The wicked are those who rebel against the light. They do not recognize its ways or stay on its paths. [Job 24:13, CSB]
When I was a young Christian, I always envied the many Christian authors who would tell about God speaking to them. They always made it sound so effortless, as if any Christian could have the same easy access to conversations with God, however, I found that I never seemed to hear from God in the way they did. One prolific author particularly bothered me because God would call him “Son”, and just begin speaking to him. Well, maybe this author did experience that all the time…I definitely did not. I still don’t have the magic bullet for this lack of access, but I do seem to hear from God more in my old age, probably because I learned He speaks differently, and in different ways, to different people. Remember, He makes no two snowflakes alike, so He can get through to each one of us…if we want Him to, and if He wants to.
That said, I had another mini adventure in prayer early this morning. I overslept and did not get into my prayer chair until 1:40 am, but as usual, God was on time and apparently waiting for me. As my backside hit the chair cushion I began thinking about the absolute perfection of God, which was a bit odd, since most nights I’m still struggling to wake up enough to pray. It was then that I realized God was having a conversation with me! Sometimes He “speaks” by infusing thoughts, and since I’ve realized this option, I am able to hear from Him more often and more easily, and this morning He was talking about His own Perfection. I capped that word because only He is perfectly Perfect.
As soon as the thoughts began in my head, I was given an analogy. I was suddenly thinking of a chess board, and God told me the game at hand had millions of moves that had to happen before the game was over, and He had made the very first move. Then He said conclusively, “I won the game with the first move!” I realized the game still had to play to the very end before it ended, but God had already won it with the first move…and He won it because He is Perfect.
We live in a completely relative world, and we learn by default to view the world through our imperfect lenses. There is very good, good, sort of good, almost good, etc. We grade evil on the same scale. More importantly, we quite naturally grade our fellow man the same way, as we seek to filter each person we get to know against this scale, before we assign to them levels of trust. We seek to remain “safe” that way, we seek to guard ourselves from getting hurt that way; it’s simple self-preservation, and we do it without even consciously thinking about doing it. We choose to trust best friends more than acquaintances, and as we get older we complicate the filtering process by trying to discern motives. If we do this too often, it can result in our having “trust issues”, and to varying degrees, most of us have that issue.
The problem with this relative-trust issue is that God created each and every human being with a desire to trust someone; we can’t help it because the desire to trust is strong and built-in; we cannot avoid it. Many folks give up trusting humans entirely and instead have dogs, cats, birds, etc., but…they will trust someone or something, because the desire must be satisfied. We are made that way. But why not simply decide to completely trust the perfect God Who makes no mistakes, and is perfectly Perfect? After all, He won the game with the first move He made, and all we have to do is accept it, and Him.
I think we have trouble trusting God because talking about His perfection seems too good to be true, and after all, we naturally judge by earthly standards, verified by our own experiences, if something or someone seems too good to be true – they aren’t. And there it is…we look at Almighty God through our imperfect lenses and cannot believe, because believing in Him appears too risky and we are afraid to do it. In light of that, let’s look at the menu of options:
- Decide to not commit to trusting this Perfect Being for any number of cogent reasons and live out our lives doing the best we can and die like all men.
- Decide to trust this Perfect Being and make a firm commitment to do so at any cost, and thereby grow into Him, and enjoy Him growing into us. **
**(option number two comes with an eternal get-out-of-jail card…option number one does not)
Think about it.
John Miltenberger
Photo: game theory
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