When God Isn't Exciting

Updated: 17 hours ago

Joshua Manahan

You go to church as you always do. The praise and worship leader exhorts a bit, and
you kind of know what He’s about to say next. Then you nod in agreement as the
pastor makes His final points. You go home. Another Sunday ends.
It’s Monday and you start your day with a prayer. If you’re honest enough, your
prayers have become gradually mechanical. The passage you read from the Bible
doesn’t captivate you the way it used to. Then you ask yourself, “What’s wrong with
me? How come God doesn’t excite me anymore?”
I’ve had seasons like that. God seems boring and I don’t look forward to spending
time with Him in the Word and prayer, and everything feels like a duty. He feels so
unreal even when I recall verses that remind me of His grace, beauty, and sufficiency.
I know He’s enough, but it feels otherwise. So you keep on doing what you have to do
but the season is taking too long, other things start to excite you. Things you feel.
Things you concretely see.
It’s not that you don’t love God anymore, but He’s so bland sometimes. Confusion
sets in, guilt messes up your head, and you find yourself in a place far worse than you
left off. If only there’s a Time-to-get-excited-about-God switch you can flip to change
everything in a snap, but there’s none. Tomorrow is dreadful because you know it
wouldn’t be any better.
So what do we do if we’re in this spiritual blackhole? A verse comes to mind:
“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your
heart”-Jeremiah 29:13
The word ‘seek’ appears twice in this passage, but they are separately two words in
the original Hebrew text.
1. Darash- Means to seek carefully, on the basis of the covenantal relationship with
God
2. Baqash-Means to seek or search someone when the location is unknown
It’s easy to understand darash. Of course, we have a relationship with the Lord that’s
why we seek Him. How about baqash? Isn’t God always with us? Just very quickly,
there are two types of God’s presence:
1. God’s omnipresence: the fact that God is everywhere, whether we sense it or not.
2. God’s manifest presence: His presence as sensed by the observer.
When God Seems Absent
In the old testament, when God ‘hides’ Himself, it pertains to His manifest presence.
This hiding of His presence is often the result of sin (Isaiah 59:2). If God doesn’t
excite you because you don’t see Him, an internal examination must be done by the
leading of the Spirit. In my experience, it is not uncommon that the cause of my dry
seasons was unidentified and/or unconfessed sin, and in this case, the reason for my
boredom on God is my excitement for the other things that don’t glorify Him. He
wants to sit unrivaled at the throne of your life.
But what if, after thorough and honest self-examination, the Spirit hasn’t revealed any
sin in our life? This is where it gets tricky. There could be a number of reasons for
this. But can I suggest that when God says nothing, it’s because He’s teaching you to
wait? To mold your character? We could fall to that trap of chasing after what He says
instead of chasing Him and Him alone. Or maybe, He wants you to go through life
with the biblical principles you already know. In other words, you may not need to
hear something new from Him. Indeed, God’s silence is as significant as His voice.
Discipline and Decision
When the desire for God is untraceable in your life, there are two things you need to
do. Though these aren’t exhaustive, they are easy to remember. Just think of the two
Ds:
DECISION. Decide to baqash God. Are you a man of emotions or decisions? Which
one drives your life? I hope it’s the latter. We cannot rely on our emotions because
they are unstable and fluctuating. Decide to seek God. Decide to MAKE time for Him
in prayer and diving into the scriptures. That doesn’t make you a hypocrite, in fact,
doing something even when our emotions aren’t in it is a mark of maturity.
DISCIPLINE. Deciding to seek God for a day seems easy. But seeking Him in a week
or in a month with no significant answer from Him is entirely different. This is where
the discipline to stay on what you’ve decided comes in. It’s easy to read the Bible and
pray when everything is alright and when we hear from God clearly. But when the
opposite happens, that’s when discipline is forged. What Jeff Fisher, a former NFL
coach, once said really stuck in my head all these years:
“Discipline is doing what you don’t want to do, so that you can
do what you really want to do.”
Decide to seek God and be disciplined to keep on seeking Him. He promises to
reward them with Himself.
The End of the Matter
We are very shortsighted and limited beings. Emotions often get the better of us and
our minds get clouded by the things we see, or in this case, things we don’t see. God’s
manifest presence might change from time to time for a variety of reason, but His
omnipresence is immutable. That’s why I need to remind myself to always look at the
nature of God, because the more I know Him, the easier it is to trust Him in the hard
times. He said in Psalm 46:10 that we need to “Be still and KNOW that He is God.”
(Emphasis added) Not ‘feel’ that He is God; but to know (by observing and reflecting)
that He is God. It’s a decision we have to make every single day. If we constantly
base our Christian walk on our emotions, we become unstable in our faith. Our
emotions must follow our decisions.
Friend, if you are in that state where God doesn’t excite you, you are not alone. Even
the most experienced and mature saints go through these valleys. But you need not
stay there any longer than you should. Keep on seeking God because He will be
found. That’s a promise we have to be excited about.