Not God's fault

I may have bit off more than I could chew with this dental work. Readers of this website may find columns of mine mentioning it going back as far as three years. Two successive dental students who had my case have both graduated.

Today I was driving home from my latest appointment (and latest payment) feeling guilty, or at least wondering whether I should be feeling guilty (which is the same thing, I suppose). Did I make the wrong decision in the beginning? Was I selfish? Was I vain? Was I trusting in God for the money or just overextending myself financially?

I was frustrated that things are not clearer in this life. One is tempted to blame God for lack of wisdom: “Lord, you knew I wasn’t sure from the beginning. Why didn’t you answer my prayer, drop me a postcard from heaven?”

Then I remembered something about wisdom from the Bible. “Mature” Christians are:

“… those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

The previous verse corroborates. There are Christians who are:

“… unskilled in the word of righteousness. …”

So then, discernment (the ability to judge well, perceptiveness in spiritual direction) comes only from “constant practice.” If we haven’t been practicing following God and His Word constantly, we have not developed the spiritual skill of distinguishing between a good idea and a lousy idea, “distinguishing good from evil.”

If we have ignored years of the Holy Spirit’s inner whispers, and then we are suddenly in a jam and we pray on the spot for direction, we should not be surprised if the answer is not forthcoming. It is not as though God has failed. It is because He told us how wisdom comes and we ignored it.

Another way of saying it is this: We are where we are today, wherever we are, as a result of a hundred thousand smaller choices that preceded this day—choices that either tended to make us increasingly wise and more skilled in discernment, or choices that tended to make us more dull.

God is able to zap even a rebel with sudden wisdom if He wants to. But He has told us His usual way with men: If we constantly practice obeying Him in the details of today, according to the light afforded from His Word, then tomorrow we will have skill for tomorrow’s forks in the road. Obey what you already know, and tomorrow you will know more. Or as the Apostle Paul put it:

“… and if anything else you think otherwise [that is, incorrectly or undiscerningly], God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained” (Philippians 3:15-16).