God doesn’t work by magic, but the surprises are many

It’s taken me a long time over my past seventeen years as a serious Christian (15 years in ministry) to dispel the idea that God is going to bless me around the corner because of some secret wish.

We all expect God to come through for us in some significant way — “God, if I do this, you’ll do that.”

Many of our prayers can start out this way, or we can even pray thinking that if we pray, we’ll get our way.  God will answer THAT prayer.  But God doesn’t work that way.

I think we pray expecting our prayer to be answered because deep within us we strongly desire control over our lives.  And who could blame us?

When we believe in God, we may have nurtured a belief deep down that we’re not even aware of, that if God is benevolent, that God will be benevolent with me!

We can begin to believe that bad things won’t happen to me, because, quite frankly, God is for me, and if God is for me and focused on blessing me, I’m beyond harm.  This is actually a harmful attitude.

Think of the bargains we make with God.  If we’re remotely honest.  We all have deep wishes we desperately want satisfied.  We can very easily fall into the practice of saying to God, very unconsciously, “Lord, if I’m a good Christian, I know you’ll do such-and-such for me.”

But God doesn’t work like that.  Even if we’ve done everything right, and attended to every detail, there is no guarantee with God that 5 + 5 = 10.  God can’t be bargained with.

I can’t say to God, “I’ll study and get the degree and then you get me that great job...”  There’s no guarantee that even with great grades and grade point average that we’ll get the opportunity we set our hopes on for years.  The truth is there’s a possibility I may never get a job in that field I invested 5-10 years of studies in.  Is that fair?  No, it doesn’t seem that way.  But life also isn’t limited to this one missed golden opportunity.  There are others.

God isn’t transactional.  But God is transformational.  God works by surprises that we never expected.  God blesses us in ways that are too high for us to conceive (Isaiah 55:8-9).

I find that if I wind the clock back five years, I would hardly believe looking forward that I’d be doing some of the things I’m doing.  God also connects us with people and situations that seem bizarrely coincidental — God-incidences I call them.

We must learn to root out of our psyches all the bargains we make with God — “If I do THIS, I know you’ll do THAT, God.”  It’s a recipe for disappointment at best, and at worst, in the long run, it’s a plan for despair.

One of the most empowering things we can do in our faith is to identify all the conditions we place on God, and quickly, thoroughly and often repent of them.  They keep coming up because our hearts are geared to cling to idols.

The fewer the unconscious bargains we make with God — those ‘agreements’ we strike that, in reality of things, will never come to pass — the more content we will be simply to serve God with what we have and who we are.

When we free ourselves of the pressure to manipulate God for our own ends, we’re freer to look for the surprise blessings that God is doing all the time.

We may not be able to successfully bargain with God, but if we’re diligent in our faith, we will soon find that God blesses us in better, more abundant ways than we could have even imagined.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash