Experiencing God's Presence #62

[Hannah] made this vow: “O LORD of Heaven’s Armies, if you will look upon my sorrow and answer my prayer and give me a son, then I will give him back to you.”

1 Samuel 1:11

I prayed fervently and persistently for God to fulfill a deep desire. Over time the pleas grew deeper and more desperate, and the desire grew larger in my own mind. In fact, it grew so large that I eventually realized it had become almost as important to me as God was. I had been desperately praying for God to fulfill my love for something that would rival Him in my heart.

We do that often, though usually so subtly that we hardly notice. We treat God as our Cyrano de Bergerac, who was put in the painful position of helping another man win the heart of someone Cyrano himself loved deeply. We ask God for those objects of our affection, forgetting that He desires to be an even greater object of our affection. We provoke His jealousy in our prayers for His blessings. God then has to choose between either watching our heart delight in His gift rather than the Giver or disappointing us by not giving us our heart’s delight at all. In His mercy, He often gives anyway, but our joy in our treasures often overshadows our joy in Him.

There’s a way around this dilemma, of course. It’s to always treasure God over and above the things we ask of Him. But that’s easier said than done, considering our common misperceptions of His goodness and glory. Hannah was able to maintain her priorities by offering the gift, her child Samuel, back to God. And in a sense, that’s what we have to do with every request we plead. The God who loves us passionately offers us extravagant blessings, as long as we love Him more extravagantly than them all.

Lord, please forgive me for exalting my requests above You. I want You to fulfill my desires, but not more than I want to fulfill Your desires. My greatest affections belong to You—always.

From the book