HIS PART—OUR PART

For the last several months I have been keeping a record about what my Facebook friends post about God. Every day there will be several prayers asking God to take care of us, cure all sickness, guide our children, heal our nation, put prayer back in our schools and make us all feel blessed.

Then there will be several platitudes about all the things God is going to do for us, or to us, I assume because of prayers already said. Great blessings are on the way. All of our problems will be solved. The darkness we feel will turn to light, problems will become blessings and financial issues will go away.

Of course, we all seem to enjoy confessing other people’s sins and releasing God from having to do so much of the judging.

Now although I call myself a realist I probably come across as an old cynic, but it seems to me there are a couple of things missing in the posts.

First, there seems to be a lack of interest in what part we are to play in solving our own problems and almost no prayers asking God to lead us to be part of the answer to the prayers of others. It comes across like we just join ourselves up to a heavenly vending machine and figure out how to trigger the contents to flood our lives. “God take care of everything while I take a nap.”

The other missing element is, what do we do when the blessings do not come, or things get worse? And things do get worse. Like the old poem:

One day as I sat musing
sad and lonely without a friend
suddenly there came a voice
from out the gloom
saying cheer up, things could be worse.
So, I cheered up and sure enough
things got worse.

Okay I have to admit I am a cynic. When Oral Roberts came up with his slogan, “Something good is going to happen to you,” I wrote my own that said, “p.s. So is something bad.”

It seems to me we spend an awful lot of time talking about promises and trying to whip up our belief in them to qualify as having enough faith to make them happen followed by trying to answer the age-old question of, “why do bad things happen to good people.”

There seems to be a basic question behind all of this. The question is: How much does God actually do for us and how much are we to do for ourselves? How pro-active is God?

It feels great having a God who controls everything in our lives down to when our shoe strings break. The problem is explaining who is to blame when they do break at just the wrong moment.

I am not about to claim that I have the answer to why bad things happen to good people or why good things happen to bad people. I can share two concepts that have helped me have a better understanding of life its own self and the roles God and man play in the living of it.

 THE CARD GAME
The only way that makes sense for me is to see life as a game of cards with fate dealing the cards. I understand that is not how we want it. We want God to deal the cards and there to be some secret to getting Him to deal us all good cards, but then we are back to trying to explain why the bad cards appear in our lives. Every bad thing that happens to us becomes either a test or a punishment. Either way it ends up being either our fault or a good reason to get angry with God.

If Fate deals the cards, then we can see life as a very natural thing God set in motion and He allows it to take a very normal and natural course. A certain number of people will be in car wrecks, have cancer, or die young. Some of them will be wonderful Christians, some not. The percentages remain true to the population we live in.

God’s role is to stand beside us and help us play whatever cards we get.

Not a perfect analogy but one that seems to make sense to me.

 HIS PART – OUR PART
From the earliest days of my serving as a pastor, people began coming to me for counseling. I had no training nor very much life experience to prepare me for the task. Every session was an experience in cold sweat and panic on my part. I discovered a text that has proven to be very pivotal in my life.

James 1:5 Says. “But if any man lack wisdom let him ask of God who giveth liberally.” I took that literally and probably tried God’s patience claiming it every time someone came into my office. I certainly lacked wisdom, so I thought I qualified.

At some point I did a deeper study of that text and found something that means a lot to me. Since the text begins with “But” it must mean the verse connects to the preceding verse which talks about how God is trying to grow and prepare us for living. He seems to be like a father wanting his children to become whole and independent human beings. That was contrary to how I had seen our relationship with God. I thought He wanted us to be totally dependent, helpless and to never feel competent in our own abilities. To think I was capable was arrogance.

The Devil’s first lie in the garden was that God was not really for us, He wanted us to be dumb and dependent. The tree we should not eat from was the knowledge of good and evil, so the Devil used the tree to picture following God as slavery, and to some degree that is still preached. Like the old song says, “I can’t even walk without Him holding my hand.” Perhaps God’s answer to that would be, “I put a bone in your leg now use it.”

To me that all means God is trying to make us competent and capable in every way possible. As we talk with Him person to person, we begin to think like He thinks. As we study the life example He lived among us we begin to understand what real living is. As we touch others like He did we start feeling about other people more and more like He felt. That is Christian growth, but it is also being equipped for living. One translation of James 1:4 even says that we might have the right kind of independence.

When James 1:5 is added it seems to me to say, we are to use what we have as far as we can, knowing that when we get overwhelmed, He is there with insight to help us figure our way out. Maybe the secret is not to figure out how to get God to do it for us, but to figure out how to get Him to help us do it for ourselves.

It also means He expects us to use what He has provided us. Maybe just posting “Thoughts and prayers” on Facebook is not enough.

Maybe it is time to climb down from our prayer towers and turn our gifts loose on the world around us…to be the answer to some prayers, the rescuer for someone in the ditch, and the provider of the love we have asked God to give.