"I AM THE MAD NIMROD!"

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mormonmonastery:

theraisincouncil:

imageoftheinvisible:

So many churches are raising young people to see the Holy Spirit as a force that primarily exists to make you “feel things” in worship. That you know you’ve been Touched™ because you have goosebumps and feel like crying or whatever.

I’m not downplaying the emotional impact an encounter with the spirit can illicit. That’s real. But when we place such an emphasis on our human response, we can make people who don’t experience these heightened emotions feel like they aren’t being filled with the spirit.

I’ve seen it happen before. “I felt nothing in worship”, “I’m in a spiritual rut”, “Why aren’t I being filled?”. The spirit is so much more than what you feel on a Sunday. Look at your fruits, look at God’s work in your life. That’s where you’ll find evidence of the spirit.

@mormonmonastery

Yeah! This is absolutely something we need to be better about! The Spirit doesn’t speak only though big gooey EFY feelings or by driving someone giving their testimony to tears or when listening to bland molasses-slow piano ballads (at least it’s never spoken in any of those ways for me). We can’t limit God like that! Not everyone is the same and everyone’s relationship to God is gonna be unique, special, and different! I’m also pretty specious of this whole emphasis on “feeling the Spirit” being a passive thing that happens to us instead of a call or a challenge or something that envigorates us and gets us moving forward–I don’t want to go too far the other way because I’ve had spiritual impressions located in feeling that were and are deeply meaningful, but I’m pretty sure that if the Spirit just manifests in our emotions we’re not doing the best job of listening.

guns-and-humor: