The Jen Young

Thanks for joining me for the FIRST post on the new site!

The top 2 places that God talks to me are in the car and in the shower.  (Incidentally, those are also the top 2 places where I am a totally awesome singer.  Legendary, really, and lucky for me there are no witness to dispute this claim!)

One of the things God was talking to me about in the shower recently is how the world is slow to give the credit but so quick to place the “blame” on God, especially for things He didn’t do.  It’s an easy out to just to throw God under the cosmic bus when things get ugly.  God could have stopped the holocaust if He wanted to. The homecoming queen was killed by a drunk driver on prom night because ‘God needed another angel in heaven.’  America suffered the attack on 9/11 because our country had strayed from God. We’ve all seen the train of His robe dragging from underneath one of those buses, and it doesn’t take a spiritual giant to see that these are simply the desperate attempts of a hurting world to make sense of something horrific.  We can have some compassion and let it slide in these cases, because the middle of a painful disaster is really not the time to set an unbeliever straight on their theology.  No problem, I get that.

But, the world and even our young Christians aren’t the only ones letting God take the fall when something bad happens.  Of course we like to dress it up with scriptures and try to make it sound all spiritual, but the church can be as quick to slander God as anyone without even realizing we’re doing it.   It’s the subtle deceptions that will undermine the very foundations of our faith if we let them run unchecked.

Here’s one for you:  ”God allowed me to have [insert sickness or disease here] so that I would slow down, and learn to be humble and let other people help me.”   You can spin this one a lot of different ways, but the gist is always the same:  God allowed someone’s sickness in order to have them to learn a certain lesson.

Sounds really holy and spiritual, right?  It even gives God glory for the lesson learned and now being a better person for the experience, right?  The problem with this thinking is that it isn’t biblical, and it doesn’t agree with the nature of God.

There’s a difference between God causing “all things to work together” for your good (Rom 8:28), and God being the cause of something bad that ultimately produced some good.  There’s a difference between God speaking a lesson through an illness, and God making you sick to teach you the lesson.  Many times over in scripture we see where a situation was intended to cause harm, but God worked something good out the bad situation. (Gen 50:20 for example)  But, that doesn’t mean God caused the bad situation in order to get the good.

The problem with believing God will allow or cause sickness in order that we learn a lesson is that we can never fully believe in God’s healing at the same time.  If God might want you sick for some reason, then praying for healing would be going against God’s will, wouldn’t it?  The truth of the Word is that God is good, and God is the Healer.  Not once in the Bible did God make someone sick to teach them a lesson.  Jesus healed every person that came to him, without exception.    Mark 16:18 says “we will lay hands on the sick and they will recover.”  It doesn’t say “and they will recover, unless God made them sick for a good reason.”

If we’re going to believe that God is who He said He is, then we have to settle in our minds that sickness is not from God.  God is the Healer. Always.

Here’s another one that the Holy Spirit corrected me on recently:  ”Those who hope in the Lord will not be disappointed” (Is 49:23)  There have been deep things of my heart that I put my hope and trust in the Lord for, and I still ended up wildly disappointed in the end.  And what did I say?  God, I trusted in You, and You didn’t come through. You know what God ever so kindly told me?  If you’re disappointed, then your hope wasn’t really in Me after all.  Your hope was in something else. In my pain I was so quick to blame God that I never considered that I was the one who was wrong.  I threw God under the bus when really I was the one who set up an idol and was trusting in someone else to fulfill God’s promise.

If we’re going to believe that God is who He said He is, then we have to settle in our minds that God does not let us down.  God is faithful.  Always.

God doesn’t lie.  God doesn’t make promises and not keep them. (Num 23:19)  Settle in your heart and mind once and for all that God is good.  This is the key to believing Him for anything else He has promised us.

How about you?  Have you ever thrown God under the bus for something?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 4:20 am and is filed under Spiritual Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.