If you can overcome the feeling of dryness, you can overcome your environment. The feeling of dryness is the most difficult to overcome. If you can overcome this feeling, you surely will overcome your environment. The environment that is closest to a Christian is his emotion. Only by overcoming your emotion can you overcome other things. If you exercise your will to say, “I will read the Bible, I will pray, and I will testify,” even though you are living a dry and parched life, you will find that you can overcome all kinds of environments, no matter how great they may be. I will say frankly that those who have not overcome their environment have not overcome their emotion. Those who would overcome their environment must first overcome their own emotions.
The duration of joy becomes shorter, while the duration of dryness becomes longer. The degree of joy is less, while the degree of dryness becomes more. The end result is that at a certain point, the two will meet. They will be like two streams merging into one; there will not be any distinction between them anymore. At the beginning, the joy becomes shorter and less intense, and the dryness becomes longer and more intense. But in the end, we cannot tell the difference between our joy and our dryness anymore. The reason God is leading us this way is to show us that there will eventually be no difference between the two. In other words, our joy and our dryness will be completely merged as one. Today God has no intention other than having the just live by faith. The just do not live by emotions. Therefore, no matter how we feel in our emotions, they will not bring us anything. Some believers have to go through God’s training ten or twenty times until they do not exercise the strength of their emotion. God’s training causes the dryness to increase more and the duration to become longer, in order to bring these ones to the point where they will live by faith.
If a man is not saved, we have nothing to say about him. But if he is saved, his experience will surely be one in which the times of dryness become longer, while the times of joy become shorter. His plain days will become more, and his joyous days will become less. God will point out to him what his goal is. Many Christians are living a dry life. Of all the days in a year, he may only experience three to five days of joy. Some may even go through three to five years in dryness, without any joy at all. If you have never been trained, you will see in that day that your emotional strength is useless because the just live by faith.
Finally, if you live by faith, you will be able to live a joyful life in the driest hour and live the driest life in a joyful way. These words seem to be contradictory, but it is a reality in the spiritual life. God is leading you to live such a life by faith.
What is it to live by faith? It is what the three Hebrew men Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Our God...will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if He does not...we will not serve your gods nor worship the golden image that you have set up” (Dan. 3:17-18). They were saying even if God did not save them, they still would not change. This is to live by faith. Christians today are strongly inclined toward a life in the emotion. Whenever God takes away their feeling of joy, they have nothing left. But God says that we should live by faith and not by feelings. In a few years, we will see that joy and dryness are the same, and neither joy nor dryness can affect us anymore. We will live the same in dryness or in joy. We do not have to live like those whose vessel is small and who are easily satisfied. When they are happy, they dance in their rooms. When they are dry, they wet the wall with tears. If we live by faith, we will not be affected by either of the two. This does not mean we are insensitive; we do have feelings of joy and dryness. But these outward feelings will not affect us inwardly. (This article covers the joy experienced by the outward man; it does not cover the joy that the inward man enjoys in the Lord. The latter is deep and unshakable. But this deep and unshakable joy can only be enjoyed by us after we can fully control the outward joy.)