It’s a common experience: Being in a worship service or profound devotional moment in which God’s presence seems palpable, faith swells with every expression of praise, any thought of problems floats away as though it’s filled with helium, and you feel as if you are called and empowered to go out and do great exploits for your God.
And this too is a common experience: Landing back on the ground the next day, with all its preoccupations and distractions, sensing the weight of to-do lists and daily responsibilities, feeling stuck in the daily grind, getting sucked into the posts or politics of the day, and wondering if everything you felt the day before was just an illusion.
Which is a more accurate glimpse of reality? Many would say the inspiring worship service or profound devotional moment was just a mountaintop experience or an emotional high, while your everyday experiences and challenges reflect life in the “real world.”
I beg to differ. It’s the other way around. I firmly believe that who we are in worship and prayer and times of deep, spiritual joy, when our hearts feel free and in sync with God, is reality and everything else is a counterfeit.
Living in an Illusion
In my experience, when people talk about the “real world” in contrast to something that seems to them to be so good or different that it’s unreal, they are either completely unaware of or casually ignoring a world that is far more real than the one they think is reality. They are mistaking their everyday experience for their baseline and treating everything else as an exception.
You’ll see this everywhere . . .
Like with a sports commentator who freely uses crude, crass, and hyper-critical language on air because “this is how people talk in the real world.” No, my friend, it isn’t. It may be how people talk in a world temporarily in rebellion against its Creator, but in the real world — the much greater and everlasting world beyond your limited vision — people don’t talk that way at all.
Or the people who marginalize Christian activities and institutions like churches, schools, social networks, publishing, and entertainment as an escape from the “real world” when, in fact, the “religious” are firmly rooted in the real world while their critics have built their lives on an illusion.
Or, to get back to the main point of this article, like the Christians who minimize those mountaintop spiritual experiences as exceptional and therefore unrealistic. Those moments are nice to have, they might say, but you wouldn’t want to base your life on them.
Wouldn’t you, though? If those experiences reflect God’s presence and his kingdom, then you absolutely should base your life on them. People have made lifelong, eternity-shaping commitments in those moments, and the world is better for it.
In those inspired moments, the thoughts, perspectives, and feelings that emerge within you are closer to the “real you” than the thoughts, perspectives, and feelings that resurface in whatever feels like a mundane existence, which is not the real you at all. What you get in the midst of a worshipful, inspirational, empowering moment like that is a glimpse of who God truly is and of who you truly are. Why would people not base their life on those things?
And why would they not look at “mundane,” “everyday” life as the anomaly that comes with an expiration date, and which they should already be making every effort to step out of. In reality, however you see yourself in discouraging, soul-crushing, or even just run-of-the-mill situations is not the real you. It isn’t how God sees you, and it isn’t how you should see yourself either.
Your True Identity
No, you are a son or daughter of the King, an eagle in flight, a member of a royal priesthood, a saint of the highest order, a vessel of an everlasting treasure, the beloved of God.
Don’t feel like it?
Then this is where I’d turn the warning that “you can’t trust your feelings” back against the people who minimize mountaintop experiences. The feelings that make you think you’re stuck in a less-than-thrilling “real life” are the ones that aren’t trustworthy. So what if you don’t feel like a child of the King, an eagle in flight, a resurrected being who has complete access to the Spirit, wisdom, power, and love of God? According to his word — again and again and again — that’s who you are.
Far too many people assume that faith is an escape from reality when it’s actually an escape into reality. It’s embracing the truths of another realm, which happens to be the realm from which all truth flows to begin with and which will last forever. There’s no greater foundation for your existence.
Remember that next time you’re caught up in a meaningful experience with God and wishing it would last, even when you know you’ll get sucked into a different way of thinking in just a matter of time. Also remember it when you catch yourself assuming that your self-perception in the valleys and plains of life is accurate and your experiences of soaring in the spirit are nice little breaks in between.
No, those experiences are a taste of the kingdom, and God is calling you to embrace them fully. He is drawing the true you to the surface. And it’s okay — even encouraged — to let the commonplace aspects of your daily life, whatever they look like, serve as a mere background for that much greater reality.
So true! Thank you!