A Convenient God

Recently I was talking to a friend on my cell phone.  She was rehearsing for me a litany of her woes and ills.  I didn’t say much.  Often I don’t know what to say when someone is complaining about their ills and I know that most of them are self imposed.  My friend has a potentially serious health issue but she continues to smoke, she has lapsed back into poor eating habits and she refuses to exercise – each of these activities would improve her health.  While it might take a great effort to get started on any one of them, the results would be…well, they would be everything she has been praying for.

In our Bible study we take time when we meet to go around the circle and share with each other some of the things that we are praying for.  These inevitably concern family, friends, and ourselves. 

I also have my list of family, friends – people and situations that I talk to God about nearly every morning before I begin my day.

Each week in church the pastor asks what people wish him to pray about and then we pray about those things in a corporate way.  I suspect that a few of the congregation take those lists home with them to continue to pray during the week.

In almost all these situations I hear people petitioning God to do something for or on behalf of someone.  Fix their health, restore their situation, adjust the weather, keep them safe etc.  Almost never do I hear anyone say, or ask, for His will to be done – remember Jesus saying in the prayer taught His disciples, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. 

Back to my friend of the first paragraph:  so often, as American Christians, we (perhaps unconsciously) ask God to fix  what is wrong in our lives.  We want God to restore our health even when we have failed to do our best, through diet, exercise, and healthy habits.  In our economic crises, as a nation, and as individuals, we want God go fix what is wrong even though we live(d) self-centeredly, selfishly, without regard to consequences or others.  We ask for God’s direction in our lives, but we have a preconceived idea that the direction should always be toward bigger, better, the more….

We want our God to be convenient.

We want Him to wait on the sidelines while we live our lives and then rush in to fix what we mess up.  But He should WAIT until we are ready for Him, until we really NEED Him.

As Bill and I continue to read through the Old Testament, over and over the prophets tell the people of Israel that God desires to bless them, to restore them, to bring them back to the land He promised them….IF they will turn to Him, or return to Him.  IF they will put Him first in their lives and turn their attention AWAY from the other gods they have created.

In the New Testament Jesus boils it down to two simple principles for our lives:  Love God with our entire being and care for others in the way we would like to be cared for.  When we follow these principles in our lives, THEN He will bless us beyond our capacity to contain the blessing.

An unusual thing happens when we begin to practice these two principles.  Gradually we no longer desire STUFF but find great joy in what we have.  Gradually we don’t desire the acclaim of others, but rejoice when others are acclaimed.  Gradually what happens tomorrow (or even today) doesn’t matter all that much because we have TOTAL confidence that He is in control and that is best.

There comes a day when we wake up and realize we are FILLED WITH JOY.  Joy that has nothing to do with stuff, nothing to do with people, joy that has every thing to do with walking with God every day.

We no longer desire a God who is merely convenient, we just desire the God who IS, the God who chooses to walk with us EVERY day. 

May each of you reading this blog experience the joy of knowing this God!  To the fullest!

amen