Between God And Us

Between God and Us

When trouble strikes, you lose heart. You are terrified when it touches you. Job 4:5

JOB WAS DESPONDENT OVER HIS LOSSES and cursed the day he was born. He had tried to be a man of integrity and live in faith, but his righteousness had apparently failed. He began comparing those who lived uprightly with those who lived recklessly, and the rewards and consequences that came, but he was beginning to notice that patterns don’t always hold true. And after much anguish, his friend’s response hit Job where he was most vulnerable: his rapidly eroding hope.

Without realizing it, we often base our prayers of faith on something other than faith—expectations that God will reward our upright lives with good things. Over time, however, we begin noticing that the pattern doesn’t always hold. So we adopt a new pattern: prayers accompanied by nagging little thoughts of fine print and conditions, fears that every promise comes with some divine legalese or caveat somewhere else in Scripture that undermines its full effect. And our old thought patterns can find plenty of evidence for those subversive fears. Bad things really do happen to good people. People with great faith really do have diseases that don’t get healed, children who struggle, financial setbacks, and broken relationships. All the praying in the world didn’t fix things for them, did it? The more we look at other people’s evidence, the more our faith fades.

Kingdom thinking doesn’t look at other people’s evidence that way. It allows our faith to be stirred up by their victories, but it doesn’t buy into negative examples. It is always biased toward God’s goodness, faithfulness, and hope. We don’t live in denial of a fallen, broken world, but we focus on the upward call of Kingdom fulfillment—the story God is writing in our lives according to our faith. We can’t afford to read his promises through the lens of disappointments, whether ours or others’. We have to read them through the lens of his character. When we do, we choose hope and joy, not fear. We leave disappointment behind and celebrate whatever he is doing for us, in us, and through us. We pray in faith with eyes only on his purposes for our lives.

His love in times past forbids me to think He’ll leave me at last in trouble to sink.