Do I love the gift more than the giver?
Is the question posed today during Sunday school. I’m definitely not a fan of glossing over material that has been picked out whether or not I think its useful.. all of God’s word and teaching is useful and there are always ways to incorporate anything you want into a lesson. Every topic you touch crosses into every other topic with many basic Characteristics of God and doctrine being the basis for other higher level deduced truths.
Anyway it was still an interesting thought from some “supplement” material because I was wondering how I can actually make this fact useful in my own life. As far as I could think I could only come to the conclusion that if you that God for only the things you like him to give you without regard for his will, you don’t just have a problem with misplaced or absent gratitude, you have a totally wrong view of God’s character and how he works. Reading piper’s justification of many “bad” things (eg. death) as being gifts from God really intrigued me and how diving into the little nuances of the sentences yielded these conclusions too.
Still, the question remains.. how does this affect my life? and is it another one of those “LEARN THIS! AND YOU’LL BE THE SUPER ULTIMATE CHRISTIAN YOU WERE PREDESTINED TO BE AUTO-MAGICALLY!” kind of one principle to rule them all statement/axioms/summary-of-the-christian-life things? haha.. Honestly I’m so tired of people sharing the latest thing they learn as if everyone else is completely ignorant or unresponsive to it.. God works in different ways in different times with different people and everyone is at different stages of learning.. so lets not push stuff on each other and play the holy spirit.
I honestly think I might not be fully understanding what are the implications, but I think I’ll take a couple of days to think about the practical implications of consciously loving God more than the blessings he gives and more importantly, actually do it. There are days where I wake up and my first thought is of God and how good he is. I really like that.. I just wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time but I can’t remember if I’ve ever had a terrible day and sit down thinking God is so good too. That, is probably where the rubber meets the road.