mgpcpastor's blog

Dan Philips of the Pyromaniacs on the real work of finding God’s will, instead of just waiting for him to tell you.

Valerie was preparing some dish for our church pot luck, and needed lime-flavored tortilla chips.
I looked and looked among the chips, the tortilla chips. Nothing. Up, down, back and forth. Nothing. I mean, yes: there were chips of all kinds; there were even tortilla chips of all kinds.
Just no lime-flavored tortilla chips.
But I really wanted to please and serve Valerie, and I tend to be very tenacious in situations like this. So I kept looking, back and forth, up and down, back and forth, up and down.
Then I looked in a totally different area from where all the tortilla chips were — and there it was.
If I didn’t care, I would have quit earlier. If I didn’t have the conviction that Walmart had to carry this kind of chip, I would have quit earlier.
Moral: The effect of these “God whispered in my ear and it worked out” stories is to encourage and validate giving up, and thus to encourage laziness.

After all, if you have the conviction that Scripture doesn’t have every word you need from God, you’ll look a bit… then you’ll quit. If you don’t see it on the shelf after a couple of glances, and your theology tells you that not everything you need is in fact on the shelf, and that there is in fact an entirely different way to get what you’re looking for… done!
What’s more, if you have a choice between close, hard, focused, disciplined study, and maybe the humbling experience of asking for help, on the one hand — and having God just murmur the answer directly into your ear, on the other (thus giving you the unchallengeable G-card) … who’d choose study?