Richard Ellis Talks

Richard Ellis: Today on Richard Ellis Talks. You feeling like God loves you or you feeling love for God has nothing to do with the fact that he loves you, right? You say, "Well, I don't believe he does." It doesn't matter what you believe in that sense. He just does. So the sooner you get your head around the facts of the Gospel, then the feelings may or may not come.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Richard Ellis Talks with Richard Ellis. So many of you have shared how important this program is to you and how Richard's messages have impacted your life. We also know that there are many others who have positively influenced your life and how to be a better Christ follower. We are devoting this entire month to celebrate and give honor to those in our life who have made a great impact and how we want to do the same in the lives of others.

So we're introducing a new feature on our website to help you share that story. More on that later. But for now, with today's talk, here's Richard Ellis.

Richard Ellis: The title of today's message is "Not Feeling It." A good portion of my early years as a Christian were filled with not feeling it in terms of either not feeling God's love for me or me not feeling love for God. I wanted some kind of feeling. There was nobody around for some reason to help me get through this, which is why discipleship again is so huge, to walk with people and help them figure out that it's not about feelings primarily.

The reason so many people get in trouble, for instance, and have affairs or cheat on someone they're dating or whatever it may be, is that feeling that you get when you first meet someone and you think you're in love and things get too physical, whatever, all it snowballs, you're like, "Oh, that feeling." By the way, people that cheat on their spouses have feelings. You say, "Oh, it's so real." Yeah, it's real. It's a real sin. You can sin and feel stuff. But we don't care about that, right? We just want to feel something.

So you get in a marriage and things cool off, the euphoria of all that, that infatuation. So some people kind of get infatuated with God early on, then those feelings go away and they go, "Well, I'm out. I'm not feeling it anymore, so maybe it's not real, maybe it didn't take." No one's there to explain to them that the things that they are feeling or not feeling have nothing to do with what is fact. If you don't know what the scriptures say, what the facts are, and you don't go back to that and have someone help you with that, then you're going to be all over the board. You're going to be upset. You're going to think God's abandoned me. And we're going to read a bunch of scriptures to this effect.

How many couples do I sit down with, either the man or the woman or just both of them together or one of them comes see me and says, "I don't love her anymore. I don't love him anymore. The feelings, they've lost that lovin' feelin'. Not feeling it anymore." Let me tell you something about love. Love first of all is a person. God says that he is love. It doesn't describe him that love is one of his attributes. He literally is love. Love is ultimately a choice.

If you decided to go home at night based on your feelings, you're married and "I've got to decide whether I'm going to go home tonight to my wife. I'm not feeling it today." So where are you going? Where do people go looking for love in all the wrong places? They end up where they shouldn't be. Why do you go? You say, "Well, do you feel love?" I use this example when I'm sitting with people. I come out here and I feel nothing for my wife right now. Now she's in the room and she would probably feel especially now that she feels nothing for me either.

What does that even mean? I don't wake up in the morning and just instantly go, "Oh my gosh, I can't get out of bed. I'm so in love. I've just got to lay here the rest of the day. I'm so overwhelmed by just my every waking moment. I just can't breathe. Sweetheart, I can't leave you. I'm going to quit my job. We'll be poor but we'll be together." You say, "Well, don't you feel that all the time?" Nobody in the room feels all the time, right?

Now, if you give me just a few seconds to start talking about her and thinking about her and all that stirs up, I'm going to have to leave early. That's why I'm not going to do it because I'd like to be here with you. So feelings come and go. So what do I do when I don't feel something? What does she do when she doesn't feel something? Or what she feels is anger or frustration and trying to process I've been mean, I've been an idiot, whatever I'm gifted at doing.

So what do you do then? You still know that you love the person and it is a choice and so you show up. You say, "Well, I don't feel like God loves me." Please don't misunderstand this. You feeling like God loves you or you feeling love for God has nothing to do with the fact that he loves you. You say, "Well, I don't believe he does." It doesn't matter what you believe in that sense. He just does.

So the sooner you get your head around the facts of the Gospel, then the feelings may or may not come. In my case, I felt plenty from birth to my mid-20s when this stuff finally made some sense, real sense, that I felt like he loved me. There was a moment in time for me, I hate to even tell the story because you'll think if I go read that verse and this is the scenario, I had not felt that for a long time. I believe part of the reason for that was that God was trying to build a slab of fact and foundational fact that I could land on when I didn't feel that way.

