God Doesn't Owe Us Anything

Over these many years, I have been thoughtful of the fact that God doesn’t need me. Truly this has been a humbling and healthy perspective to hold. In my 40 years of pastoral ministry, I have witnessed far too many individuals who thought God needed them. They had great beginnings but were blinded by success, and fell prey to the idea that God owed them something. The love of money and marital infidelity led to broken families, death, financial ruin and destruction. 

Pride and self-adulation will ultimately produce a waste place in your life. True repentance before God is the only thing that will transform the waste places of your past. Those who face genuine sorrow for their actions and seek God’s forgiveness experience restoration. This restoration is costly on the part of God, and we must receive it with humility.

We are all tempted to yield to our desires and set aside what we know to be right. 

When being enticed, we tell our conscious to shut up. What assists me when I am tempted to have my way, is to visualize the manure pile we had on the farm. The stench of it in the summer months can take your breath away. Yielding to our cravings produces mounds of manure.

What did we do with these mounds on the farm? We let them season until spring and then spread them on our garden and fields, resulting in a wonderful crop production. In like manner, when God restores us, He takes these mounds in our past and spreads them over our waste place. The result is transformation, with new growth and fruitfulness formed in us.

While God doesn’t owe us anything, He has given us all things in Christ.

~ Pastor Mike

We cleaned out the barns every day and set aside the straw mixed with manure from our cows, adding it to the mound under the sun until it seasoned. It would rest there until after winter, when we used it for our spring planting.