In this episode, I want to talk to anyone who said yes to Jesus and then woke up the next morning wondering if anything really changed. That quiet question (why don't I feel different?) is one of the most common things new believers wrestle with, and I think the church has done a poor job of answering it. So I walk through what actually happened at salvation, why feelings are not a reliable measuring stick for your relationship with God, and what spiritual growth really looks like when it shows up in ordinary life. We spend time in 2 Corinthians 5, Philippians 1, and 1 Peter 2, along with some honest, practical steps for growing when you cannot feel a thing. If you are new in your faith, or walking with someone who is, this one is for you.

Interesting Links:

• 26,000 Baptized Across U.S. In Largest Mass Baptism Event In American History - Worthy Christian News
• Well Versed - Asbury Revival 2023
• Soul Shepherding. Spiritual growth survey.
• Peterson, E. (1980). A long obedience in the same direction. InterVarsity Press.
• Packer, J. I. (1973). Knowing God. InterVarsity Press.
• Lloyd-Jones, M. (1965). Spiritual depression: Its causes and cures. Eerdmans.
• Grudem, W. (1994). Systematic theology. Zondervan.
• Bleidorn, W., et al. (2024). Psychological change before and after religious conversion and deconversion. Journal of Personality.
• Barna Group. (2025). The declining importance of faith: New Barna findings.
• Barna Group. (2025). New research: Belief in Jesus rises, fueled by younger adults.
• New Survey Shows Areas of Spiritual Life People Feel Most Confident About – and Those They Want Help With the Most - Barna Group
• New Research on the State of Discipleship - Barna Group
• Asbury University. (2023). The outpouring story of revival.
• Anderson, N. T. (1990). The bondage breaker. Harvest House Publishers.

References to Bible Verses:

Romans 5:1; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 2:20; Philippians 1:6; 2 Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 11:1; Lamentations 3:21–23; Hebrews 12:1; Romans 12:2; Philippians 2:12–13; Ephesians 1:13–14; 1 John 5:11–12; Romans 8:1; Hebrews 4:12; 1 Peter 2:2; Colossians 2:6–7

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Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Jason McConnell. All right, I wanna start off today with a scenario. See if any part of this sounds familiar. Someone you know, maybe it's you, finally does it. They pray the prayer. They accept Christ. Maybe it happened at a church. Maybe it's in the car on the way home from a conversation that cracks something open.

Maybe it's at a baptism event with worship music playing and hundreds of people around them, and the moment feels enormous. Hallelujah. And then Monday comes. They wake up. They stub their toe on the way to the bathroom. They spill their coffee. They get frustrated in traffic. They scroll their phone and feel the same pull towards the same things they always did.

And somewhere in the back of their minds, a quiet, unsettling question starts to form. Did anything actually happen? And I wanna tell you today, yes. Yes, something happened. Something enormous and permanent and real happened, and the fact that you can't feel it does not mean it's not true. This question, why don't I feel different after becoming a Christian, is one of the more common things new believers wrestle with.

And here's what I love about it. It is an honest question. It is a searching question. It's the kind of question that comes from someone who actually wants to know God and is paying attention. This is not some sort of a spiritual failure. This is faith doing exactly what it's supposed to do, pressing in, asking the hard things, refusing to settle for performance.

So today, we're gonna spend some time unpacking what actually happens at salvation, why feelings are not reliable measuring sticks for your relationship with God, what spiritual growth really looks like when it happens, and how to anchor your identity in what God says rather than what you feel. And then some practical things that you can do to keep growing even when you can't feel a thing.

So we're gonna spend some time today in 2 Corinthians 5, Philippians 1, and 1 Peter 2. And we're gonna hit on other things along the way, of course. So open your Bibles if you have them, or follow along in an app, whatever you use. Let's get going.

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Here's something worth being honest about before we get into theology. Part of the reason so many new believers are caught off guard by ordinary life after conversion is that we, the church, the culture around Christianity and all of it, we sometimes do a poor job of, of explaining what comes next.

Think about the moments that tend to mark the beginning of someone's faith. The altar call with everyone standing and music playing, the baptism in the ocean or the lake with crowds cheering, the revival service where the presence of God is absolutely palpable and you, you feel like you could float out there in the building.

These are real, these are good. These are moments that matter, but they are by definition extraordinary, and life after them is by definition ordinary. And when ordinary hits you in the feels a- and it's exactly the same as it was before, the same temptations, same habits, same emotional flatness on a Tuesday morning, it can feel like evidence that nothing real has actually happened.