Now, I don't feel love from God all the time and I don't know that I could tell you that I feel love for God all the time. But I know at least two things. I know that he loves me and I know that I love him. Sometimes I get a wave of emotion that if it doesn't stop, I'm not going to be able to take it much longer anyway. Sometimes I feel like nothing, just nothing. Like he's just gone. But when you know he's not gone, no matter how you feel, you know he's not gone. Okay?

Now, if you haven't reached this point yet, it's coming. And if you're there and you've forgotten about it, then remember, okay, he's still with you. He's not just with you, he's in you if you're a believer. So let's read some scripture. Psalm 118:6. Simple stuff unless you don't believe it. "The Lord is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me?" So is the Lord on the enemy's side or on your side? He's on my side and I don't want to be on the enemy's side.

I've shared this before, my daddy was bigger than anybody's daddy when I was growing up. Six-foot-nine, 260. When he was on my side, your side's going to lose because my daddy's bigger than your daddy. Though I feared him, when I was with him and I was afraid, I was not afraid anymore because nobody could take my daddy. I believed that. Now, I was afraid of him, but I figured they were too.

So who's bigger than your daddy? You say, "Well, I have respect for the enemy and they have power and all that." I get that. Even the angels don't address Satan, "The Lord rebuke you," they won't even take him on. But let me point this out again. When this whole thing is shut down, you're already in heaven or Jesus returns while you're alive, when it's all said and done, one angel locks up the devil, throws him in the pit. That's it, one angel.

So I haven't even gotten into angels yet. I've got the God who created the universe living inside of my body. He is on my side, he is on my inside. You've got nothing coming up against me with him. Now, you say, "Well, I still don't feel like he loves me." You know what? I'll take the fact of that and if the feelings come, great. But that helps me get through another day.

Psalm 139. So some of these I'm reading to you to let you kind of get a feel for who you... If you're not a Christian, you're in a heap of trouble. So by the way, let's just say that right here. You say, "Well, I don't feel God's love." Let him love you. Believe something. You say, "Well, how do I know God loves me?" At this point in my life, I've got a wife, three daughters, two grandchildren as of this moment. I'm not giving any of them for any of you. You're going to die if they don't donate something. Guess what? You're going to die.

You say, "Well, that sounds harsh." No, I don't love any of you that much. Everybody understands what I'm saying? What kind of fool God would come along and say, "Well, y'all not going to make it and I'm not coming in, I'm going to send my son down there to take care of this and I'm going to let him die because I love you." Then we come around and go, "So I don't believe you love me." Then you don't get it. Because it's the most insane thing ever even talked about in all of history that God would send his son.

You know, if you love us, come down here yourself. You know, if you want to get really harsh, be a man, come down here yourself. You come die, you're the dad. Leave your son up there, you come down here and die. Why are you going to send him? Why would he do that? Why not come himself? Because maybe we could explain that one away. You can't explain away a father letting a son die for me. You can't explain that. Not a dad on the planet has got any category for that. No father is going to give his son, his only son to die to save someone else. Not going to happen.

I prayed at an event for military burn victims. A guy that runs it got saved. Sitting with him one day and he invited me to come and pray at this event. A Medal of Honor guy was speaking who had had his hand blown off. He picked up a pineapple grenade and was throwing it to save his guys and as he was throwing it, it went off and blew his arm and... anyhow, here's the thing he told me. He shakes your hand with this robotic arm. He can spin it completely around. He has all kind of tricks he can do with his arm.

And he puts it out mechanically and grabs your hand and he says people will shake that hand and they will say, "Thank you for your service." And he will squeeze their hand and pull them in and say, "You were worth it." All of a sudden everything changes. We throw that little phrase around "Thank you for your service." He put it back on the person. So let me tell you why that matters. If you don't understand when Jesus died on that cross and we say, "Well, you died for my sins," and we say "Thank you for your willingness, your service, thank you for dying for me." What you've got to understand is he would say back to you, "You were worth it." Or he never would have done it. Right? You were worth it.

You say, "But I still don't feel like he loves me." You dwell on those facts and that information long enough and it'll get stirred up, I promise you. You chase after him, you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you will be filled. It's a fact. I never got into video games. I don't know how I missed all that. I missed the alcohol, the weed, and the video games. But I know people who play video games all night long, playing people all over the world. They pursue that. You know what? If you just pursued Jesus like you pursue video games.

