When you’re a brand-new Christian, you tend to geek out at everything.
It’s totally understandable. Newbies are so hungry to learn, yet 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 fun; I wish more Christians were as excited about Jesus as they.
Problem is, some longtime Christians sound exactly like they do—excited about every new discovery they’ve just made about Christianity—and it’s like, “Wait, you’ve been Christian for 20 years. This is stuff you should’ve learned already. Why haven’t you?”
Well duh: They’re not growing as Christians.
They discovered a new book, and were all hyper about it, and devoured it, and lived by it a few weeks, and then forgot about it. And a year passed, and they didn’t grow any. And then they discovered another new book, and got all hyper about that book for a time. They’re still making baby steps of faith, and the reason they’re all excited about it is because they’re still spiritual babies.
And every time they come across a new Christian resource, they think this is the resource which is really gonna get ’em to grow into
And this lack of maturity expresses itself as mania. That’s why they’re as twitchy as yapper dogs, years or decades after
But all too often this turns into chasing that spiritual high, instead of following Jesus.
The pursuit of mania.
Plenty of Christians insist we should be excited by every little truth and revelation, same as newbies. They get excited, and don’t want to be the only excited people among us. Why aren’t we excited? What, are we dead inside or something? Aren’t we supposed to pursue
And some of us fall for this kind of thinking: “Yeah, I really should be as excited as they are.” So we manufacture those emotions. We psyche ourselves into feeling how we think we oughta feel.
It really isn’t hard to force ourselves to have any emotion we want. Actors do it all the time. Wanna be angry? Drop all your emotional barricades and get angry. Wanna be joyful? Think about all the things you love most and get happy. Wanna be sad? Sad thoughts. Wanna get ready to fight? Violent thoughts.
For some of us, this is hard: We’ve set up a lot of emotional barricades to keep out the negative feelings. Or we know our emotions run amok have fearful consequences. Some of us have untreated psychological problems. In these cases, Christians fake the emotions. We look joyful. We’re really not.
But the manufactured emotions are hypocrisy too. They’re not naturally occurring. The Spirit’s fruit produces
Of course people don’t realize this is hypocrisy, because we’ve psyched ourselves into feeling something, and if we really are feeling something, it’s not hypocrisy is it? But if we had to conjure it up, yeah it’s fake; yeah it’s hypocrisy. You’re not naturally excited, and it shoulda come naturally.
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 psyche yourself into excitement simply because you think you ought to be excited. ’Cause there are unfortunate side effects to emotional self-manipulation. The main one being if emotional self-manipulation is okay, Christians figure it’s just as okay to emotionally manipulate others. Hence all the manipulative preaching techniques, music, videos, and memes which do likewise. Christians who lack spiritual maturity can’t tell the difference between what we’re nudged into feeling, or what we truly feel. So we go where we’re led.
If Christians want to get spiritually mature, it’s not gonna happen when we can’t tell the difference between what we should feel, and do feel. We gotta recognize what’s authentic and what’s fake. Not gonna happen if we can’t tell the significant from the commonplace, a profound truth from a clever-sounding truth, a life-changing verse from a nice-sounding verse. When we’re too ramped up to care.
New, profound revelations from God ought to excite us and push us forward. But if we’ve psyched ourselves until everything excites us, 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 yet think everything is profound, everything is inspiring, everything is awesome, and why aren’t you feeling it?… yeah, you need to start hanging around mature Christians.
But sometimes God’s just gonna be awesome.
When I wrote or spoke on this subject before, sometimes people—’cause they
No of course not. It’s still really cool when I see God immediately answer a prayer, and miracles happen, and the petitioner is overjoyed by the fact God still hears his kids and answers us with a yes. Never gonna get tired of that.
If you’re following Jesus, and expect him to do stuff, sometimes he does, and sometimes that’ll blow your mind. Sometimes the Holy Spirit will decide, “Okay, you’re finally ready for this,” and do something profound, and it’ll knock you flat. (
In contrast, when Christians tell me something, I’m a lot less amazed. Oh, it’s not that there aren’t really clever Christians out there. Thing is, once you reach a certain point of spiritual maturity, you’re gonna become one of them. You’ll just be casually talking about something the Holy Spirit recently told you, and Christian newbies are gonna jump like someone hit ’em with a cattle prod, and you’ll think, “Why does that stun you?”
It’s not because mature Christians are calloused, nor because we take God-things for granted. Newbies are like when you wake up in the middle of the night and have to use the bathroom, and you flick on the light and are blind for just a moment as your eyes adjust. Mature Christians are like people who’ve already been in a lit room for a while, and turning on another light just isn’t gonna be shocking.
But when God shows up, sometimes he’s like the sun rising at the wrong time, and even mature Christians respond, “What the… What is happening?” Anybody can be discombobulated by God. And if a mature Christian figures, “Yeah but it’s quite unlikely; I’ve seen it all,” they aren’t as mature as they think they are.
Still, once we’re mature, we are gonna flinch less. Once we develop continually joyful lives, joy’s not gonna startle us like it does to people who aren’t used to it. And these are good things. Getting used to life in God’s kingdom is a good thing. Keep pursuing it!
