Giant Number Two - "Feel Good"

Giant Number Two - "Feel Good"
By Bob Mumford www.lifechangers.org

You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. James 4:3

The Feel Good Giant seeks to control our emotions, mind, and heart. This Giant has kept more people from freedom than anyone can imagine. Feel Good involves avoiding pain or discomfort at any cost, is fully committed to personal pleasure or gain, and is given to the senses or is sensual. This Giant is the epitome of what Scripture identifies as sensuality, causing us to seek gratification of the senses in such a manner that it controls us, effectively becoming our governing force. Feel Good operates on the pure pleasure principle. It is the source or first cause of all compulsive and addictive behavior. Our whole society is quickly moving toward addictive and compulsive behaviors that, directly or indirectly, will eventually touch all of us. The individual has trained himself to respond to whatever gives him pleasure. Anyone controlled by substance abuse understands both the authority and the power of Feel Good.

Modern psychology and cultural preoccupation with feeling good are the source of much of our anxiety. Our society is rooted in feeling good in one way or another. This Giant is why we sit in front of the television like “couch potatoes”—we want to escape reality and feel good. Feeling good must be guarded and protected; it cannot be disturbed. We do not want to hear what God may be saying because, not only will it bother us, but, it may not feel good. Entire religious movements, individual churches, and particularly doctrinal emphases are constructed on the premise of feeling good. The Feel Good Giant gives us the sense of actually ceasing to exist if we do not feel good. It may be okay to be wrong if we can just continue to feel good. We may even consider that impossible choice of refusing to look good in preference to feeling good because feelings have now become the ruling force. Preservation of Feel Good is worth risking anything, because immediate gratification is the insatiable goal. However, there are not enough drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping, attention, or sex to satisfy this Giant. This is called the universal law of reduced return: the more Feel Good is used, the less results are produced, leaving us in increasing pain and frustration. The frightening truth is that God has not designed us to feel good all the time.

I have repeatedly watched powerful men and women of God lose their ministry and marriage for a sexual encounter with someone else’s spouse. Someone once said, “The chase is long, the expectation great, the pleasure momentary.” These are descriptions of an immature personality that is ruled and directed by hedonism, which is the philosophy of pleasure or the pleasure principle. We all know that sometimes our feelings lie to us. When we are in a situation that makes us uncomfortable, we can move toward freedom in the Kingdom of God by opposing the demand of the Giant Feel Good.

Analogous conduct of Feel Good: happiness, entertainment, fun, comfortable, pleased, pleasurable, gratification, satisfaction, diversion, and recreation.

QUESTIONS & THOUGHTS
• Explain why Feel Good can become a governing force.
• In what ways has your life been motivated by “I feel like” rather than facts of a situation?
• What has Feel Good cost you?