Expecting satisfying payback from God for your faithfulness is the mark of a big baby

9. You are likely to think that God is going to pay you back for your faithfulness in prayer by making you feel full in your soul, or by giving you a special sense of his presence or at least by providing you with a zest for the spiritual life.

Inner life Christian teachers from centuries ago refer to these good feelings and pleasant outcomes as “consolations.” It may strike you as very unusual that we would be warned against these consolations.

My own spiritual director once gave me this terse warming: “God ebbs, too, you know, Tim.”

It is true that some of our spiritual experiences feel good to us. That “full” or “close” feeling that we have with God is something that we should be free to enjoy. The point here is that many times our spiritual practices, our prayer life, and the tendencies of our spirit do not yield what we have come to know as “warm fuzzies.” In fact, many students of the interior life struggle often against a complete absence of consolations.

We are told by Spanish spiritual writer John of the Cross that the quest for consolations is an aspect of “beginners,” and will hold us back in our learning and in our growing such that we remain “feeble, like that of weak children.” “Their motivation,” he says of beginners, “in their spiritual works and exercises is the consolation and satisfaction they experience in them.” (Dark Night of the Soul, Book 1, Chapter 1, Part 3.)

As you become more resolute in your pursuit of God, your need for warm fuzzies will fall away. You will think your prayer life is getting stale and perhaps God has wandered off, but, quite the opposite is happening. You are growing.

This closer look at your interior life will press you toward better things

8. Last time we concluded with this: It could be said that we are conditioning our inner life to the end that God will use every thought, every word and every deed of ours to fulfill his purposes in us and, through us, in others.

Here we are on the verge of the topic of sanctity. Depending on your church background, you may know this as holiness, sanctification, perfection, theosis or even moral theology. As you spend time considering the state of your interior life, you will also find that some things just don’t belong in there.

You will naturally excuse yourself from the impurities that you allow yourself to store in your inner life. You are, after all, only human. You are, after all, a sexual person, a self-indulgent person, a materialistic person, sometimes a spiteful person, maybe an addicted person … you get angry, you say unkind or unclean things … you are tired of putting up with the same falderal from the same people all the time.

Okay, so you are just like everybody else, except that you are looking more closely at your inner life these days, and you are sensing a disconnect. Some things just don’t belong in there. You are starting to realize the inner battle between your personal darkness and the indwelling Spirit of God. No, they will not live in truce. They will keep fighting until one of them dies.

When you look into your inner life, you start to choose sides.

Emphasis on inner life runs the risk of lack of balance

7. Any time you emphasize a particular facet of the spiritual life you run the risk of lacking balance or appearing to do so. If you are exercising the development of your inner life, this could raise some questions. Aren’t you avoiding your responsibility to love your neighbor when you are holed up in your room musing Bible verses or whatever? Aren’t you being selfish by looking after your precious little inner life when you should be feeding the hungry or asserting a just cause to right a wrong? What’s the big deal about the inner life anyway?

It should be obvious that good spiritual teaching would not divorce the inner life from the necessary “exterior” life of action.

The best way I have heard this expressed is that the inner life involves our response to the “Greatest Commandment” as stated by Jesus – to love God with all of our being. The life of the outward expression of spirituality is how the believer responds to what Jesus called the “second” greatest commandment – to love others as ourselves. Added to this is the idea that one’s love of God comes first as the source and inspiration for the second.

It could be said that we are conditioning our inner life to the end that God will use every thought, every word and every deed of ours to fulfill his purposes in us and, through us, in others.

Refrain from getting uppity

6. The student of the interior life must not fall prey to the pride that falsely tells him he is a special breed of Christian because of his interest and enthusiasm about the inner life.

Already I have used the term “student of the interior life” to somehow recognize and congratulate the reader. It is, in fact, a good thing for a brother or sister in Christ to take an interest in their own inner life for the betterment of their walk with God and their ministry to others. The student should be thus affirmed that he or she is involved in a spiritually healthy pursuit. At the same time, it is unhealthy and counterproductive to one’s spirit and ministry to think oneself as above another or as elite in some way.

In loving God, we are all responsible to address ourselves to God’s love of us. In loving our neighbor we are, to some extent, responsible for the condition of one another’s souls. No one is excluded or exclusive.

The topic of Christ’s indwelling of us and through His Spirit exerting His influence upon us is important for every believer.