Nobody Promised You a Feeling

A couple sat in my front room on a wet Tuesday and told me they had been unable to make a decision for two years.

It was not a moral question. It was a house. Two houses, in fact, both of which they could afford, in two towns, both of which were fine. They had made lists. They had prayed. They had asked four people.

And the thing that had them stuck was one sentence, which they said almost in unison, and which I have heard more times than any other sentence in twenty years of pastoring.

They said: neither one feels right.

I asked them where they had learned that a thing would feel right. Neither of them could tell me. They had not read it anywhere. Nobody had taught it in a class. It had come to them the way most of our working theology comes to us, through the air, from a hundred half sentences said by good people, and it had become an unquestionable rule in their household.

They had been waiting two years for a confirmation that nobody in Scripture was ever promised.

What Isaiah actually promises

The verse people reach for in this situation is worth reading slowly, because it says something quite different from what it gets used for.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. (Isaiah 30:21, King James Version)

Three things in there, and the first one is the one everybody misses.

The word comes from behind. Not from in front. That is a correction from a person walking with you, not a map handed over before you set out.

The second is when ye turn. The word arrives at the turning, which means the walking has already started and a turn is already being made.

And the third is that it is a word, not a sensation. Isaiah promises a voice that says a sentence. He does not promise an inner warmth, a settledness, or a lifting.

You have been promised a word rather than a feeling, and the difference is in the text rather than in anybody's temperament, and Isaiah 30 describes a sentence spoken from behind a person already walking. That work is the Spirit's, and He does that speaking rather than a mood that arrives on its own.

Where the feeling rule came from

I want to be fair to it, because there is something real underneath and I am not going to be dismissive of a thing that has helped people.

There is a verse about peace, and it is genuine.

And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful. (Colossians 3:15)

The word translated rule is an umpiring word. It is about arbitration. And it is worth noticing that Paul writes it to a church about how members of one body get along, not to an individual about which house to buy.

So the peace of God is real and it does arbitrate. What it does not do is show up on demand about a decision between two good options, and when it fails to, a person is not entitled to conclude anything at all about themselves.

You are not lacking something because a decision has never felt settled, and Scripture never once makes a feeling the confirmation of a choice (Colossians 3:15), and the Holy Spirit is the one who leads a person, and He is not a mood and He is not obliged to feel like one.

And Paul says the plainest thing about the whole subject in five words.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Not by sight. Which includes the internal kind of sight, the sense of clarity a person keeps waiting to receive before they are willing to move.

The lamp is not a floodlight

There is one more image worth putting beside Isaiah, and it corrects the scale of what people expect.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. (Psalm 119:105)

A lamp unto my feet. In the world that psalm came out of, that is a small clay lamp carried low, and it lights the next step and a little beyond it. It does not light the far end of the road and it was never built to.

A person waiting for the whole route to be visible is waiting for equipment they were not issued. That is not a failure of faith. It is a misunderstanding about the size of the lamp.

You have exactly enough light for the next step, and the lamp was always described as a lamp rather than as a floodlight (Psalm 119:105). The same Spirit is the one who carries it, which means the light moves when the person moves and not before.

I want to add one guardrail, because this could be misread. None of this means feelings are worthless or that a person should override a strong unease. Unease is worth listening to, and sometimes it is the Spirit, and sometimes it is a person's own wisdom talking, and telling those apart is a human work that no article can do for you.

The only rule being taken down here is the one that says a decision may not be made until it feels settled. That rule was never issued.

You have been carrying a law that no one ever wrote, and Scripture is quiet in exactly the place that rule claims to speak (2 Corinthians 5:7), and it is the Spirit who leads a person, which He has been doing all through the years the feeling never came.