Desiring God Above His Gifts

HERE IS THE CLAIM of this chapter, stated at once. When God delays an answer, the delay is not idle time; it is at work, prying our fingers off the one thing we asked for so the hand comes free to close on God Himself. The gift goes transparent in our grip, slowly, until what we are holding turns out to be the Giver. Beside that promise stands a warning, and I have needed it more than once. When my longing for a particular outcome outgrows my longing for God Himself, I am no longer praying in faith. I am bowing to an idol I carved out of my own desires.

A child and an old man receive the same gift differently. A child tears the paper off a present and forgets, for one happy hour, that anyone gave it, and nothing in that joy is wrong; God is not offended by it. Now watch an old man take a small gift from a friend of forty years, a jar of honey, say. He holds it a long while, and he is not really looking at the honey. He is looking through it, at the man. Prayer is meant to carry us from the first kind of receiving to the second. The wanting changes shape slowly, the way a voice changes across a lifetime, until one morning you catch yourself desiring the Giver above anything He could ever set in your hands.

I have to confess before I teach. More than once I have stumbled into believing that praying in faith means wanting a thing so hard that God will be compelled to hand it over. Some years ago there was something I wanted badly. I will not tell you what it was; it was a good thing, and its goodness is exactly what kept my condition hidden from me. I prayed for it morning and night. I fasted with it in view. I leaned on God the way a man leans on a stuck door, and I called the leaning faith. Let a sermon so much as brush my request, and I took it for confirmation. Let a month pass with nothing, and I combed back through my life for the sin that must be blocking the answer. From the outside the whole performance looked like devotion. It was fervent, tearful, biblical, and proud.

Then one ordinary morning, on my knees, I caught myself in the act. My longing for the outcome had outgrown my longing for God, and my praying had quietly turned into an attempt to compel Him. I was still kneeling. I was still fluent in the whole vocabulary of prayer. Only the object of my worship had changed. A man can commit idolatry with his eyes shut and his hands folded. I know, because I have done it, and I have since sat with enough praying people to call this one of the commonest and least confessed sins of devout lives. Nobody warns us, because from the outside it looks like fervor, and fervor gets praised.

Since that morning I have carried three questions where I can reach them. Can I still pray gladly about anything else, or has every prayer become a corridor leading to the one room? When I imagine God saying no, do I feel honest grief, or the cold resentment of a man whose machine has failed him? And the hardest one: if He gave me everything else He has ever given and withheld only this, would I still come to Him tomorrow morning with love? On the days I cannot answer that last question, the idol is back on its shelf, and I know what my praying must be about until it comes down.

God has treated this disease in me chiefly by making me wait. He delays an answer, I have come to think, not to withhold good from me, but to loosen my grip on the good I asked for so that my hand is free to close on Himself. I do not claim to know everything He does in His delays; I can only report what His delays have done. Waiting unbends the fingers that have clenched white around an outcome, one at a time, and as the gift is worked free of my grip, my empty hands close around Someone else. The furniture of the heart gets rearranged: the thing that had planted itself in the center is carried, protesting, to the side, and God resumes the place that was always His. And when the answer finally comes, if it comes, the joy arrives in a different key. I have received things I once begged for, years after the begging stopped, and been startled by my own calm: glad of the gift, and gladder of the Hand.

Psalm 73 maps this whole country. It opens on a man in spiritual danger, and the danger is desire. Asaph looks at the arrogant and sees them prospering: sleek, healthy, untroubled, their tables full. "My feet had almost stumbled," he admits; "my steps had nearly slipped" (Psalm 73:2 NKJV). What nearly took him down was wanting what the godless had. His envy was a prayer aimed at gifts with the Giver cropped out of the picture, and he carried it until the carrying wore him through, until he went into the sanctuary of God. There the ledger he had been keeping fell out of his hands, and out of that recovery comes one of the purest cries in the Psalter:

Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart fail; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

(Psalm 73:25-26)

These two verses refuse to be separated. The first reaches as high as human desire has ever reached: a man scans heaven and earth and wants nothing on either inventory apart from God. The second sets the same man back down on the ground where we live: his flesh gives out, his heart gives out, he is no marble saint but a tired singer whose courage fails on schedule. The desire of verse twenty-five is credible precisely because it rises out of the failing man of verse twenty-six. Then there is the last word, portion.

When the land was divided among the tribes of Israel, every tribe received territory except one. To the priestly tribe God said that He Himself would be their inheritance; while their brothers measured out fields and vineyards, their portion was the LORD. Asaph was a Levite, born into the one tribe whose inheritance was never counted in acres. His inheritance had always been God. Every time I pray this psalm it asks me, quietly, whether I can say the same of mine, or whether I am still out somewhere surveying acreage.

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MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN I asked the Lord to use me in His Kingdom, I asked two things: that I would never use the Church's money, even to finance my own service, and that I would never become a celebrity. That was the whole prayer, and I meant every word of it.

I can still give an account of why I asked it. I am no Jesus Christ. People do not follow me; they follow Jesus, and the Church is His, not mine. Even then I had seen what an audience and an income can do to a servant of God, so gradually that the servant never feels it happening. I had watched men who began by pointing at Christ end up pointing, by imperceptible degrees, at themselves, and their followers followed the finger instead of the direction it named. I was afraid of that, and I still count it one of the healthiest fears I have ever had. Whatever I did in God's name, the people near it should walk away following Jesus. So I asked to be kept poor in that one currency, and small in that one sense, before I was old enough to know what the asking would cost.

Decades have gone by, and I can finally give an account of how that prayer was answered. Among all my prayers, the desperate ones and the decade-long ones, the ones answered sideways and the ones still lying open on God's table, this one was answered exactly as asked. To the letter, and with a thoroughness I had not entirely bargained for, since I had never once considered how completely God might agree with me. I have taught and preached and served through all these years and never taken payment for it. When someone presses an envelope into my hand at the door, I press it back with thanks. No crowd has ever followed me home.

When a famous man joins a church, it makes the news; nobody has ever asked to interview me about anything. He is Mr. Somebody, and as far as the Kingdom of God is concerned, I am Mr. Nobody. I keep no record of how many souls I have brought to Jesus, because none of them were ever mine to count; a record is kept somewhere in heaven, I am sure, in a better hand than mine. By this world's accounting, my whole service adds up to almost nothing: no salary drawn, no name made, no following gathered. I regard this as one of the great answered prayers of my life.

Our age will find that strange, because our age mostly prays in the other direction. I have heard sincere believers ask God for reach, influence, and growth they can count and chart. I will not judge them. Some of that asking comes from love, and God can be trusted to sort through His children's requests. What worries me is that the opposite request has become nearly unintelligible to us. That a man might ask God to keep him hidden, and that God might grant it, and that the granting might be a kindness and not a shelving: this hardly fits our imagination anymore. Yet hiddenness can be an answered prayer, and the plainness of the wrapping is part of the gift, since nobody covets what nobody notices.

I will not pretend the answer has cost me nothing. There have been evenings when I watched a man become celebrated for work no better than work God had let me do in the dark, and felt the old twinge. On those evenings I remind myself of the terms. I asked, God agreed, and He has kept His side of it with perfect fidelity; the twinge is only the child in me, wanting to run around the corner with somebody else's toy. It passes sooner now than it used to.

Hiddenness did not finish the work in me, because a man can renounce money and applause and still keep one dream folded in an inner drawer. Every time I have a dream, I become obsessed with it. It takes me years of fighting to make it a reality, and the whole time I call the fighting faith. For many years I carried such a dream about the shape my service might someday take, and I will keep its details between God and me. I fought for it through discouragement and closed doors and the patient smiles of people who thought I should know better. And here is what took me longest to learn: our only true attachment is meant to be to God, and to nothing else, however holy it looks. Even the practices that carry a man toward God, the study, the silence, the long habits of prayer, are roads and not the country they lead to, and a heart can move into one of them and quietly set up house. The test comes when the road is taken away. A faith rooted in God, and not in its own supports, is still standing when the supports are gone.

Then came a season I can date by its length: about a week and a half. In those ten days I learned things I had not known, one after another, and by the end of them the dream was gone. I did not lay it down serenely, like a saint in a stained-glass window. Some of those days were among the harder days of my adult life, and I spent long hours with men I trust, trying to hear God underneath the noise of my own disappointment. It was in that same season that I asked the people around me to set aside the titles they had been using for me. Call me a child of God, I told them. It is the only title I am sure of, and the only one that will still be true of me ten thousand years from now.

Then came the surprise, which is why this story belongs to God and to this chapter. When the dust settled, I took inventory the way a man does after a burglary, walking through the house of my life room by room to see what had been carried off. Nothing I actually treasured was missing. The two biggest dreams of my life had been granted long ago and stood untouched. Christ is my Lord and my Savior, the dream underneath every dream I ever dreamed. And I have been bringing people into the Kingdom of God, something I did long before anyone gave me a title and have never stopped doing; nothing and no one can take those two dreams from me.