God was moving, and organizers themselves were asking the exact right follow-up questions. What happens on Monday morning for those twenty-six thousand people? How do you sustain the step you took in the water when you go back to the apartment, to the job, to the relationship, to the patterns that were already there?

And these aren't abstract questions. They are the most important pastoral questions I think the church can ask a new believer or about new believers. And the research su- research is suggesting that we are not answering them well enough. A Barna Group study on discipleship found that only one percent of church leaders say today's churches are doing very well at discipling new and young believers.

Six in ten pastors say churches are doing not too well at this. And that gap matters because when a new Christian is not given the framework for understanding what is happening, or not happening in that case, i-in their interior life after their salvation, they are left to interpret it on their own. And without the right framework, the most natural interpretation is, "Well, maybe something went wrong."

Well, look, look, nothing went wrong, but you do need a framework, and that's what I wanna talk about today

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So let's start with one of the more foundational pieces because everything I feel, I feel like everything builds on this. When you place your faith in Jesus Christ, when you acknowledge your sin, believe that He died and rose again, and turn to Him as Savior and Lord, something happens that is real, objective, and absolutely permanent, and completely independent of how you felt about it in that mormen- moment or how you feel about it now.

The theological word for it is justification, and it's important to understand what that means. Justification is not a feeling. It, it's more of a legal declaration, and in the courtroom of heaven, the moment you believed, God declared you righteous, not because you earned it, but be- not because you felt it, but because the righteousness of Jesus Christ was credited to your account.

And that's exactly what Romans 5:1 is telling us. "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Peace with God, that's past tense, present tense reality, and that's already yours. But now let's go to 2 Corinthians 5:17. And now this verse people often quote in the, in these kind of conversations.

It says, "Therefore, if anyone in Chri- is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here." And people read that and think, "Okay, so I should feel like a new creation, right? I should feel like the old stuff is gone. But I still want that same thing I wanted before. I still react the same way when someone cuts me off.

So what gives?" Uh, here's the thing. This, th- this verse is describing a change in spiritual status and trajectory, not necessarily a dramatic emotional overhaul. You are a new creation in the sense that you, your standing before God has permanently changed. The direction of your life has fundamentally reoriented, and the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in, in you, and that's real.

That's enormous. But it doesn't mean every old habit, desire, and tendency just, poof, evaporates in an instant. Uh, this, this brings us to a distinction that I think is essential for any Christian, any new Christian especially, to understand, the difference between justification and sanctification. So justification is what God does for you in an instant.

It's the one-time act. It's the moment your spiritual status changes from condemnation to forgiveness, from separated from God to adopted as His child. It, it's complete, it's permanent. It does not need to be repeated. Now, sanctification is what God does in your, in you over a lifetime. It's the ongoing process of becoming more like Christ in your character, in your habits, in your desires, in your response to the world.

And this is where the theologians become, uh, pretty helpful here. So, uh, J.I. Packer, in his landmark book, Knowing God, draws a careful distinction between adoption, which is our new status in God's family, it's immediate and permanent, and growth in Christlikeness, which is an ongoing process. You don't become the child of God gradually, but you do grow up gradually.

Now, Wayne Grudem, Grudem, i- in his systemic theology, defines sanctification as a progressive work of God that man, uh, and man... Sorry, a progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives and characters. So there's that word progressive. It's not instant.

It's not a single dramatic event. It is progressive. It pro- progresses over life. And here's one more piece of theological clarity, I think, from Galatians 2:20. "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." Now the Apostle Paul, one of the most remarkable Christians who ever walked the earth, uh, arguably I suppose, is describing an ongoing reality that he is living into, not a single moment he had once and then coasted on.

He's, he's still working it out and, and still living from what Christ did, and that, that's the posture. So you're not behind. You're, you're not broken. You're not undone. You're at the beginning of a lifelong process, and the God who started it will see it through. Philippians 1:6 says it plainly, "Being confident of this," or yeah, "Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."

So he started it, and he's gonna finish it, and your job is just to show up

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All right, so let's talk about feelings because this is where a lot of new believers get tripped up, and to be honest, uh, where a lot of longtime believers get tripped up too. Feelings are real. I'm not here to tell you that feelings don't matter, that you should just push them down and pretend, right?

