When you’re new to Christianity, you tend to geek out at everything.
Totally understandable. Newbies are so hungry to learn, and know so very little. So they constantly lose their tiny minds about all the cool stuff they’ve just discovered. “Wow, have you read this verse? Have you read this book? Have you heard of this preacher? Are you going to this conference? Check out this worship album!” They’re like fangirls and fanboys at a convention.
Their enthusiasm is kinda fun. I wish more Christians were as excited by Jesus as they. And it’s actually not all that hard to get that excited. Just keep growing. Keep making big steps of faith.
But here’s the problem: When Christians aren’t growing, aren’t making those big steps of faith… yet they’re still as yapper-dog-twitchy as a brand-new Christian.
Our emotions are supposed to mature.
Fruitful Christians are supposed to mature. We’re supposed to grow in fruit of the Spirit. Y’know, self-control, namely emotional self-control. We’re not supposed to be knocked flat on our behinds by every new thing we encounter.
After all, as we get more mature in Christ, we’re supposed to become elders, the people who help lead our fellow Christians by our good example and wisdom. Yet in some churches, the pastors and elders lack the emotional stability to lead someone to the door, much less Christ. They’re too overcome by some prophecy they just heard, some worship song they just sang, some miracle they just saw. Emotionally, intellectually, they’re gone. Often this gets blamed on God: “God took him out.”
To be fair, certain miracles and revelations are awesome, and oughta knock everyone flat. The LORD thundering from Sinai; Jesus getting transfigured in front of his students; Lazarus coming forth. But everyday, commonplace hearing from God? Seriously? No. Only newbies should find it overwhelming. The rest of us, if we truly follow the Spirit, should’ve learned self-control.
If we haven’t, let’s be fair: Sometimes it’s a legitimate psychological problem. Praying for growth isn’t the answer; medications and therapy are. But few suffer from this problem.
The real problem? We’re manufacturing it.
The pursuit of mania.
Plenty of Christians believe we should be excited by every little truth and revelation. You know, like newbies. They’re excited, and some of us feel we should remain just as excited, and keep pursuing the Kingdom like little kids.
It is not hard to force yourself to have any emotion you want. Actors do it all the time. Wanna be angry? Drop all your emotional barricades and get angry. Wanna be joyful? Think a bunch of happy thoughts and get happy. Wanna be sad? Sad thoughts. Wanna get ready to fight? Violent thoughts.
For some of us it is hard—’cause we have too many emotional barricades up already, or because we fear what we might do if we cut loose with certain emotions. And again, some of us have psychological problems. In those cases, Christians fake the emotions. We look joyful. We’re really not.
Whether it’s manufactured or faked, it’s pure hypocrisy. Those aren’t naturally-occurring emotions. The fruit of the Spirit is naturally-occurring joy, not mania. We’re happy because of the Spirit’s grace and love; not because we’ve slapped happy thoughts over everything.
Some of us don’t even realize it’s hypocrisy. We figure excitement is the correct pose to assume whenever God does something. We’re simply trying to model the proper behavior. We should be excited—so we are. Still phony, though.
How to spot the phony: Whenever a happy Christian turns to you and exclaims, “Aren’t you excited?!”—then wants to know why you’re not as excited as they are, and want you to darn well get excited. Fakery loves company.
True excitement won’t get you excited by demanding it, but by sharing it. Like newbies who are jazzed about Jesus, who are fun to watch, whose enthusiasm is infectious. The conjured-up stuff doesn’t spread like that. It fizzles out a little too easily.
Don’t get sucked in to their bad behavior. Don’t psyche yourself into excitement simply because you think you ought to be excited.
Deadened discernment.
’Cause here’s are some of the unfortunate side effects to all this emotional self-manipulation.
If emotional self-manipulation is okay, then Christians figure it’s just as okay to emotionally manipulate others. Hence all the music that’s meant to ramp us up, or bring us down. Hence all the preaching techniques which do likewise. Christians who lack spiritual discernment can’t tell the difference between what we’re nudged into feeling, or what we really feel. So we go where we’re led.
If Christians want to develop their spiritual discernment, it’s not gonna happen when we can’t tell the difference between what we should feel, and what we do feel. We can’t tell the authentic from the fake. We can’t tell the significant from the commonplace. We won’t know a profound truth from a clever-sounding truth, a life-changing verse from a nice-sounding verse. We’re too ramped up to care.
Hence we’re not gonna grow as Christians. New, profound revelations from God ought to excite us and push us forward. But if we’ve psyched ourselves so that everything excites us—including old revelations—we’ll go forward, then backward, then forward, then backward. We won’t be on a path, but a carousel. We’ll go nowhere. We won’t be dying Christians, but we’ll certainly not grow—or grow slowly, if at all.
So if you’re around Christians who aren’t newbies (or haven’t just fallen in love—which is largely the same thing), yet they think everything is profound, everything is inspiring, everything is awesome, and why aren’t you feeling it?… well, go find some authentic grown-ups to be around.