There are seasons when faith feels alive and warm and close. And then there are seasons where you are doing all the right things and feeling almost nothing. This verse is for the second kind.
"If you love me, keep my commands."
This is one of those verses that can be read two very different ways depending on where you are standing. From one angle it sounds like a test. Prove you love me. Do the things. And that reading produces a kind of exhausted striving where you are always trying to demonstrate something.
But read it again. Jesus is speaking in the upper room, the night before the cross. He is not issuing a warning. He is giving His disciples something to hold onto when He is gone. A way to stay connected to Him when they can no longer see Him. When it all goes quiet.
Keep my commands. Not because you have to earn something. Because this is how love stays active when feeling runs dry.
Feelings follow direction, not the other way around.
We have been shaped by a culture that says feelings come first. You feel something and then you act on it. But in a long obedient life with God, it often goes the other direction. You act first, in the direction of love, and the feeling follows behind. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes after a long stretch of just doing the thing without the warmth underneath it.
That is not spiritual failure. That is mature faith. A child needs to feel every good thing in order to do it. An adult can do something good because they have decided it is right, and trust that the feeling will come back around.
This is what it looks like in a quiet season.
You read your Bible even when it feels like words on a page. You serve even when you feel nothing spiritual about it. You keep your commitments to your community even when you would rather stay home. Not to earn proximity to God. But because love, at its best, is a decision before it is a feeling.
And somewhere in the keeping, the warmth usually comes back. Not always on our timeline. But it comes.
Something to Sit With
Is there something you have stopped doing because it stopped feeling meaningful? What would it look like to come back to it today, not chasing the feeling, but choosing the direction?
- What have I stopped doing because it stopped feeling meaningful?
- What would it look like to come back to it today as a decision, not a feeling?
- What is the difference between mature faith and childish faith in this area?
- Do I trust that the warmth will come back, or have I given up on it?
- What is the difference between doing something to earn Gods love and doing something because you already have it?
- How does knowing that Jesus spoke this in the upper room, the night before the cross, change how you hear it?
- What wouldchange if you treated love as a direction to walk in, not a feeling to wait for?
Jesus, some seasons I feel the warmth of this relationship and some seasons I am just walking by decision. Today is one of the second kind.
I choose You anyway. Not because I feel it right now, but because I know who You are. Let my obedience today be an act of love even if it does not feel like one. In Jesus Name, Amen.