Feelings are part of how God made us. The Psalms are full of raw, unfiltered emotion. Uh, Jesus wept. Paul wrote about his own anguish and inner conflict. Feelings are not the enemy. But feelings are not authoritative either. They fluctuate. They are affected by how much sleep you got, what you ate, how your relationships are going, what season of the year it is, what you scrolled through this morning, what conversations you had yesterday that you're still turning over in your head.

They are influenced by hundreds of non-spiritual factors every single day. And here's the problem. If you use your feelings as the primary measuring stick for your relationship with God, you're going to be on a spiritual rollercoaster that has nothing to do with the actual state of your soul. Think about it this way.

On the day after a great worship service where you felt genuinely close to God, I mean, you are not more than... not more saved than you were the week before when you, when you felt spiritually dry and distant, right? And on a day when you haven't prayed in three days and you feel guilty about it and far from God, well, you're really not any less saved than you were on your best day.

Your standing before God does not fluctuate with your emotional state, ever. The Bible says... I'm, I'm sorry. The Bible never said, "Feel and be saved." It says, "Believe." Faith is not a feeling. It is, it is a trust placed in a person based on what has, what He has done, what, what Jesus has done, right? Second Corinthians five verse seven says it this way.

"For we live by faith, not by sight." And then Hebrews eleven verse one gives us the definition. "Now faith is the confidence in what we hope for and the assurance about what we do not see." Big words, confidence and assurance. These aren't emotional states that come and go. They are settled convictions grounded in what God has said and done.

So Martin Lloyd Jones wrote an entire book about this called, uh, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, and it may be one of the more practical things you can read as a new believer. One of his central arguments is that the root of a lot of spiritual depression is allowing your feelings to interpret your standing before God instead of allowing scripture to do that.

And he, he had this memorable way of putting it. He, he would say, "You need to learn to talk to yourself instead of listening to how you feel." You preach the truth of God's word to your own soul. You, you remind yourself of what is objectively true. You say, "God has declared me righteous. Christ has risen.

The Holy Spirit is in me. These things are true whether I feel them right now or not." Now, there is something interesting in research that may be worth noting here. A twenty twenty-four study published in the Journal of Personality, which tracked, uh, physiological changes before and after Christian conversion, found that conversion is often followed by unexpected shifts in personality traits, and not always the ones people expect.

Now, rather than the uniform emotional uplift that many anticipate, the reality is more nuanced and sometimes includes unexpected dips in certain areas. So the reacher-- researchers noted that on average, people experience relatively sudden shifts during the year they converted that did not always match their expectations.

This is... Now, this isn't a spiritual red flag. This is normal human experience intersecting with a, a spiritual reality that operates on a different timeline than our, than our emotions do. Now, the research confirms that, or ref-- sorry, the research confirms what Scripture has been saying all along. What God is doing in you is not fully visible or fully felt in the short term.

Now, here's the good news underneath all of this. Lamentations three twenty-one through twenty-three gives us one of the more beautiful anchors in all of Scripture. Coming from a book about grief and devastation, which is itself remarkable, the writer says, "Yet this I call to mind, therefore I have hope.

Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning." New every morning, not new every time I feel them. New every morning whether I feel them or not. That is the God you have put your faith in.

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Okay, so we have established that justification happened and it's real, and that feelings really aren't a reliable guide. Now let's look, let's, let's look at what the process of spiritual growth may actually look like from the inside, because I think this is where one of the biggest gaps between expectation and reality lives.

Sanctification, most of the time, looks boring. I mean, I mean that in the best possible way. It looks like showing up to read your Bible on a Wednesday when you would rather be doing anything else. It looks like choosing patience in a conversation that is frustrating you and, and maybe half succeeding. It looks like forgiving someone over the course of months, slowly and imperfectly, until one day you realize the bitterness is less sharp than it used to be.

It looks like a Tuesday afternoon where you make a slightly better choice than you would have made two years ago, and no one notices. Not even you. Not right away, at least. It rarely looks like a lightning bolt. It rarely looks like a single dramatic moment where everything changes. It looks like Hebrews 12:1, throwing off everything that hinders and running with perseverance.

Perseverance, not sprinting, running long. Now, here, here is a way to think about it that kind of helps me. Sanctification is renovation. It's not de- demolition. God is not tearing your house down and starting over. He's rebuilding it room by room. Some rooms get renovated quickly. You come to Christ and almost immediately have zero desire to do a thing that used to define you.

