Pastor's Corner by Pastor David M. Jahn

God is faithful. Not just sort of faithful or mostly faithful or almost always faithful. God is faithful 100% of the time.

This doesn’t mean that God takes our prayer requests and changes our circumstances so that things go the way we want them to go. It doesn’t mean that the people we care about will be saved from the suffering that seems to be an inevitable part of this life.

When God doesn’t “answer our prayer” (at least in any way that we can recognize) it doesn’t mean that God is unfaithful or unreliable. The fact that we were unsuccessful in guessing the will of God (in the complex web of circumstances surrounding the thing for which we were praying) has nothing to do with God’s faithfulness.

God is faithful. I think the problem lies with us. Our understanding of God is superficial. Our understanding of our relationship with God is often shallow and self-centered. Our understanding of how God works in the world and what God is doing in our lives is so limited that there aren’t words to describe its smallness.

It’s not that God hasn’t been trying to bring us up to speed. Since we human beings have been aware of our existence, God has been trying. Through prophets, visionaries, teachers, and, most powerfully, through God’s Son, God has been trying to tell us that this whole creation is moving toward a goal. That goal, spoken through Jesus, is that the whole creation and everyone in it would have life in all of its fullness.

For reasons that are difficult to understand, God has chosen to fulfill much of that goal on this tiny planet through the human race. God has chosen to love, to reach out, and to make the total transformation of our hearts and minds available to us so that, if we choose to do so, we can be God’s agents of change. We can be the ones who bring the living, loving, shining faithfulness of God to the creation and to people in every circumstance.

Why is there so much suffering in the world? Not because God is unfaithful. It’s because we, God’s people, have chosen to be unfaithful. God has already provided every spiritual and material resource we need to alleviate the hunger, poverty, loneliness, and misery in every life that is willing to be lifted up. We, unfortunately, have decided to use what God has given us for another plan, another set of priorities.

I can’t imagine how it sounds to God when we bombard heaven with prayer requests, asking God to intervene, while we hold the God-given resources to change the world in our hands. And then, with the resources that might have changed the lives of those we are praying for still held tightly in our grasp, we complain about God’s unwillingness to act.

If Jesus were to meet one of us troubled and wealthy (by the world’s standards) Americans, and we were to ask him, “What is it that I can do, Lord, that would really please you?” I think he might say, “Trust everything you have and everything you are to me. Let me direct you to use them for God’s priorities. And then come, follow me…all the time…every hour and every minute of your life.”

If every believer in Jesus were to take him up on this call, I don’t think many would question God’s faithfulness anymore.

Serving with you,