Fall 1981
Limiting God
Walter Beuttler

One of our difficulties in receiving things from the Lord is that we often attempt to come to Him with our own program and timetable. But it is impossible to limit the seeking of God to a fixed pattern. What makes things still more difficult both for ourselves and for God is our mistaken use of Scripture to prove our point.

For instance, we might think that if we fast for four days as Cornelius did, we too shall be favored with the appearance of an angel; or because Daniel mourned twenty-one days and ate no pleasant food until he received an answer, we shall accomplish spectacular results by means of a semi-fast for twenty-one days.

Merely copying patterns is wrong. The Lord uses Scripture to guide us in particular cases. That is another matter. But to arbitrarily select such as our own pattern will not work, for the underlying condition of faith is missing and the motivation is not the same.

There is also the matter of God’s purposes to be considered, which is contingent upon our individuality. As is said in John 21:22, “. . . what is that to thee, follow thou me.”

This means a personal walk by means of personal guidance, by a personal God. Naaman the leper had a preconceived plan as to how God was going to meet him. When God wanted to heal him in an unorthodox manner he “was wroth and went away and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper” (II kings 5:11). Naaman would have remained a leper had he not accepted God’s own method, however humiliating it was and however strange it must have seemed to him.

Just as soon as we think we have found the groove in the way God works and begin to settle there, in self-complacency, in the mistaken belief that God is going to continue the same thing in the same way, we shall discover that this is not His groove, but our rut. Unless we are ready to follow Him along other paths, discovering His mercies are new every morning, we might become buried in this rut.

It is delightful to learn the ways of the Lord, but our greatest delight is to learn that His ways are past finding out, “O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God . . .” (Romans 11:33).