Other rooms may take years. Uh, some you may come back to multiple times, and that's normal. That's how renovation works, and the builder knows exactly what he's doing, so you got nothing to worry about. Romans 12:2 speaks to this: "Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Transformed by the renewing. That's ongoing present tense, right? It's a renewing of your mind. This is not a one-time reset. I wish it were. I really do. This is a continuous process that God does in partnership with your willingness and, and your engagement. In Philippians 2:12 and 13 gives us the cooperative picture.

"Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." Both things are true at the same time. God is at work in you, and you are called to work it out. N- now, understand, that's not... I don't mean you earn it. Just work it out.

Live from what is already true. Now, here, here is a piece of data that I find- genuinely encouraging for new believers. Barna found that three out of four Christians, not new Christians, all Christians, say there is an area of their spiritual life they want to see improved. I know that doesn't sound good, but I mean, like, it means you're not the only one struggling if you're a new Christian.

And the research also found little correlation between how much spiritual activity people engage in and how much growth they actually perceive. That's a key word, perceive. Like, even longtime believers feel like they're not measuring up. Even people who have been following Jesus for decades feel the gap between who they are and who they wish they could be.

You are not behind everyone else. You're in the same boat as almost everyone else who has ever tried to follow Jesus faithfully. Now, Eugene Peterson, a pastor and scholar who translated the message, he wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. A phrase he drew from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was definitely not writing about Christianity, I want to be clear, but he accidentally described it pretty well.

So Peterson's argument is that Christian discipleship is fundamentally about sustained, unglamorous faithfulness over time. Not spiritual highs, not peak experiences, long obedience in the same direction. And that's what sanctification looks like from the inside. So guys, give it time. Keep showing up.

God's not behind schedule. You're not behind everyone else. Everything's good. You're fine.

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Okay, so here's what I'm trying to tell you, what I think is the most important shift a new Christian can make. This is what this all boils down to, um, at this moment at least. It's one of the more freeing things I think you could do. Move from, "I feel like a Christian," to, "I am a Christian because of what Christ has done."

Now, these kinda sound familiar, but they are completely different anchors. One is built on sand, the other is built on rock, and when the ordinary Monday comes, when the feeling is gone, and the alarm goes off, and life just lives, which anchor you stand on makes all the difference. Your identity in Christ is not earned.

It is not maintained by your performance. It is not proven by your emotional consistency. It is declared by God and sealed through the Holy Spirit. Ephesians one, 13 and 14 says, "And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in Him with a seal then promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance."

That's a lot of words, a sealed deposit guaranteeing our, your inheritance. That's not language of uncertainty, though. That, that's, that's a done deal right there. Uh, 1 John five, verses 11 and 12, it's... I think it's worth memorizing if you're a new Christian or honestly if you've been a Christian for 20 years.

Um, and this is a testimony. "God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life." That's it. Do you have the Son? Do you have Jesus? Then you have life. The question is not, do you feel it? The question is, do you have the Son? And if you, if you placed your faith in Him, you do.

Romans 8 verse 1 should be a verse that I think new believers should memorize or at least come back to consistently. "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." No condemnation. No condemnation on the days you don't feel close to God. No condemnation when you've been consistent with your prayer life or not.

No condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. It's, it's a period right there. The culture we live in tells us identity comes from how you feel, what you produce, how others perceive us, whether you are performing at high enough levels to justify your experience. Scripture kind of flips that on its head entirely.

Your identity is a gift. It was declared over you before you did a single thing to earn it, and you may never earn it. And it's never revoked when you have a bad or we- bad week. Uh, Neil Anderson i- in his works on spiritual identity, particularly his book- Victory Over the Darkness makes the case that when the majority of spiritual struggles believe str- struggles, sorry, the makes the case that the majority of spiritual struggles believers face are resolved not by trying harder, but by actually believing what God says is true about them.

So, so not feeling it, believing it. There is a difference between intellectual agreement and genuine trust, and the gap between them is often where the real work of discipleship happens. So on the days when you don't feel different, go back to the facts. Christ died for your sins. Christ rose from the dead.

You have believed and placed your trust in Him. God has declared you His child. The Holy Spirit is at work in you, and even when you cannot detect it, that is solid ground. That is something you can stand on when feeling has nothing to offer you.

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All right, let's get practical. And as I say that, I'm sure at least one of my listeners is probably singing "Let's Get Physical" right now. I mean, you are my listeners, and I love you all, but you are my listeners. Anyways, I don't want anyone to walk away from this episode with a bunch of good theology but no idea what to do with it tomorrow morning.

