Can you be a believer but not enjoy God?

Robert McCurley explains in this video that it is one thing to profess that a person is a believer and it is another for a person to actually possesses faith. There will be many who say that they are Christians but are really not. 

It would be impossible to not enjoy God if you are a true believer. While there may be seasons of time in the believer's life where there may not be much joy and enjoyment of God as at prior times, those times are not forever. There is always a restoration of that joy. 

Romans 15:13 (KJV) - "Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost."

Can you be a believer and not enjoy God? As a pastor, with a pastor's heart, one of the things I would start with is recognizing, First of all, that we can have people who are professing Christians, right, who profess faith in Christ, that is not the same as possessing faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so when we say, can you be a believer? Let's first be careful that we're distinguishing between someone who makes a profession that they're a believer and one who actually possesses saving faith because there are lots of warnings in the New Testament about deceiving ourselves and about those who on the last day will discover that the Lord never knew them and so on. We don't skirt over those passages of scripture.

That's an important point, pastorally, to begin with. I think the answer to the question can you be a true believer and not enjoy God, it would be impossible to not enjoy him at all. So to say I am devoid of any enjoyment of God I think is impossible for a true believer because even even the seed even the smallest degree of faith or repentance for that matter or any of the other fruit are going to include a measure of enjoyment of God. So if the fruit of the Spirit are the marks or evidences or proof of being a Christian and joy is one of those fruits, then I think we can safely conclude that if we have the Spirit then we have to have at least some joy. Now having said that, having distinguished the fact that we have some people who aren't believers and then having made the point that you can't be completely devoid of joy, it is a reality that the Lord teaches us in his word that true, earnest, exercised Christians can have very little joy, enjoyment of the Lord.

So there are seasons of spiritual declension, there are occasions of spiritual desertion, and other things that bring the Lord's people to the bottom. We're there in a dark place. The Lord puts a song in our mouth for that. He's given us a number of psalms to sing when we're in those circumstances that express everything we're thinking and everything we're feeling and that channel and guide us both in our minds and in our affections of how to respond to all of that. So we don't want to to break the bruised reed.

We don't want to quench the smoking flax. We have to be gentle and careful with the tender lambs who perhaps are suffering and questioning and wrestling with do I actually enjoy God. I need to come alongside them with gentleness and love and winsomeness and to help bring them through those seasons which most every believer has had in one degree or another and at one time or another. And so it is possible to have struggles for sure, acute struggles in that area.