It’s important to remember that I’m not writing about how to switch the way we operate in life. Instead it’s a call to quit acting as if we’re “self-moved” rather than “response-based” people — the former is a distortion that keeps us asking what really does move us.

Any focus on “feelings” themselves is to miss that our call is to respond to Christ. Once we see him clearly he elicits our response of devotion, not duty. So the focus needs to be on him, not on our emotional state. Jesus, for instance, didn’t treat feelings-in-themselves as his motive, as in, “I’m feeling very good right now about getting crucified, so let me follow that feeling to the cross!” Instead he endured the cross because he loves us, knowing that our only hope of joining him in eternity was for him to swallow death on our behalf. So the point is that love is inherently relational; and the quality of our love is defined by who we love.

To say it another way: if we treat free-standing-emotions as our guide we’ve simply repackaged, slightly, the classical Greek premise that we are ‘self-moved’ in what we do. Let’s toss that in the trash. Instead faith works through love, and that love starts with Christ. So, too, our appetite for Bible reading is always defined by our vision of Christ. If that vision is so foggy that other things are distracting us, we need to say that to Christ: “Whoops, Lord, you’ve lost your luster . . . I hope you become a bit more attractive soon!” Or we need to say, “Lord, I’m missing your beauty! Open my eyes, please!”

Hope that makes sense!