Like wine, God is meant to be enjoyed.

Jun 9

Toxic Myth in The Church: #2 God isn’t a feeling.

I sat down at a prayer set the other day, when suddenly I was overwhelmed with the gift of enjoying God. Sweating under the fire of His love, laughing in radical delight. Everything was so easy, so simple, so pure. I was a child again, giddy, safe and alive in wonder.

Suddenly I was laying on a picnic blanket in an open field with Him, no agenda but just to be with one another. We both had butterflies in our stomachs, drinking the other in—lost in love and delight. I couldn’t stop crying and laughing, everything in me felt so utterly free, enjoyed.

Completely in love with God, experiencing an unexplainable joy in the greater measure of revelation—that I get to enjoy Him.

I get to enjoy God.

I get to know God. The creator of the Heaven and Earth. I get to enjoy Him.

God is meant to be enjoyed.

Like a cool drink on a summer’s day.

Like wine.

Like a lover, He is meant be to be fully enjoyed: loved, tasted, felt, experienced, deeply known.

To say God isn’t a feeling is to say that the Personhood of Jesus can’t be experienced. As a Christian this should not even compute or make sense to us in anyway—it is completely dissolved of the truth and reality of the gospel.

It’s like saying, “I walked down the aisle to marry my husband but it’s okay I didn’t feel Him. I knew He was there because people told me He was, but it’s okay that I didn’t feel Him kiss me after I said I do. He isn’t a feeling.”

If someone truly said this out loud, we would all be like—um, I’m sorry are you OKAY? Did you just marry air?

Faith is a substance. It is not air. It is completely and entirely FELT.

Jesus is a Person, alive, entirely tangible. His presence is His Personhood. He is not a cloud. He has skin, hair, emotions, longings, thoughts, concerns, desires, dreams. He is alive and accessible to be deeply known, completely FELT and experienced. This is the gospel, that we get to know God, feel Him, experience Him, enjoy Him.

If it hard to experience and feel the love of God, that is not because He is not a feeling. That myth is rooted in the spirit of religion as a justification for lack of intimacy.

If it hard to feel God, that is simply a sign and a marker that it’s time get some healing. Soul blocks are real: control in the mind, pain, trauma and shame can makes us feel really distant and calloused towards His presence.

It is never because He is not a feeling. His love is always accessible to be tangibly experienced and felt.

“If you are running from spending time with Him, (specifically from time in an experiential time of love and worship) that is your marker and sign to know it’s time to get healing. It’s time to come back to His embrace. Nothing else matters, your heart is all he longs for.” - Hannah Babarskis

To experience His love so deep that all else fades away. Time completely washing away. The room completely erasing, lost in His eyes of delight. Butterflies of radical love bubbling up. Like champagne, intoxicated in rest, intoxicated in love. Us, enjoying and being enjoyed as the apple of His eye.

This is the gospel. We are enjoyed and we get to enjoy God, sweetly, every single day.

What an immeasurable gift that we get to enjoy God.

This is gift of the finished work of the cross. There is no more have to’s or should’s.

There is no twisting His arm for attention or affection.

Our only job is to just get over ourselves; to lay down our pride and selfishness—to draw near, leaning, moving all of our being into Him.

Apathy is the fruit of self-centeredness and independency.

To receive His love, to let Him kiss you, is an act of humility and maturity.

It’s a giving up of trying to prove or earn that we could ever do something enough of our own accord.

It requires a loss of self, of double-mindedness, of confusion, a full yielding of self-sufficiency, a submitted trust in His Lordship and Leadership, a surrender—completely.

The sign of maturity for a believer is your ability to receive and drink in His love.

This is death to self—to lose oneself—lost completely, inside the flesh of God.

This is denial of the self, where we give up and take on the weight and glory of what the cross has won for us. Experience the warmth of His constant liquid love.

This love is what changes everything inside of us, this is where true sanctification in the deeps begin. Where we taste His kindness so purely, repentance becomes like Christmas, a gift that keeps on giving. We are no longer leading ourselves, no longer living in double-mindedness, tossed about like a leaf in the wind circling old patterns—leaving then coming back again. We surrender and fully take on sonship and daughterhood. We are children. We are accepted. We are loved. We are grounded.

We REMAIN, in love.

We are lost in Him, completely in Union.

He is fully, Adonai, our leader.

He is our Good Shepherd.

We are won, body, mind, spirit and soul.

This is salvation. This is the weight of the cross. This is Union.

His body becoming yours.

His blood swimming in your veins.

Where He fully takes our place—tearing away everything that tears us in two.

Where we now just get to lay under the warmth of His blood and enjoy Him fully, abundantly, without end.

Where in His presence is fullness of life, and we get to drink Him like wine; enjoying Him and being absolutely enjoyed by Him.

Like wine, we get to enjoy God.