Claim the Victory!

Yesterday I mentioned that one has to claim what one has been given by God. Some people would argue that if God wants you to have it, then you are going to get it. Period. There is no discussion. Yesterday, the subject at hand was the Israelites, having been brought out of Egypt, arriving at the promised land, and discovering that there were already people living there. These people were physically bigger, and more numerous than the Israelites. God was willing to give them the victory over the Canaanites, but the people of Israel were frightened, or didn’t have enough faith, or both. So, God led them back out into the wilderness. That, in and of itself, would seem to negate the argument that if God wants you to have something, then you will get it.

The plain and simple truth is that if you want anything in life, you should be prepared to put forth some effort to get it. If you sit back and wait for God to give you everything you want, you will almost certainly be waiting for a long time. You may get a few things, because of the prayers of others in your behalf, but that’s it. Ever hear the expression, anything worth having is worth working for? There’s a lot of truth to that. Some may say, “But I could never earn that…” and that may very well be true, also. There are many things that I have gotten from God that I could never earn. I’m not saying that you have to earn gifts from God, I’m only saying that God helps those who help themselves.

If you were walking along a river bank, and there was a guy handing out $100 bills on the other side of the river, and invited you to swim over and get one, I’m pretty sure that you would be willing to do that. Some people would try to find another way across the river that didn’t involve getting wet, but if swimming were the only way across, then what? Most of us would swim for it. I’m sure that there are some people that would argue the semantics of this “gift” $100 bill. “If I have to do something to get it, then it isn’t a gift; I earned it.” So, what you’re saying is, in order for it to be a true gift, the other guy has to swim to you? Are you saying that swimming across the river is actually worth $100? If you know of a job where I can get paid $100 for spending a few minutes of swimming, I’d sure like to know about it, because I can swim for a long time, and, for that kind of money, I would be willing to spend a lot of days at the pool. Let me ask you something: what would your swimming across the river benefit the guy giving away money? I could see if there were a swim meet with professional athletes and organizers selling tickets to see these people swim, but that isn’t the case here. This is just some philanthropist who wants to give away some money, but he’s not willing to go too far out of his way to do it; we need to come to him.

The Bible talks about people being slothful and lazy, and it doesn’t talk about those people in a nice way. If God doesn’t approve of laziness, then why would He reward it? Why does the New Testament talk so much about things that we should be doing, if it’s okay to refuse to do any of it? Oh, but we’re saved by Grace through faith. Yes we are; absolutely. We could never do enough to earn salvation, but faith without works is dead, and dead faith is useless. If salt, a preservative, loses its savor (its saltiness, the qualities that make it salt, that help it to preserve things), then it is basically just dirt. If our faith is dead, then it can’t preserve us, either, and we aren’t good for anything, either. Remember the man with the one talent? If one has only one talent, then that talent is faith. Remember what happened to him because he didn’t use his talent of faith? It wasn’t because he was out doing things he wasn’t supposed to be doing, but because he didn’t do what he was supposed to do, which was add to his faith.