Winner's Excogitations

Over the last few months, I began noticing a problem that had always been around but had escaped my attention probably because I was amongst those creating and perpetuating the problem. Listening to an Andy Mineo song recently can’t remember which exactly right now, finally gave words to the problem which I had hitherto been unable to articulate. The words he (Andy) used can be distilled into this statement, “Majority of Christians have taken to making God a crutch”.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a crutch as “something that a person uses too much for help or support”. I don’t want to be misunderstood so let me emphatically state that I am all for total reliance on God, Jesus Christ himself said that without me you can do nothing. The issue I am calling attention to via this article is about a human tendency to laziness and shirking of responsibility, we have even taken this attitude into our relationship with God. In other words, we have taken to foisting responsibilities on God that are entirely ours.

Let me give a few examples of this:

1. Prayer: I heard someone praying using the words, “Lord, pray for your child”. To say the least, I was infuriated. It is God’s purview to answer prayer and it is ours to ask. But asking has gotten so “hard” that we have also told God to ask himself for our needs. Now we are too lazy to even bother asking God for what we need that we just tell God to ask himself.

2. Money (Finances): Since the riches of Christ have been promised to believers, we think we can fold our arms and wait for God to take the result of a hardworking unbelievers’efforts, and deliver them straight to our doorsteps. Or we believe that without any fiscal responsibility on our part, its Gods duty to prevent our resources running out.

3. Health: I was going home from work one day and I heard the advert for a particular health product whose job apparently was to rid our body of the poisonous substances we ingest under the guise of food. What immediately occurred to me was, instead of giving people drugs to remove the “poisons” why don’t you tell them not to eat the wrong food in the first place! Then on second thought I realized that we rather eat the poison and then take drugs that may expunge them. We do the same with God, we eat whatever junk we desire and then saddle God with the task of keeping us healthy. We avoid exercise like the plague and then ask God with tears to give us six-pack abs.

4. Politics: We lament our the pitiable state of our country and spend hours praying for a turn around for the country, yet we fail to heed the call of God to go into the political system that needs a touch of godly values and principles.

These are just a few examples of ideological cancer that betides us, a cancer which says that “if God is to do something, then he’ll do it whether or not we do our part”. I read Isaiah 26 verse 12 which says “… all that we have accomplished, you have done for us.” and this set me thinking, if the Israelites were the ones who accomplished the things, then how was it God who did it? This may seem like a weird statement, but I think it is the correct Christian outlook. For everything God will do, there are parts we must play and if we don’t do ours, don’t expect God to do his.

Have a great day.