Experience is the by-product not the objective.

How much of our faith/walk is about what we feel?  How often is it about the experience of the moment? How often is our faith about how we, in general, experience the world? If sentimentalism is the attempt to experience the emotion for the sake of the feeling or the emotion, how much of our faith has become religious sentimentalism? 

We are in danger at times of reducing our faith to sentimentalism revolving around an experience that we have in a religious context.  Carried to an extreme the experience can become an idol.  This idol of experience, at least at its first manifestation, appears to be orthodox.  But experience requires ever increasing novelty to remain an experience.  If the measure of the life of faith is the experience the pursuit of experience can and often will come at the expense of orthodox faith.  The ‘high’ becomes so important that minor compromises are made and they pile up on each other till they obscure any view of the Lord.  

It may be that by the time we realize that experience has become an idol we have passed the tipping point.  If the life of our church is built on experience and if we took away that narcotic we would lose our members.  We would have empty buildings with large budgets and no patrons to fund the cycle.  We feel we cannot cut off the flow of experience.  Additionally, to attract new patrons we have to take the experience to the level beyond every other church in town.  Caught on a hamster wheel we race and race and race hoping the next “WOW” will be enough.  At some point we realize that we are caught in an endless cycle of chasing an experience.

Please don’t think I am targeting anyone specific expression of the Christian faith.  We are all susceptible to this infection.  It can manifest in highly traditional churches where every sermon has to be a hotter, louder, and more fist-pounding version of an old fashioned, hell-fire and brimstone, revivalist message.  It comes in liturgical churches where the pomp and procession replace relationship and there needs to be ever larger clouds of incense.  It comes to preachers when we desire the accolades of people and sermons become a TED talk to enlighten and inspire.  Experience can even whisper to us if we are boring and dull and convince us that in the plain drabness of our faith suffering for Jesus is something we need to feel.  Anytime we anticipate a feeling as the measure of our faith we are in danger.

Interestingly, the greatest experience in the Bible appears to have been almost a bi-product of something else.  It looks as if it may have been anticipated but was not the objective.  In Luke 9:28, we read that Jesus went up the mountain to pray.  To pray is an aorist middle deponent infinitive.  Without getting too much in to Greek grammar the middle voice (according to Dana & Mantley): “is the use of the verb which describes the subject as participating in the result of the action.”  In this case, Jesus was going up the mountain to pray.

It would be a mistake to say that the transfiguration was nothing but a bi-product of Jesus’ time with the Father.  But it is entirely correct to say that if Jesus had not gone to be with the Father the transfiguration would never have happened.  The greatest “experience” in the Bible record was not the result of pursuing an experience.  Rather it happened because Jesus was meeting with the Father.

All the stuff is in and of itself neutral, neither negative nor positive, but it can never replace the passionate pursuit of the Father.  Experience if it aids is a blessing, but if it distracts us from our Lord or becomes a substitute it is a curse that will disappoint.