Your Feelings Are Not What Carries You

Psalm 139 says something that every spiritually dry Christian needs to hear.

“Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there! If I take the wings of the dawn, and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me.” — Psalm 139:7–10

The short version is this: you can build your spiritual life from a place of dryness because your feelings are not what carries you.

Notice what Psalm 139 does not say.

It does not say, “Oh Lord, You are so easy for my spirit to find.”

Because that would mean, “I have to come find You.”

“I have to knock on Your door.”

“I have to make You give me Your time and Your energy and Your attention.”

But that is not what the psalm says.

The psalmist says, “Where could I flee from Your Spirit?”

In other words, God’s Spirit is already following me.

God’s Spirit is coming after me.

God’s Spirit is chasing me down.

The psalmist says, “I literally do not have the power to flee from Your presence, because Your presence will follow me.”

That means the Lord is the pursuer in your relationship, not you.

There is a beautiful quote from John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” where he says, “The Lord sought me when I sought Him not, then I began to seek Him, and He was pleased to be found by me.”

That is the order.

When I was not looking for Him, He came and found me.

A lot of us think that when we walked down the aisle once upon a time, said the sinner’s prayer, and so on and so forth, we were kind of proposing to God. We were pulling a ring out of our pocket and saying, “Lord, marry me.”

But it is the other way around.

He is the one who proposed to you.

It is the Lord’s redeeming love that awakened your heart and moved you to start looking for Him once upon a time.

His love convicted your heart and moved you to start searching for Him.

His love opened up your heart and moved you to welcome Him as your King, your God, and your Savior.

And in the same way now, His sustaining love is what moves you to stop running from Him in the middle of this season of spiritual dryness, wandering, or doubt. His sustaining love is what turns you back around so you can take Him by the hand again.

All this time that you have been running from the Lord, avoiding the Lord, debating whether you even still believe the things you used to believe about the Lord, His right hand has been holding you.

He has been letting you drift as far as you want and run as far as you want, but you are still in His hand.

And His right hand that is holding you will draw you back to Himself and lead you again.

And when that moment comes that you stop running and turn around to walk the miles and miles back to Him, what you find is that He is literally right there.

He was always one step behind you.

That means your feelings, your passion, and your devotion to Him are not what hold your relationship together.

His devotion to you does.

Because His covenant faithfulness to you has never changed, your relationship with Him continues regardless of how you feel about it in the moment.

Take that seriously.

Whether you feel anything right now or not, your relationship is still there.

That is such good news for spiritually dry people, because if your relationship with the Lord depended on your emotional consistency, you would be in trouble. So would I. So would every Christian who has ever walked through a long season where God felt distant, prayer felt flat, Scripture felt dry, and worship felt like going through the motions.

But your feelings are not what carry you.

The Lord carries you.

His right hand holds you.

His Spirit follows you.

His covenant faithfulness remains steady even when your emotional life does not.

So no, spiritual dryness does not mean the Lord has abandoned you.

It may mean you are discovering something deeper than the spiritual mountaintop.

You are discovering that God was never held close to you by the strength of your grip on Him.

You were always held by His grip on you.