Love Doesn’t Always Feel Like Love

Garden of Gethsemane

Love doesn’t always feel like love.

Sometimes it feels like doing what, in the moment, you don’t want to do.

We live in a world that says our feelings are the primary indicators of truth. Something is only good if it feels good.

So we think our time in prayer is only beneficial if we leave it feeling better. We judge the worship service based on the buzz it gives us. We wait until we “feel like” reading our Bibles, because doing something for God when we don’t want to seems like legalism.

But what will we do when the good feelings aren’t there? Will we love people when we don’t like them? Will we worship when our hearts go numb?

Jesus didn’t always feel good. He was human, and part of being human means feeling real emotion. Jesus felt hard things, but He never acted sinfully out of them (Hebrews 4:15).

When Jesus asked for another way in the Garden of Gethsemane, He meant it. He did not want to die—but He chose to anyway.

“No one takes [my life] from me,” He said, “but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18).

Even Jesus had to do what he didn’t feel like doing to live a life of love. Should we expect anything different?

Good feelings will lead to faithfulness, but good feelings are fleeting—and so is a faithfulness dependent on them. But faithfulness in spite of good feelings is faithfulness in its highest form. To choose God when you don’t want to is not the sign of a weak heart, but of a surrendered one.

Feelings are not bad, they just aren’t always right. Our heart ebbs and flows, and if we follow our hearts then our faithfulness will ebb and flow too.

Some days we will wake up ecstatic to serve the Lord. But usually, being a Christian looks like waking up, feeling a myriad of desires, and choosing Jesus over every one of them.

Even when we don’t feel like it.

No matter what we feel today, we can follow Him. In doing so we will find the thing to which every fleeting feeling of satisfaction points to. Feelings come and go, but Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And when our heart tells us otherwise, may Gethsemane remind us that the greatest act of love was a man doing something that, in the moment, He did not want to do.