In our dining room, we have our regular table, which is wooden and has six chairs. We also have a smaller, plastic table made for kids, with four little, yellow plastic chairs. One particular evening, I allowed the kids to eat their supper at the little table.
At one point, Lindsey got up and went to the kitchen. She brought a bottle of BBQ sauce and a bottle of ketchup back to the table. “You already have ranch dressing,” I said, taking the two bottles and putting them back in the fridge.
Lindsey began to cry. “But I want ketchup,” she said.
“All right,” I decided. “You may get the ketchup out, but only the ketchup.”
Lindsey stopped crying and walked out to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door and stood looking at the bottles and jars on the shelves.
“I changed my mind. Not ketchup,” she said. “Whatever I get, you say ‘yes’.”
We want the same thing from God, don’t we? We want His ‘yes’ to anything we come up with. We want to be able to deliver a request and know that He will rubber-stamp it. Not content with what He’s offered, we want something more, and we want to be the ones who determine what that something more will be.
Consider how you react when God doesn’t grant your requests. Do you become angry? Irritated? Resentful? Do you trust that God, in His superior wisdom, is denying your request to further His own good purposes, or do you secretly feel you’ve been cheated out of something good?
I think we’ve all been there.
We’ve all asked God for things we fully expected to receive, or perhaps desperately hoped we would receive. Then, when we didn’t get them, we felt angry or betrayed.
These emotions reveal our belief that God did not do what He was supposed to do regarding us.
But God is not some genie who is obligated to grant all of our requests as long as we put them in the right format. He’s not some passive celestial figure who exists for the sole purpose of granting us things we can’t secure for ourselves.
No, He is the Almighty Creator of the universe, and He knows far better than we do which requests can be granted, and which must be denied. You may be certain of this: God doesn’t deny requests lightly. If He denies what you’ve asked for, He has a reason why it must be so.
It’s okay to be disappointed that we didn’t get what we’ve asked for. It’s even okay to grieve over His denial of our requests at times. But to get an idea in our minds of what God should do, and then become angry when He doesn’t perform?
That’s sin.
“Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham asks as He is pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah.
And indeed, He will.
We could learn a lot from Abraham’s prayer. His prayer was no monologue delivered heavenward, a list of demands couched as requests. He approached God humbly, making his request, clearly acknowledging that God could grant it but didn’t have to.
How do you and I approach God? Do we come to Him pridefully, expecting that He should say yes to whatever we ask? Or do we come respectfully, making our desires known but being willing to accept any answer from His hand?
May our attitudes be not “whatever I ask, You say yes” but “whatever You grant, I say yes”.
James 4:10—Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.