So here's the thing about spiritual disciplines, uh, prayer, scripture, community worship, serving others. They are not performed to manufacture feelings. They are not spiritual vending machines where you put in enough repetitions and eventually the feelings come out. They are the means by which you position yourself in the path of what God is already doing.

You show up, God works. That's the relationship, guys. The message that came out of the Asbury Revival from teachers who were there in the room stewarding what was happening was explicit about this. Spiritual formation does not come through a temporary emotional experience. It comes through a personal, daily, persistent commitment.

Time with Jesus, prayer, reading the Word, asking the Holy Spirit to examine your heart and convict you of sin, and that's it. That is what long-term growth looks like. It's consistently doing those things. Now, it's not gonna be perfect. You're gonna have days where you just don't feel like it, and maybe you don't do it.

But if you do it more often than not, you're, you're in a good place. You just, just have to keep going. But here are, here's some, here's three practical anchors for new believers who struggle, uh, to feel it. A- And these are just advice from me. Take it or leave it. Um, first, get in the Word daily. Five minutes, even if you don't feel like it, even if you read the same passage three days in a row because nothing else is sticking.

Hebrews 4:12 is... it's not a metaphor. "For the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword." It does not say that the word of God feels alive. It says it is alive. It is working whether you feel it or not. And 1 Peter 2:2 frames it like this, uh, and it's good for new Christians: "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation."

Crave it. Not because it feels good every time, but because it is what you need to grow. We all need this to grow. All right, second, get into community. Faith was never meant to be a solo project. Find a church, find a small group, find one person who has been following Jesus longer than you a- and, and have, and h- ask them questions.

Because one of the things that can happen when you are a new believer navigating this question alone is that you get in your head, you get in your own head You start interpreting your experiences with no external reference point. Community gives you that reference point. It gives you people who can say, yes, I felt that exact way.

Here is what's helpful. Here is what I wish someone had told me. The body of Christ exists in part to help new members of the body understand what is happening to them. All right, and third piece of advice. Give it time and resist the comparison trap. Someone else's dramatic testimony, the guy who smoked two packs a day and quit cold turkey by the moment he prayed a prayer, or the woman whose marriage was restored overnight, those testimonies, they can be real and they are good and they are worth celebrating, but they are not the measuring stick for anyone's experience.

God works differently in every person. Colossians 2, verses 6 and 7 frames it this way. So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught. Rooted and built up. Again, that's agricultural language.

You see that a lot in the Bible. Roots take time. Growth takes time. The tree that grows fastest in a storm is not always the one with the deepest roots. Now, one more thing on this. Barna Research found that only 31% of Christians strongly agree they have a personal responsibility to share their faith.

And one of the reasons that number is so low, not the only reason, but one of them, is that so many Christians never got grounded firmly enough in their own identity and story to feel like they had something solid to share. Getting rooted in truth from the beginning changes that trajectory. The new Christian who learns to stand on what God says rather than what they feel becomes the mature believer who can hand that same foundation to someone else 5, 10, 20 years from now.

That's long-term gain. And it really is worth playing.

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All right, let's reflect on the episode before I wrap this up. When you became a Christian, something real and permanent happened. Your spiritual status before God changed comp- completely, instantaneous, and irreversibly. That was justification. It does not depend on your feeling to be true. What comes next is sanctification, a lifelong process of becoming more like Christ, room by room, slowly and imperfectly, and faithfully.

It looks ordinary most of the time. It looks like showing up. It looks like Philippians one, verse six, "Being confident of this, that he who began good work in you will carry it on to completion, completion until the day of J- Christ Jesus." He started it. He will finish it. And in the meantime, your identity is not built on how you feel.

It, it is built on what God has declared. You are in Christ. You are sealed by the Holy Spirit. There is no condemnation for you. Those things are true on your best and your worst days, and every ordinary Tuesday in between, and Wednesday, Thursday, Fri... all the days. I don't know why I keep-- I always pick Tuesday.

It's crazy. Look, if you're a new Christian and you, and you walked into this episode wondering whether something went wrong, nothing went wrong. You're exactly where God expects you to be. He is at work in you right now, even if you don't notice, even if you can't feel it. And here's one thing I wanna encourage you to do this week, just one.

Pick one small discipline and do it tomorrow morning. Five minutes in the Word, one honest conversation with another believer, one prayer that does not wait until you feel ready to pray it. Start there. Start small. The roots go down before the branches go up. Trust the process. Trust the one who started it.

Until next time, keep loving your neighbors, dive into God's Word daily, and may the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with His peace. Take care, God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode