One of the most prevalent issues with people’s relationship with God is their dependence on that self dictated prerequisite of being in that special “place” in order to commune with Him. It is a mood they want, an emotional or mental state of religiosity that they require before they can feel close to God. The thought is “We must feel holy before we can approach or engage in thoughts concerning The Holy One.”
But the problem is 90% of the time we are not in that mood. Which of course means 90% of our whole LIFE! is not lived in communion with God. So what happens by implication is that the 10% of “godly mood” where we do engage God becomes more and more ritualistic. It becomes special, exclusive, and to some even necessary! By having preconditions for meeting with God, whether temporal, emotional, or physical, we essentially reconstruct the veil that Christ died to tear, and reinstitute our own version of the Law. We say we must do this, or be in this place, or maybe feel this way, and for this long, in order to be ready to engage God… seriously? If you think about it, you probably do it too.
But doesn’t scripture tell us to walk with God? [1] “walk” is live, “with” is in communion. So here are some thoughts:
1. Making your mood dictate your communion with God is like making a law for you to approach God. You repudiate the law-fulfilling sacrifice of Christ if you do this. [2]
2. To have to “Be in the mood” for God to get through to you, makes God seem like a servant to your whim. In this you dethrone God in your heart. He should not have to wait on you, you should be waiting on Him. If you’re in a wrong mood, well, deal with it, ask for grace and get before God. Don’t make Him out to be a God who has to wait around for you to feel good first before He can meet with you.
3. Mundane moments and moods are not just uneventful miscellany passing before God. God is just as awesome, just as worthy of worship regardless of whether you are at church or in the bathroom. If you cannot engage God in the midst of the mundane, you have missed out on what it means to walk with God. His imminence, his accessibility, his very greatness should imbue significance into every moment of your day. The Mundane is the Lord’s.
There is no godly mood, only moody people who occasionally feel religious.
1. “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
2. “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:3-4 ESV)