Or if you just pursued Jesus like you pursue porn. That relentless pursuit of pleasure and winning. Maybe put the game down, put ever what you're chasing down and say, "You know what? Funny, Lord, I don't feel anything for you or from you. Like, funny how that works, isn't it? You're not pursuing me." Do you know what you usually catch? What you're chasing. "Well, I don't have time to read the Bible. Too many sports. I might get behind on the useless information of sports trivia." Did I leave anybody out? I'm trying to be sure. I feel terrible. I want to be an equal opportunity.

Psalm 139:7. "Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in hell, behold you're there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say 'Surely the darkness shall fall on me,' even the night shall be light about me. Indeed the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to you." You can't get away from him.

Jeremiah 29:13. Some of you know this by heart if we just actually did it. "And you will seek for me and find me." Guys, the answers are in the scriptures. "You will seek for me and find me" when? "You search for me with all your heart." Jeremiah 31:3, a few pages over. "The Lord has appeared of old to me saying 'Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore with loving-kindness I have drawn you.'" Everlasting, it always lasts. Not going to quit. "Therefore with loving-kindness I have drawn you."

What has God got to do to get us to believe that he loves us? Honestly, there's nothing left. You give your only son, that's it. You say, "Well, I want more." There is no more. He gave himself. Matthew 27:46. And I'm going to read this to you. I am not claiming to understand anything about what I'm about to read to you except that it's in the scriptures. And Jesus is hanging on a cross to pay for my sin, your sin, the sins of the world. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" That is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

And the word forsaken means desert or abandon. He's hanging on the cross and feels completely abandoned, forsaken, deserted. God has left him. You say, "Well, why would God do that?" Because he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. And so he's hanging there and God has to abandon him and let him pay the price for my sin, let him die, but then raise him from the dead.

So you say "Well, God doesn't understand." I can assure you Jesus, and I do not know what he felt because I don't know what it means for Jesus and the Father to have this conversation, but clearly we know that he feels forsaken, deserted, and abandoned. And if you feel that way, you're not alone. Romans 5:6. "For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrated..." And look at the word used. He demonstrated his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

"Well, I just don't feel like he loves me." I get that. But what I'm trying to tell you is no matter how you feel, the fact is he does. And so I would apply this to someone... I sat with a guy and he was telling me he just didn't think he loved his wife anymore. And so we're talking and going through this process and at some point he said something about her, kind of threw me. He started talking about that she was amazing at something and I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought you didn't love this woman. Listen to what you just said." And then he teared up.

The book of Revelation talks about a church at Ephesus saying it doesn't say you've lost your first love, it says you've left your first love. And my question to couples is: where'd you leave it? Because if you left it somewhere, we just have to figure out where you left it. And if you go back to that moment and say, "Okay, we loved each other, didn't we? Yeah. You think we still do? Yeah, we just left it right here." "Yeah, but all this stuff has happened. I don't know that I can forgive, I don't know that I can be forgiven." And here we go. You'd be amazed what God can do. Just get out of the way, right?

Romans 8:31. Now I'm reading you the verses and you say, "Well, I see what you're saying, I see it's in print, I hear what you're talking about, I just still don't feel anything." You know, it's interesting you'll look around church sometimes, some people take notes. A lot of people don't. I'd never preach without notes. Do you know why people take notes? Because they may not need it today but they may need it later and they won't remember, right? So you write certain things down that God says that makes sense to you and then you go back and go, "Wow, that's true, I remember that."

I've noticed unless you're some kind of genius, I've not sat in many classrooms where people just sat and listened to professors and then took the test. Tests go a lot easier with notes that you study and process. Just a suggestion. Romans 8:31. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" Now that's a good question and the answer is no one, right? If he's for you, and in my case I know that he is, then someone can be against me but it's not going to work for them because I've got God.

"He who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" If he's willing to give us his son, then what do you think he's going to withhold? Nothing. "Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"

Now you say, "Well, I feel like God's abandoned me, he's deserted me, he's forsaken me, I'm not feeling it anymore, something's wrong." Here's what the scripture says. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" The implication is there is no one. Okay, there's no one. Then "Shall tribulation?" You say, "Well, you've got tribulation. Can that separate you?" If you let it, but it can't. "Or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or even a sword?" Someone literally threatening your life.

"As it is written: 'For your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." In all what things? That list of things that he said. In spite of all the tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. Even if that comes our way, we still come out more than conquerors. We don't just win, we mega win. And who is it through? Him who loved us. Why does he keep using the love word? Because he loves us.

