I’ve arrived.
I know God and God knows me. I pray everyday, read the scriptures and go to church every Sunday…I even go to bible class. I’m nice to the people around me. I try my best to do what’s right and forgive the people that hurt me. I even serve God by sharing about Him to others.
I deserve to receive anything that I ask God for.
Now those people over there? They don’t deserve what I deserve…because I’m doing what’s “right” and they’re not.
Yikes. Did you see how ridiculous that just sounded? It gave me chills just to write that!
Although, I’ve never written or said that out loud, I’ve said it in my heart, more times than one. I’ve looked at the lives of other people and sized them up in my mind deciding if they deserve what they have or not.
I’ve taken an evaluation of my life and compared it to theirs, making a mental list of how much “wrong I’ve done” in comparison to what they’ve done . I sulk in my frustrations trying to figure out how in the world they have the things that they have when I’ve been “doing right” and still haven’t received what I have been praying for…because, I deserve it…right?
This is the mistake that I’ve admittedly made and still struggle with making. I find myself thinking because I’ve been a Christian for so many years and God has taken me through a few things and I’ve grown a little, that I deserve more.
I'm subconsciously saying in my heart,
“I know enough, I’ve been obedient enough. God should be pleased with me. Now WHERE is my blessing?”
That sounds so bad! But the scary part is, sometimes I actually believe it. (I am so sorry, Lord)
As humans, our logic is so "cause and effect". In our minds we tend to believe, “if I do this, I should get this” or “if I don’t do that, I don’t deserve that.”
But that is not how God functions. We don’t serve a “tit for tat” God. God’s love is so far and wide, it truly exceeds our comprehension. He doesn’t look at our actions, He looks at our heart and our faith. If God only blessed us solely off of merit, we would all be out here working tirelessly trying to earn blessings from Him.
But the thing is, God’s love can not be earned. How, when and who He chooses to bless and give certain things to is based on His choosing and His purposes.
I have to constantly remind myself that, I don’t deserve anything from God. I didn’t deserve for Him to send His son Jesus, to die for me. That was God’s love.
I don’t deserve for God to even wake me up in the morning. That is God’s love.
The sin, that I’ve committed just on today is enough for God to strike me dead. I don’t deserve any of His blessings. But God is gracious, and forgiving, and merciful. The fact that He continues to forgive sins that I’ve committed over and over and then, on top of all of that, still love me enough to provide my everyday needs is a blessing in itself.
Time to stop being greedy. Time to stop thinking so highly of myself, time to stop believing the lie of entitlement. Everything I have and everything I am is because of God’s grace - something I haven’t earned and can’t even measure.
Love.
"I don’t even trust my own judgment on this point. My conscience is clear, but that doesn’t prove I’m right. It is the Lord himself who will examine me and decide." - 1 Corinthians 4:3b-4
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Inspiration for this post: So last night I was up late watching YouTube videos. I ran across a video of a young lady, Alicia, who I happen to follow on Instagram. Toward the end of her video she talked about her renewed faith and how God used something horrible that happened to her to turn her life around. She made a comment at the very end of the video about her struggle with feeling self righteous and deserving of God’s blessings and I was totally convicted. That one comment made me think about how I, as well as so many others tend to fall into the entitlement trap.
