Burning catches my attention the most. Like when I’ve misjudged someone and feel this sharp heat in my chest, almost a nudge to go back and look at that person again. Heart burning usually means sorrow. I know that feeling well by now. Then there’s this spot on my left hand that flares up when someone is being dishonest with me. Hard to explain, but it’s specific. Other times it’s just a poke in the head telling me to pay attention or think harder about something.
The signals vary, but they’re consistent enough that I treat them as prompts rather than coincidence.
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Funny, a friend and I were talking about this just last week. She said being filled with the Spirit felt like sticking her finger in an electrical socket, not painful but strong and unmistakable. It changed everything about how she prayed afterward and how she read Scripture.
She still talks about that part more than the moment itself.
Sure. Just don’t build the whole house on that foundation. Feelings make terrible landlords. They can pack up and move out with no notice.
Your walk with Christ was never depending on them anyway.
Pushing back on one thing here. You stopped praying that prayer because you didn’t want to chase the feeling, but the feeling is still deciding what you do. It’s just in the back seat instead of the front.
If it helps, try praying it out loud for somebody else’s sake. Ask God to fill you so you’ve got patience for a hard person in your life (we all have one). That’s harder to turn into a vending machine when the thing you’re asking for is meant to be spent on someone who isn’t you.
Your post made my stomach drop a little.
I have prayed that prayer plenty of times and felt nothing. No warmth or buzzing. So I guess my question is the flip side of yours. If the feeling isn’t what settles it, what does? The only thing that has held for me is the stuff that doesn’t depend on my nervous system cooperating. Christ died and rose. The promise is offered to me. I keep showing up for the bread and the cup whether I feel a thing or not.
Whether that is actually enough or whether I’m just talking myself into it, someone further along would know better than me.
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My two cents, and I hope this doesn’t land wrong. Ask the boring physical questions too.
I’ve had that warm buzzing spread through me from low blood sugar or standing up too fast, and once from a panic attack I mistook for God at the time. That doesn’t cancel out what happened to you. God made nerves and He can use them, but a body reacting to intense emotion isn’t proof of anything on its own.
The more useful question is what came out of it a month later. A real touch from God tends to leave you kinder and more honest, not just more interested in your own experiences.
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It was the surrender that did it.
Months of worship meetings, everyone around me speaking in tongues, and I’m just standing there with arms like lead. Nothing. I kept asking, kept waiting for something to hit me. The shift came after I was completely broken and told God I was only still living because He wanted me to, not because I wanted to. Which sounds bleak written out, I know.
I wonder sometimes if people who struggle with this are still gripping something. Took me way too long to even ask myself that one.
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Always in that order, for me anyway. The tears show up first, before I even know why, then this warmth and a peace so complete it feels like being washed clean from the inside out.
Anyone else? Or is that just me.
I think this might be the most common experience there is.
That feeling you’re describing, I know exactly what you mean. When I first got saved, it moved through me instantly: the love of God, just like that. Complete change.
And I can still access it so easily. Whenever I’m doing something kind for someone, or just showing love in some small ordinary way, there it is again. Same warmth. Same feeling. That’s why I wonder if maybe everyone has felt this at some point and we just forget. Lose track of it as life piles up?
Not sure that’s true. It’s just something I think about.
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