You say, "But I'm not feeling it." It's okay. When he says it's time, you will. If you love something more than you say, "Well, I want God to love me and I want love for him," is there even room in your heart for him to begin with? Or do you love something in this life more than even him and you'll not swap? "Would you trade your sin for me?" "Oh, no, no, Lord, I'm keeping my sin," whatever it is. He says, "No, no, you give me that, you lose that and you'll find your life." "Oh, I couldn't risk it. This is my life. I've got all my chips on this, Lord." He says, "No, just trust me. If you hold on to your life, you're going to lose it. But if you lose it for my sake, you'll find it."

Everything you ever dreamed of I've got. Sure, you may have some of these things, but my way you're more than a conqueror. "For I am persuaded..." And this is Paul writing and this is a guy who knew. When he says, "I'm persuaded," these are not just words. It is personal persuasion, he knows he is persuaded. "I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall..." What is he going through all these machinations for?

The point is that "nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The point is nothing's coming, no challenge, life, death, or anything, height, depth. You can't doubt, questions, nothing is coming that will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. It's just a fact.

And if you think you've got trouble falling in love, what if your mom and dad talked to somebody else's mom and dad and said, "Hey, how about your daughter marry my son?" And at the wedding you flip a veil and go, "Oh my gosh, I'm in trouble. Like, what in the world, Mom? They threw me under the bus. He's terrible. She's terrible." That's what used to happen, arranged marriages. I'm actually that's what happened to me. I have an arranged marriage. Just it was by God.

So turned out good. But you know what people with arranged marriages used to do? They found out who the arrangement was at the altar and then you know what they did? They figured it out. "Well, I'm not in love with this person." I know lots of people who claim to be in love when they got married and aren't in love anymore. So turns out that's not a thing either, is it? Not feeling it anymore. So that apparently is not the answer either. Turns out love is a choice. Right?

They run this commercial on TV all the time. It's another burn victim. And they show the picture of this soldier before his Humvee blew up. And you see her and the kids and then you see this disfigured human being and she's sitting there right next to this guy. He doesn't look like he looked like in the pictures when she married him. So what's she doing there? She loves him, I guess. "Well, he doesn't look good anymore."

All these men going, "Well, my wife doesn't look the way she used to." Maybe you ought to check a mirror yourself, big boy. If you can't stand up straight, look down and see your feet, you've done lapsed. I mean, "Oh, she should be this and that." Well, why don't you get out there in front and show her how to do it? So people get burned, people get paralyzed, things happen.

I remember sitting in a Denny's with my daddy. My mama was sick at the end for six years and he was a piece of work, but he took care of my mama like nobody's business. My daddy taught me to hit the finish line caring for your wife. Put everybody to shame. And he sat there in that Denny's, wept with me, wept and wept. And finally he said, "I never knew how much I loved your mama till she got sick."

What does that mean? So you're about to bail on God, some spouse, some marriage? Man, the best may be yet to come. Maybe a little suffering, maybe the suffering's already there. And maybe if you make a choice, you might be that close to the winning ticket. Hebrews 11:6 says, "Without faith it is impossible to please him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him." So it's going to take some faith.

You say, "Lord, I want to please you. I'm not feeling it. But okay." It takes faith, not feelings. So if I'm supposed to have feelings for you, knock yourself out, show me what that feels like. But until then I'm going to faith my way into your presence. And I'm going to trust you and I'm going to read the scriptures and if they say you love me, I'm going to believe it. And if my feelings change about that, fine. If they don't, I'm still going to believe it.

And then 1 John 4:9 and 10. "In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins." You say "I'm just still not feeling it." Then faith it. Believe it. Let him love you. Get out of the way. Maybe ask him if there's... may not be any room for him. You've got other stuff you love more than him. You say, "Lord, I don't want anything else but you."

Guest (Male): Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to listen to Richard Ellis Talks. We know these programs encourage and inspire you because we hear from so many people about them. Richard has such a unique way of speaking right to the heart because it always comes straight from his own heart.

And maybe there are others who have greatly impacted your life as well. So who is it in your life that was a great example as a Christ follower? Possibly a parent, a grandparent, a friend, pastor, neighbor, coworker. Well, we have just the place where you can share this story. There's a brand new feature on our website called a Legacy Wall where you can tell us who made a huge difference in your life in your growth as a Christ follower.

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