Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
God does not owe us anything.
This might seem like an obvious truth, but it is one that many of us have had trouble accepting in our own lives. In our minds we may know that He is not in any way a debtor to us. It is our hearts that are more often the problem.
We live in a world of reciprocity; a place in which it is regularly assumed that clichés like “one good turn deserves another” and “if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” are really are inviolable laws . Human beings do little for others of their own kind that is not predicated on this principle. It is rare to find a truly altruistic person, someone who gives for the sheer joy of giving expecting nothing tangible in return. I suspect the majority of us live out most of our daily interactions with others with the ingrained, unconscious assumption that we give in order to get. This is just the way it is in a fallen world where scarcity determines value and enforces the reality of indebtedness between men. People owe us, we owe them.
Because of the pervasiveness of this aspect of our present existence it is difficult not to at least unconsciously try to apply the Rule of Reciprocity to our relationship with God. Perhaps some blessed souls have been so powerfully impressed with their own depravity apart from Christ, and simultaneously with His supremely loving solution to it, that they never could feel God owes them anything. Many of us, though, cannot honestly say that we have reached that place yet. The truth is we sometimes feel “shortchanged”, as it were, by Him. We have what seem to be overwhelming needs that are not getting met when and/or how we want them to be and we end up blaming the one Person we assume could and should do something about it.
The problem here is that our Lord is, by His very nature, not beholden to us in anyway whatsoever. He does not need anything we can give Him because He is utterly limitless and thus the only truly self-sufficient Being in the Universe. Scarcity does not exist in the economy of God. Moreover God has no intention of furthering our sinful self-centeredness by giving into our absurd demands towards Him. It may well be that Christians must, by necessity, operate within the constraints of a world where we do not get something for nothing. A Christian-run business, for example, expects payment for its services just as any secular business does. But that necessity is a concession to our having to live in this world. It is in no way applicable to our relationship with our Maker.
No matter how badly we want something, whatever the reason may be, that something is never “owed” to us by God. On the contrary, we owe Him for everything we are and possess. Both our natural and spiritual lives are ours only through the sheer gift of God. There are few more important heart lessons we need to grasp than this one. If we do not learn to both accept and appreciate this eternal truth we condemn ourselves to a life of frustration and bitterness, a life that, as children of God, we need not experience. God actually longs to give us all of what we need and even some of what we want, but He will never do so on our terms.
In the light of this eternal fact the best thing we can do is to choose to consciously reject our wrongful sense of entitlement. Then we can humbly ask our good Father for the things we desire and know that He will wisely and lovingly provide them for us, if it is to our benefit for Him do so, in His perfect time and way.