One of the things that came out of our four day study of Jonah was that sometimes we as Christians seems to treat God like a well trained pet that does tricks for us. We have ready recepies of how to get God to do certain things in our lives.
Whereas non Christians tend to be like the sailors and the king in the book of Jonah saying, maybe God will save us and who knows God might change His mind.
When we tell God what we expect Him to do in a certain situation we box God in and sometimes we are not even open to God to respond in a different way than we have imagined. In a way we stop God from being awesome and leave Him at predictable.
We need to remember the words of the Narnians…
He is not a tame Lion!
God is an awesome God. He IS creative and we should never be fooled to think that He will react or act in a way that we can device for He is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to His power that is at work within us (Eph 3:20 ). We need to expect the unexpected and let God be God.
While we can know what God is like, and what he ultimately wants we can never be sure of how or when he will do it. We need to be cautiously hopeful, so we can rejoice when God comes through for us!
[…] prayer really captures the tentative theology of hope that I blogged about earlier. Starting from nowhere, assuming nothing, hoping that God is please […]