Why Do I Feel Spiritually Lifeless?
“Why do I feel spiritually lifeless?”
It’s a question I’ve both asked from personal experience and tried to answer for others. As people of faith, we recount times in our lives when we felt especially close to Christ and found intense delight in disciplines like prayer and Bible reading. We grow puzzled when those same disciplines feel like drudgery, and forces in life seem to conspire together to hide the joy of Christ’s presence and make those earlier experiences a distant memory.
It’s a complex question with many possible causes, and I would never want to simplistically suggest a one-size-fits-all answer. Human beings are intricate. We go through emotional cycles. Sometimes we experience mental illness. At other times life circumstances obscure the glory of God from view. Additionally, we do well to recognize supernatural forces opposing our devotion: “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3).
Without denying any of these possible reasons, I want to focus on one principle we see taught repeatedly in Scripture. In the words of biblical scholar G.K. Beale, the Bible teaches that “what you revere, you resemble, either for ruin or for restoration.” In other words, human beings become what we worship. This overlooked truth is full of practical implications and sheds tremendous light on our seasons of spiritual darkness and lifelessness.
In Exodus 32, Moses descends the mountain of God to find the people of Israel worshiping a golden calf they had just constructed through the pooling of their resources. Rejecting the living God who had just redeemed them from Pharaoh’s slavery in Egypt, they instead give credit and devotion to this manmade inanimate object. If you read Exodus 32 carefully, you will discern the effects of this false worship. Like the ox they worship, they have become “stiff-necked,” or hard to steer (v. 9), quickly turning aside from the way God had commanded (v. 8). They are becoming what they worship. God judges these idolators by making them like the calf and refusing to give them “a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear” (Deuteronomy 29:4).
Two different psalms warn, “Those who make [idols] become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:8; 135:18). Isaiah mocks those who work diligently to fashion an idol from wood and other material. He scoffs at those who use half the tree as firewood to warm their bodies and the other half as a god to which to call out for deliverance (Isaiah 44:12-17). What is the consequence for this false worship? “They know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes, so that they cannot see, and their hearts, so that they cannot understand” (Isaiah 44:18). In other words, they have become as dumb as the idols they worship.
Beale summarizes this unified message: “Like Israel, when you worship something of this earth, you become like it, as spiritually lifeless and insensitive to God as a piece of wood, rock, and stone. You become spiritually blind, deaf, and dumb even though you still have eyes and ears physically. To the extent that you commit yourself to something that does not have God’s Spirit, to that degree you will be unspiritual.”
In a guest post on sociologist Jonathan Haidt’s substack, Rikki Schlott recently wrote the following: “People often ask me to explain their kids to them. They are baffled by the children that they raised and yet somehow do not know. It sounds impossible and yet makes sense—considering that the hours their kids spent under the same roof were also spent in a maze of digital crevices. . . Gen Z has inherited a post-hope world, stripped of what matters. Instead, we have been offered a smorgasbord of easy and unsatisfying substitutes. All the things that have traditionally made life worth living—love, community, country, faith, work, and family—have been ’debunked.’”
Are we surprised that we are beginning to resemble the devices we behold for hours on end every day? Should we be shocked when our children are lonely and lack the emotional capacity to handle real human relationships when they spend most of their waking moments staring into the abyss of an impersonal iPhone screen? Are our devices remaking us in their image? Have we grown so accustomed to digital life that we are unable to relate worshipfully to the living God and his people? Perhaps we are more responsible than we think for some of our seasons of Spiritual lifelessness.
There’s hope for us. Just as false worship deadens, true worship livens. Like a dehydrated house plant with brown wilted leaves, we can be brought back to life through attentive care. Consider 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” By worshiping the resurrected and glorified Christ, we can begin the process of flourishing again in the sunlight and hydration of true worship. We can recover the joy we lost by refusing to be “conformed to this world,” choosing instead to offer ourselves as “living sacrifices” to God—a process that results in us being “transformed by the renewal of [our] mind” (Romans 12:1-2).
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