Crashing Hard After Being So High

I was just lying in bed a minute ago, and then I jumped out of bed with an idea I wanted to write about before o nodded off. I hopped over to Darryl to wake him up and try to convince him that he was just sleep walking; he wouldn’t believe me. Then I yelled at people walking by my window, only to realize it was my friends and gave them a high five through the screen. Now on to my thought of the day.

Sometimes when I go into ‘tempting’ situations I say a prayer before I go into them. Other times I will leave a bible study and I will feel ‘stronger’ than I did before I went into it. There are even times when I’ll go to church and walk away like a million dollars. Have you ever had this feeling? Some of us consider it a spiritual high or something like that. These aren’t bad feeling per say. But you know what I’m talking about right? You just feel so spiritually ready for anything that you feel like you could never ‘sin.’

Have you ever been in one of these situations, just walking away from spiritual enlightenment or empowerment or whatever you want to call it and then crash; crash hard. Maybe you just got home from church and went straight to the porn on your computer. Maybe you were just praying for someone and proceeded (maybe even in your prayer) to judge that person. Maybe you and you’re girlfriend prayed together and then twenty minutes later we’re messing up. Maybe you just had a bible study and walked away to gossip about the leader. All these instances are blindsided us out of nowhere, and we think to ourselves? How the heck could I do something like that after what just happened?

I know I’ve felt like this. How could I go and lust after a girl 5 minutes after my hands were just in the air praising God?

It’s interesting the feeling we get from these prayer times, church services, bible studies etc. It’s almost as if we feel like we are a better person for going to them. We think to ourselves, ‘yes, I’m doing something good, I’m doing the right thing, I’m going in the right direction.’ It’s like we get this sense of ‘finally, I’m not messing up, I’m a good person now.’ It’s almost a feeling of spiritual superiority over your former self. A I’m-stronger-than-I-was-yesterday kind of feeling. Then we walk away, mess up and all of sudden we are so shocked that we could ever act this way.

I think we need to be more careful than this. It’s easy to think that these spiritual ‘good things’ are enough to guard us against failure. In fact, I think a lot of the times, these spiritually ‘good things’ can actually set us up to fail harder. It fills us with spiritual pride thinking that we actually have it more together than we did yesterday, so we are stronger to fight off any attacks.

Really, what we need to understand is that we never have it ‘more together’ than we had it the day before. The only person who has ever had it together is Christ. Don’t be so surprised when you fall like a dead weighted rock as soon as you walk away from church. Church, prayer meetings, personal prayer, reading your bible, bible studies or anything of the sort don’t make you more spiritual, only Christ does. Christ is our only spiritual superiority, which means we can’t improve on being more spiritual, we can only improve on understanding how much Christ has done for us.