My God the Prize Machine

9.04.09

Matthew 19:21-22

"Jesus answered, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.' When the young man heard this, he went away sad..."


For my ninth birthday I asked my parents to buy me a mountain bike. At the time they were the hottest thing out there, and I wanted to make sure that I had one. For weeks I scoured the newspaper adds for pictures of mountain bikes and I spent hours upon hours circling bikes in the Toys R' Us catalog. A few weeks before my actual birthday I found the bike that could not be topped. I circled it four times, cut it out of the catalog and left in plain sight for my parents to find. I was so excited because I thought I had picked the perfect bike. The color was perfect the hand brakes were awesome. It was exactly what I had always dreamed a mountain bike could be, and I made sure my parents knew exactly what I wanted.

The weeks passed and my birthday arrived and I watched as my father pulled into the driveway with the trunk of his car propped open and a tire sticking out. I ran out of the house and was on my father like white on rice. I was absolutely beaming with excitement. I was hopping up and down like a rabbit on Red Bull.

My father opened up his trunk and slowly pulled the bike from the trunk of his car and I remember the thoughts in my head went from pure excitement to utter disappointment. The bike they had gotten me was not the one I had asked for and circled from the catalog. In fact it was a little too big for me and I remember my parents saying that they bought it big because they wanted me to be able to use it as I grew. I had asked for a blue bike and this one was gray and green. The fact of the matter is that this bike was nicer than the one I had asked for, but because I was nine and this wasn't what I had asked for, I got upset and relunctantly said thank you and rode it over to my friends house in silent protest.

What I had failed to recognize was that my parents had given me something nicer than I had asked for and the fact of the matter is that I didn't even deserve what I had gotten because I had acted like a brat when I did not get what I wanted. I pouted and sulked for days, and at points even got angry at my parents for not listening to what I had asked for. My parents had gone above and beyond what I had asked for but in my selfishness all I saw was that I didn't get what I wanted.

Have you ever felt like your prayer life resembles me as a nine year old child? You ask for things over and over, build up expectations of God and when He chooses to answer prayers differently than you expected you get angry at Him. The rich young ruler was sad when he left Jesus because he didn't get the answer that he wanted to hear. He was upset because he asked for something expecting a certain response and when he didn't get what he wanted he sulked and pouted.

We tend to treat God like he is a prize machine we stick in a prayer and out comes exactly what we want and when it doesn't work out it's His fault and He's to blame. The reality is that God does not ignore prayer, He does dismiss any prayer request. The thing that we have to remember is that sometimes God chooses to answer things differently than we had hoped for. The problem with this is that we build up our expectations. We spend hours upon hours asking for things and spend seconds looking for the way God wants to answer it. The fact of the matter is that God wants to build us into His vessel and He is going use circumstances and situations for His glory.

We have to learn to stop looking at God as a slot machine, we have to stop expecting God to do something just because we pray a certain way. Our prayers should be an opportunity for us to spend time with our Heavenly Father, if God does not answer your prayers the way you had hoped for the question is, is it possible the answer He gave you was for His glory and will turn out to be better than even your expectations had imagined?

Thought question: Do you tend to see how God is answering prayers or do you just expect Him to answer them the way you want Him to? When you pray are you asking for God's desires to be met or are you asking for your own to be met?