Mistaking the Gifts for the Giver

Have you ever believed something about God for most of your life, just to find out the opposite is true?  This has happened to me many times.  Sometimes “unlearning” the old things we believe can be more difficult than learning new things.

I could give a number of examples here, but this is the most recent misconception I’m trying to put in perspective:  For most of my life, I have believed that in order to be close to God or to mature as a Christian, it was up to me.  I know that I cannot earn God’s love, and salvation comes by grace through faith and not by works, but my heart and my head are not always in sync.  I have spent a lot of time behaving as if I have to “convince” God, as if I have to “earn” His presence.  For many years I treated God as a formula . . . if I just do “X” and then “Y”, then God will respond with “Z”.  Funny, I think God understands this sort of immaturity and He indulges it for a while (the way we let our kids win games sometimes to help them learn and encourage them), but eventually, He stops, and that’s when our faith is tested.  When God is no longer predictable, when I lose control and He demands dependence, do I really trust Him?

There was a period of my life when God was hammering home to me that He is not a formula and will not be controlled or manipulated.  I got past that misconception only to be confronted with many new ones.  It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion —  I guess I will be peeling back layers for the rest of my life, but that’s what makes being a Christian an adventure.

It’s easy to understand why we think we must “work” for God’s presence and guidance in our lives because God gives us free will and wants us to open our hearts and minds to Him – He will not force His way into our lives.  The gospel is active:  ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be open, go and make disciples of all nations, draw near to me, etc.  From some of the stories Jesus told (Matthew 25:14-30 in particular), it is obvious that God doesn’t appreciate laziness and expects us to be faithful with what He has given us.  Even when Jesus promises rest for our souls, He still says, “Come to me” (Matthew 11:28).

God requires both our dependence and our effort . . . it can be very confusing. With all of that said, it is easy to see why much of my Christian life has been about “striving.”

Richard Rohr was the first to blow this up for me, when I read the following (in his book Falling Upward): “Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven.  You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for.  So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise.  What an enigma!  Self-help courses of any type . . . will help you only if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.  God comes to you disguised as life. . . “  In another chapter he writes about growth and transformation:  “ . . . it is not by our own willpower or moral perfection.  It will be nothing like we might have imagined beforehand, and we can’t engineer it by ourselves.  It is done unto us.”

Suddenly, I felt a little off balance.  It was kind of depressing to this control freak that my spiritual growth wasn’t really up to me.  But it was also freeing to know that it’s not up to me.  I have to let God be God.

I was forced to evaluate my motivation.  Do I pray, and read the Bible, and serve people out of an overflow of love and appreciation and because I want to know Him more?  Is it because I feel guilty and need to check this off my spiritual to-do list so I can consider myself (or so that other people will consider me) a good Christian?  Am I doing this because I am somehow trying to manipulate God to gain a certain outcome?

My pastor put it this way once, “Do you love the giver or do you love the gifts?”  Sometimes I think all our striving is because we want God’s blessings and not because we want God.

I remember when Casey was a teenager and we were going through some tough times.  I was on my knees before the Lord asking Him to help her learn new and healthy coping skills and to take her anxiety away.  But things kept getting worse, and I was getting a little ticked off at God.  I felt like I was doing everything I was supposed to do, I was working my tail off to show Him how important this was to me (as if it wasn’t already important to Him), and He was allowing things to get worse.  As I was complaining to my Mom on the phone about how God wasn’t answering prayers, this sudden and subtle awareness came over me that God there all along.  Inside, I could hear Him say, “I am answering your prayers.  How do you expect your daughter to overcome anxiety and learn how to navigate life if she does not experience conflict?  It’s your job to use these circumstances to comfort and teach and guide her.”  I felt ashamed that I had questioned God, and that I somehow thought my groveling before Him would magically create a world with no conflict.  I wasn’t trusting the giver; I was only looking for the gifts I wanted from Him.  Through the years I have been humbled by His patience with me.

I know God must laugh as my foolishness sometimes.  I must sound like one of those irritating self-absorbed people who try to pretend they care what you think:  “Okay, God, enough about ME.  Let’s talk about YOU.  What do you think of ME?”

But this is where it gets a little tricky because I do think God expects us to work at things.  As my Dad used to say, God is not just going to “dump” the fruit of the Spirit on you.  It’s a process of growth that takes time, but it’s God’s timing and not ours and we have to be willing participants.  The book of James (2:20) says bluntly, “Faith without works is dead.”  “God will match our effort, but he will never do our work for us.  That would be an invasion of our boundaries.”  “The sin God rebukes is not trying and failing, but failing to try. “ (from Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend).

In many ways, I’m still learning the give and take that God requires.  I get distracted with my own agenda (spiritually and otherwise) instead of seeking to “be” with Him and do what He has asked me to do, because I love Him and not because I expect something from Him.  I have never been a prayer warrior like my Mom (she set the bar higher than I could ever reach), but I am slowly learning how to relax in His presence and yield to Him.  He has been patient with me through the years that I have done more talking than listening.

As with almost everything in life, there is always a tension of opposites and the answers are rarely found in extremes.  Good intentions without effort will not get you very far.  And effort alone makes us too much like the Pharisees who got hung up on following the rules instead of allowing the love and grace of God to rule their hearts.  But if our effort is driven by love, and we are compelled to action because of who God is and not who we are, then we come closer to experiencing real relationship.  Reminds me of those amazing Casting Crown lyrics (from the song “Who Am I”): “Not because of who I am, but because of what you’ve done.  Not because of what I’ve done, but because of who you are.”

My walk with the Lord happens on His terms and in His timing, but I still have to do my part.  I think this quote from Boundaries sums it up beautifully:  “If we are trying to do his work for him, we will fail.   If we are wishing for him to do our work for us, he will refuse.  But if we do our work, and God does his, we will find strength in a real relationship with our Creator.”

So I’m going to keep putting one foot in front of the other, not because I am striving to earn His presence but because I want to know Him more and because “My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.”  And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.” (Psalm 27:8)” He extends the invitation but we still have to join Him.  When we are striving in our own power, somehow we can’t see that God is already right there in the midst of the mess of life.  But when we are seeking, it is because we are aware that we desperately need the power of His transforming love, and suddenly we can see Him . . . in places, in moments, in circumstances that we could not have imagined.  “God comes to you disguised as life.”

Are we seeking the Giver, or striving for His gifts?

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Matthew 6:33 (NIV)

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