19 March - The gift of sin

Readings:
Phil 3:12-21
Phil 4

Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.

Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.

Then you will experience God's peace, which

exceeds anything we can understand.

His peace will guard your hearts and minds

as you live in Christ Jesus. (4:6-7, NLT)

This bit of scripture describes what God wants for us when we find ourselves in trying times, yet more often than not it just doesn't work like that. When we pray about the stuff we worry about, we only want to embrace the peace of God once the worrisome issue is resolved. Though a completely rational and natural response, this is to completely miss to point. 

As far as I can tell, we are not God's hobby. Creation is not a doodle he made while he was on the phone. God made us purposefully and for relationship, and the reason he must have done it (if I may be presumptuous enough to venture into such conjectures), is because he wants to relate. God is love; he wants someones to love, and (if we can project our image back onto him), he wants to be loved. 

For some befuddling reason, beside being creatures who love, God wants us to also be creatures who have faith. I don't get it. We need to live by faith in order to prepare for an eternity in which we will need no faith! Angels don't have faith because they don't need any - they see things how they are. We however have to peer through murky glass, and we are perplexed. People who theologise the existence of evil into a neat, manageable conceptual package has simply not seen enough of it. Being a Christian though means that we accept that whatever we encounter in life on earth - whether good or bad - has been allowed in order to facilitate that primary goal. We need faith. We must learn to love and trust the God we don't see and don't really understand. 

When life becomes really difficult we are so quick to conclude that where we find ourselves must be against or outside God's will. In Acts 17 however we read that God puts people in very specific, unique circumstances "in the hope that they might grope for him" (verse 17 - NKJV). I always find this such a humbling scripture. God is hoping that we will reach out, will "grope" for him. He wants to come through for us. He wants to rescue us. He wants to give us more and more experiences to build our faith on. 

There is all this stuff we worry about. Somehow God allowed that stuff to be there. When we pray about it, our peace should come from the knowledge that God heard us. The request lies with him now. That aught to be enough.