Summer
1993
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 the Lord is our mistaken use of
Scripture to gain 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 certainly 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 would meet him. When the Lord wanted to heal
him in an unorthodox manner he "was wroth, and went away,
and said, Behold, I though, 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 settle there in self-complacency,
with the mistaken belief that God will 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 that 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.