The End of Entitlement

Paul knew that he was a sinner, saved by grace and loved by the Lord. In fact, so is everyone who believes in the Lord Jesus. We don’t get what we deserve because what we deserve is everlasting punishment for our sins. God, in His great love, has rescued us from what was rightfully due to us.

When God awakens us spiritually, we receive a deeper appreciation for His truth, for the way He sees things, for the way things truly are. His Spirit helps us grasp eternal realities. One foundational truth is that everything we receive is a gift of God’s grace. Each gift, each day on earth and every single breath is a gift from God. We have done nothing to earn these things. But in His great love Father God is full of goodwill to us and gives us blessing upon blessing.

There can be times in our lives when we feel disappointed with God, we might even feel let down by Him. Circumstances might be difficult, challenging or downright awful. Sometimes our prayers are not being answered in the way we want. As a result we can feel a bit left alone and, in our struggle, we can get angry with God.

As a healing ministry, which helps people connect in deep ways with the Lord, we always encourage people to express their true feelings, and not to hide their frustrations from Him. He already sees what’s in our hearts and He wants us to have real relationship with Him, which means we need to be real with Him. This raw honesty is a real key to genuine relationship with God.

But there is another key, without which honesty does nothing for us. This key is humility. We need to be honest and real, but we also need to be humble. We must take care in our struggles not to fall into the trap of being offended at God. We might start to harbour resentment and feel hard done by. In our hearts we might start to feel that God did not give us what we deserve. We can feel that He has not treated us right.

Remember Job. He could not understand what God had done. But in the end Job acknowledged the Lord’s wisdom and as well as his own limitations. Job became a most blessed man in the end.

Humility teaches us that, as human beings, we have limited understanding and that, when we disagree with God, we are the ones in the wrong. There is no harm in expressing our frustrations (in fact it may do us a lot of good!) but in the end, our bottom line needs to be that God knows better than we do. We may not always have received the blessings we asked for, and we may feel that we ‘deserved more’. But when we start to feel like that we should remember that all we truly deserved was the just punishment for our sinfulness. And Jesus took that punishment for us so we might receive the greatest blessing of all, eternity in His Presence.

Prayer: Father God, there may be many things in my life that I don’t understand, and things which I wish had been different. Please help me so these things don’t become stones in my heart which cause me to stumble. I thank You for ALL that You have given me, especially for Jesus taking the punishment for my sins. I thank You for Your gift to me of eternal life. In Jesus’ name, Amen.