The rest of my aspirations were technical ones, and I do not believe the Lord will hold me to account for failing to reach them. Everything the ten days took from me was scaffolding. The building stood. In those weeks I wrote to my friends a sentence I still stand behind with my whole weight: I have not lost anything, because I possess the greatest gift of all, our Lord Jesus Christ. I meant it not as a brave face over a loss but as the plain sum of the accounting, and I found, to my own surprise, that I could face what was coming with something close to unbridled joy.

A simple calculation helped me say that honestly. A century from now, which is a very short time, a stranger will live where I now live. More likely he will tear the house down and put up another, the way we do. That stranger will never have heard of me. Everyone who now knows my face will be gone. Nothing about my unachieved aspirations will weigh anything in the Kingdom of God. What will have mattered is whether I loved God, and whether I loved the people He set within my reach, and by His mercy those were the two things the lost dream could never touch. A man who has run that calculation honestly finds it much harder to keep calling every ambition a calling.

The prophet Habakkuk took a harsher inventory than mine. Standing before a future of invasion and ruin, he lists the entire economy of a farming household and strips it, item by item:

Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls--Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. (Habakkuk 3:17-18)

Count the losses with him: figs, grapes, olive oil, grain, sheep, cattle. Six subtractions, made with a farmer's precision, until nothing is left on the table but God. He counts all the way to the bottom, and the bottom holds. Notice what he does with the discovery. The last line of his short book hands the poem to the Chief Musician, to be played on stringed instruments. He wanted his worst case set to music and sung. I could not have understood that before my own ten days, and now I understand it to the marrow. When everything a man asked for is subtracted and the Giver is still there, what is left behaves less like resignation and more like joy, and joy of that kind refuses to stay prose.

That sung joy is thanksgiving, and thanksgiving is petition in its mature key. I believe that is why Paul, in the very sentence where he teaches us how to bring our requests to God, slips in a phrase most of us read past. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God" (Philippians 4:6). With thanksgiving. When I begin my asking with thanks, I begin by handling the gifts already given, which means I begin with the Giver already in my hands, and a request made from inside that embrace cannot easily curdle into a demand. Gratitude seats the new desire in the long memory of His faithfulness, where it shrinks to its true size, usually smaller than it looked in the middle of the night. Asking without thanking slowly turns the whole world into a list of what is missing. I know, because for years my prayers kept exactly such lists, and the keeper of a list of lacks becomes, in time, a lack himself.

Paul earned that little phrase before he wrote it. He set it down while under guard, in a letter thanking a small congregation for a gift of money they had scraped together and sent to him, and in the middle of his thanks he made a quiet confession of his own:

Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11-13)

The last of those sentences has suffered a strange fate among us. It gets printed on shirts and quoted over ambitions, as though it promised that Christ will supply the horsepower for whatever project we aim Him at. Read where Paul actually set it down, and it promises something better and much harder. The "all things"

of his sentence are being full and being hungry, abounding and suffering need, and the strength Christ supplies is the strength to stand content on either side of an answered prayer. Notice, too, the word he uses twice: learned. Contentment came to Paul slowly, through abasement and abundance taken in turn, each one loosening his hands a little more. A man schooled like that can be handed any answer God might send, which may be part of why God could afford to send him so many.

So the gift was never the goal. From the first word of the first prayer we ever prayed, the goal was union with the One we were speaking to, and every gift on the road, every delay, and every refusal has been His way of drawing us on toward Himself. Prayer was never merely a way to get what we want; it is the pathway into that union, and the wanting is the feet that walk it. Desire survives this schooling; let no one tell you God means to kill it. It comes out the far side larger than it went in, too large now for anything smaller than God to fill. I can report from well along in life that I want more today than I have ever wanted, and that what I want is Him.

I know the question all this raises, because I have been asked it, gently by exhausted believers and bluntly by skeptics, and it deserves better than a devotional answer. Take the man this chapter has described: stripped of his dream and claiming he lost nothing, hidden on purpose and calling it a great answer, wanting God above every outcome. Now look at his life from the outside. He still works for his bread. He still gets sick, still tires, still fails, still buries the people he loves. His neighbor, who never prays at all, does the same. Set the two lives side by side and be honest about what you see, because somewhere a voice, and on certain long nights it has been mine, finally says the thing out loud: then what difference has all this praying actually made?