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The Old Testament of the Holy Scriptures often portrays man’s unfaithfulness to a faithful God. We often compare ourselves to them and think we are not nearly so bad. We certainly haven’t totally forsaken God. We certainly don’t worship golden calves.
- Maybe we don’t worship golden calves, but we have other false concepts of God and other things we seek after.
- Maybe we don’t totally forsake God, but we mix our dependence on God with our dependence on other things.
We see nothing wrong with depending on our own resources and depending on our bank account, our work, our wife, our kids, our ministry to fulfil us. We only use God as a Force or Genie to help us in our pursuits. Listen to your prayers. How many times do you ask God to “HELP” you do something. When you do that are you saying that you can do most of it … that you just need a little help to finish the task? It is man’s natural tendency to want to make it on his own.
Our natural tendency is to want to earn our salvation by being good. But even after we recognise that salvation is totally by faith, we still want to have lists of do’s and don’ts. We think if we change our behaviour we will be able to accomplish what we want. Whether it is overcoming depression or some bad habit. We are determined to pursue our own self-interests, so we redefine God. We have decided what it means to really enjoy life – for most of us that is having enough money so we can buy all the things we think will make us happy – so we expect God to bless us.
For others it might be that perfect relationship with the opposite sex, because we think that person will be able to fill our deep longings, so we expect God to bring along the perfect mate. And when He does, and the marriage is not perfect like we had planned, What do we do? What do you do? When you pray for something and you don’t get it, who do you blame? Do you blame God?
Think for a moment!
- We don’t recognise God is the source of life, and we pursue the things we think will satisfy.
- We experience dryness in our soul because our own methods do not work. They do not satisfy.
- We are proud and don’t recognise our sin.
- We expect God to bless us because we think we deserve it because we think we are good. We think He owes us.
- We blame God when things don’t go just the way we want them to.
