New Morning Mercies #176

God is unwilling to be your means to what you call the “good life.” Your relationship with him must be your definition of the good life.

We do tend to turn God into a delivery system. We get excited about what he can do for us and what he can give us. We fall into thinking of prayer as asking God to sign the bottom of our self-composed, self-oriented, individualized wish lists. You know, what would we like God to give us that we can’t give ourselves? We set our hearts on things that we think will make us happy. Perhaps it’s the love of another person and our detailed picture of marital bliss. Perhaps it’s a certain level of affluence and all the things we could experience and enjoy as a result. Maybe its ministry success, influence, and acclaim. Maybe it’s freedom from sickness or suffering. Perhaps it’s just a good week or a nerve-free job interview. Maybe it’s a succulent steak, a good vacation, or children who turn out all right. Now, in a way, none of these things is inherently evil, but there’s something wrong about the whole system.

So many of our ideas of what the “good life” is don’t actually have God in them. We envision the “good” quite apart from the grace of his presence, promises, and provisions. It is the subtle belief that life somehow, some way can be found outside him; that the world is capable of being our savior. And because we fall into believing that life can be found outside him, God isn’t central to our dreams. He’s not in our dreams. The only way he actually touches many of our dreams is that we see him as the delivery mechanism of the good life that we dream of and ask him to produce. He is not life to us; he’s the deliverer of life. He is not the end that we hunger for; he’s but the means to the end we crave.

It’s all a spiritual world turned upside down. In our fantasies of the good life, we are sovereign. We decide what is right, good, important, and valuable. We define what life is. We control the agenda and set the timetable. The menu of the good life is written by us. It has us at the center. It’s God employed by us to do our bidding, and if he does, we will thank him and proclaim his goodness. It is self-centered religiosity that bears little resemblance to the faith of the Bible. Yet, it is so easy to set yourself up as sovereign. It’s so tempting to think that you know what’s best for you. It’s so natural to shop horizontally for what you will only ever find vertically and to question why God failed to deliver.

Psalm 103 says that God “satisfies you with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (v. 5). Those “good things” come in a person, and his name is Jesus. Yes, it is true—Jesus is the “good life” that you need, no matter what is on your wish list.

For further study and encouragement: John 10:1–18