Can I trust my experience of God?

If you typed this into a search bar, you probably had something. A felt sense in a quiet moment. An answered request that did not look like coincidence. A long stretch in nature where the world seemed to be holding you. A grief that became unbearable and then, somehow, was bearable. You are not asking the question as a hypothetical. You are asking because something happened, and you would like to know whether you can lean on it.

This page is going to take that seriously. You do not need a religious background to read it. The honest answer is in two parts: yes, experience matters and you should not throw it away — and no, experience by itself is not enough to interpret. It needs to be checked against something more durable than the experience itself.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine. The Christian claim is that he was also God in human form. He was executed by the Roman government around 30 AD by a method called crucifixion.
• The resurrection is the Christian claim that Jesus, after his execution, was seen alive three days later by multiple named witnesses.
• The gospels are four short biographies of Jesus' life — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — written by his followers within decades of his death.
• Paul was an early Christian leader who wrote about a third of the New Testament. His letters are some of the earliest Christian documents we have.
• Prayer, in the Christian sense, is talking to God — sometimes in words, sometimes wordless. The Christian tradition treats it as conversation, not performance.

A short, honest answer

Yes, with care. The Christian tradition takes experience seriously — many of the most important figures in the Bible's own story begin with one. But experience is not self-interpreting. The same felt-sense can be read several ways, and which reading is true is not something the experience itself can tell you. The Christian tradition's answer is to check experience against two outside reference points: the public claims at the heart of Christianity, and the long community of people who have walked this road across history.

Experience matters and is not to be dismissed

Some accounts of Christianity, eager to defend against the projection objection, have downplayed experience to the point of caricature — as if real belief were only ever a cold consent to a list of propositions. That is not the historic tradition. The Christian texts are full of people whose lives were turned around by something that happened to them.

Paul, the early Christian leader who wrote about a third of the New Testament, was a man hunting Christians for a living until he had an encounter on a road near Damascus that, on his own account, knocked him to the ground and changed the direction of his life. The early apostles — the small group of leaders Jesus had personally trained — kept describing not just things they had heard but things they had seen, touched, eaten with. The Christian texts speak of an inner experience of God's presence as a feature of the life, not an embarrassment to it. According to one of the gospel accounts, Jesus himself promised his followers a kind of ongoing companionship that they would experience after his death.

So the answer to "do experiences count" is yes. The wider tradition takes them seriously and treats them as part of how God meets people, particularly in pain and in grief.

The qualification is what comes next.

Experience is not self-interpreting

The problem is not that experience is unreal. The problem is that the same experience can be honestly read several different ways, and the experience itself does not contain the instructions for reading it.

A felt sense of presence at a graveside could be the love of God carrying you. It could also be your own mind producing what you most need. A "coincidence" that arrived at exactly the right moment could be God's specific care. It could also be selective attention — a pattern your brain hooked onto because the timing was suggestive. A peace that descended after a long prayer could be the answer. It could also be the parasympathetic nervous system finally relaxing after a long stretch of activation.

Notice the move. The point is not that the religious read is wrong. It is that you cannot get to which read is right by looking harder at the experience. Two honest people can have the same goosebumps in the same chapel and come out with different verdicts on what just happened.

This is also why the Christian tradition has historically been cautious about staking a whole life on a single experience. People have had experiences that led them into terrible places — into manipulative groups, into self-destructive certainty, into reading every passing emotion as a divine instruction. "I felt it strongly" is not a strong enough warrant by itself. The same goes for "I felt nothing," which has led other people to walk away from things that were true.

So experience is data. It is not self-authenticating data.

Where experience gets checked

The Christian tradition has historically given two outside reference points to check experience against. They are what keep experience from collapsing into projection on one side or into mere assertion on the other.

The first is the public claims at the center of Christianity. Christianity does not stand on what any one person feels. It stands on what is claimed to have happened in one specific stretch of first-century history — the life, execution, and rising-from-the-dead of Jesus of Nazareth. That event is reported by named witnesses, in documents that circulated while those witnesses were still around, and is publicly checkable in a way private experience is not.

The way this works in practice is: an experience you have had gets read in light of the kind of God Christianity claims is there. If the God Christianity describes is real, then the kind of God you are likely to encounter in a moment of grief is the one the gospel accounts describe — the one who, according to one account, wept at a friend's tomb, and who has a track record of being closer to broken people than to put-together ones. An experience of being held in grief lines up with that. An experience that pushes you toward isolation, contempt, or certainty that you alone have the answer does not line up with it, no matter how intense the feeling was.

The public claim is the floor that keeps the private experience from drifting.

The second is the long community of Christians across history. No single person is the first to walk this road. The Christian tradition has nearly two thousand years of people in every culture, language, and era recording what they have experienced and how they read it. The shape of authentic encounter with God has been described over and over by people who had nothing to gain by exaggerating, often in the middle of suffering, with remarkable consistency. There is a recognizable pattern, and your experience can be checked against it. Did the encounter make you more honest about yourself, or less? Did it move you toward humility and toward other people, or toward grandiosity and isolation? Did the fruit hold up over months and years, or did it evaporate?

A Christian writer named John, addressing this question directly in a first-century letter, told his readers not to take every spiritual impression at face value but to "test the spirits to see whether they are from God." He gave content-based criteria for the test. The tradition has been doing that ever since.

What this looks like in practice

For someone who has had an experience and is trying to figure out what to do with it, the Christian tradition's answer is roughly: do not throw it away, and do not stake everything on it. Hold it open. Read it in light of the public claims about Jesus and check it against the long pattern of the tradition's recorded experience.

The most concrete next step the tradition would offer is to look at the person at the center of the claim. Read one of the four short biographies of Jesus — Mark is the shortest, about ninety minutes — and ask whether what you encountered in your experience lines up with the kind of person on the page. The Christian claim is that it does line up, because the same person is the one doing the meeting.

What about right now

If something happened to you, and you have been carrying it quietly because you did not know who to tell or how to talk about it, you can talk about it here. The chat on this site is free, private, and in your language. You start it; you end it whenever you want.

Where this comes from in the Bible

For readers who want to look at the underlying texts:

• 1 John 4:1 — "test the spirits to see whether they are from God"
• 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 — Paul's list of named witnesses to the resurrection
• Luke 24:13–35 — two followers experiencing Jesus alongside them on a road, then recognizing who it was
• John 14:26 — Jesus' promise of ongoing companionship for his followers
• Romans 8:15–16 — the inner witness of God's presence
• Hebrews 12:1 — "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses"