Faith Doesn't Have Feelings

There will always be a moment when what you see and what you feel are telling you one thing, while the Word of God is telling you something completely different. The question is, which one are you going to believe?

It’s normal to be challenged. We’re all going to face circumstances that don’t look the way we want them to look. There will be days when our emotions are all over the place, when the situation in front of us looks impossible, and when everything we can see seems to contradict what God has promised. The problem isn’t that we’re challenged. The problem comes when we allow what we see and feel to become more real to us than what God has said.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:1-2,

“Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.”

Another word that can be used for “uninformed” is ignorant. Paul didn’t want the church to be ignorant concerning spiritual things because ignorance creates an opportunity for confusion. God is not the author of confusion. Christianity was never intended to be nothing more than a philosophy or a collection of ideas that help us cope with life. Christianity is a supernatural way of life because everything Jesus accomplished for us through His death and resurrection was victory.

That doesn’t mean we won’t have challenges. Jesus never promised us a life without opposition. But there is a difference between being challenged and accepting defeat.

The problem is that when the challenge comes, we have two voices competing for our attention. On one hand, we have our circumstances. We have what we can see. We have how we feel. We have our emotions and everything happening around us. On the other hand, we have faith. We have what the Word of God says.

Which one are we going to allow to determine what we believe?

Second Corinthians 5:7 says, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

Faith doesn’t have feelings.

Now, that doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t real. God created us with emotions, and there’s nothing wrong with having them. But your feelings can lie to you. Your emotions can tell you that nothing is changing. They can tell you that God has forgotten you. They can convince you that because something feels impossible, it must be impossible. If we aren’t careful, we can become so controlled by our emotions that we step outside of faith without even realizing we’ve done it.

I know what that looks like because I’ve lived it.

When Julie went from being disabled to no longer being disabled, she wasn’t the only one who went through those years. We went through them as a family. It’s hard watching your wife live in misery every single day. After enough time passes, you can become accustomed to talking about how bad everything is without even realizing what is coming out of your mouth.

I remember talking to a man during that season, and as I was speaking, he physically took a step back from me. I realized he was responding to the words coming out of my mouth. That moment hit me hard.

I loved God. I believed in God. But I had allowed what we were living through to affect the way I talked because it had begun affecting what was happening in my heart.

Jesus said in Luke 6:45, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

Something had to change.

We had developed habits of talking about the circumstances because those circumstances were in front of us every day. Changing that wasn’t easy. When you’ve talked a certain way for long enough, you don’t even recognize it anymore. It just becomes normal. But there came a point when I had to get a bulldog tenacity about it and decide, “I don’t want to talk like that anymore. I want to believe and declare what the Word of God says.”

That didn’t mean pretending the circumstances weren’t there. Faith is not pretending. Faith is deciding that the circumstances don’t get the final word.

There was a minister named Norvel Hayes who once taught a message called Faith Doesn’t Have Feelings. He said he taught for an hour and a half that night and didn’t feel anything. He called people forward for prayer, laid hands on them, anointed them, and still nobody felt anything.

So he told them to go home, lay their heads on their pillows, and keep saying, “James 5:14 and 15 heals me. James 5:14 and 15 heals me.”

James 5:14-15 says, “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.”

The next night, as Norvel was coming into the church, a man approached him. He had heard teaching like that many times before, but he told him, “Last night, I got it.”

This man was in his thirties and had lived his entire life with club feet. He had never run a day in his life. He went home that night and did what he had been instructed to do. As he fell asleep, he kept saying, “James 5:14 and 15 heals me.”

When he woke up the next morning, he swung his legs over the side of the bed the way he always had because of his physical limitations. But when he put his feet down and looked, he had brand-new feet. He took off running.

What changed? He stopped waiting for his feelings to give him permission to believe what God had said.

Romans 10:17 says, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

This is why we have to be careful about what we continually allow ourselves to hear, including what we hear coming out of our own mouths. If we continually rehearse the problem, eventually the problem begins forming our belief structure. What we see gets into our hearts, and what gets into our hearts eventually comes out of our mouths.

Then we wonder why we’re struggling to believe.

Hebrews 3:19 says, “So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.”

The Israelites had a promise from God, but they couldn’t enter into what God had promised because unbelief had taken hold of them. They saw the giants. They saw the fortified cities. They saw everything standing between them and the promise, and eventually what they saw became greater in their hearts than what God had said.

The same thing can happen to us. You want to know if faith is really working in your life? Are you stressed, or do you have rest? The true sign of faith is restfulness, not restlessness.

That doesn’t mean you don’t care about what’s happening. It doesn’t mean you never feel pressure or have a difficult day. It means underneath everything happening around you, there is a settled confidence that God’s Word is true.

You don’t have to understand how He is going to do it in order to trust what He has said. You don’t have to feel healed to believe that He is the healer. You don’t have to see the answer before you believe His promise. You don’t have to allow what you see today to determine what you believe about tomorrow.

Second Corinthians 4:18 says, “As we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

We have to decide which world is going to have the greatest influence over us. If everything we believe is determined by what we can see, then we aren’t walking by faith. We’re walking by sight.

Maybe you’ve been looking at the same situation for so long that it has become part of your identity. There was a woman who came into one of our tent meetings who had lived with pain for thirty years. She had attended meetings for three years without ever coming forward for prayer. After thirty years, the pain had simply become part of her life. She wasn’t consciously rejecting healing. She had just lived with it for so long that she no longer thought differently about it.

But one moment with God changed everything.

Sometimes we’ve lived with something so long that we stop challenging it with the Word of God. We stop expecting anything different. Without realizing it, what we see becomes what we believe. That’s why we have to come back to the Word.

Faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ. Faith grows when what God has said becomes greater in us than what we see around us.

So this week, pay attention to what has been determining what you believe. Are you allowing circumstances to preach to you all day long? Are your emotions determining whether you think God is faithful? Have you accepted something as permanent simply because it has been there for a long time?

Your feelings may be real, but they don’t get the final word. Your circumstances may be real, but they don’t get the final word. What you see may be real, but it doesn’t get the final word. God’s Word gets the final word.

We walk by faith and not by sight. Faith doesn’t wait until everything feels right before it believes. Faith takes God at His Word. And when everything around you says otherwise, you can still rest because you know the One who made the promise.