Restoring Devotion

How is God at work in the world we live in? What is He up to? What answer to these questions explains why we sometimes celebrate God dramatically acting in healing and deliverance, but also lament situations where He does not act in healing and deliverance? And frankly, if we are honestly facing the world in which we live, there are times when the situations of lament are more than the situations of celebration.

What if God is primarily about restoring devotion that was lost at the Fall? How is He going to do that? If He consistently acts in healing and deliverance when we cry out to Him, will that restore devotion? Are we devoted to Him, or are we devoted to that which will meet our needs and desires… Satan's accusation against Job?

True devotion needs to be based on a love for God for who He is, not for what He does for us. And we know who He is through Scripture and through the experiences of Him acting in our lives in healing and deliverance. These experiences testify to our souls that He is good and loving and kind and holy and powerful and faithful. Without these experiences, we would lack heart knowledge of God. We need these experiences in order to restore our devotion to Him. We celebrate and praise God for these experiences and it is easy for us to see how they are increasing our devotion to God.

But these experiences are gaining a devotion that is also self serving because we are getting what we want from Him. So how is God going to restore a pure devotion that is not based on serving ourselves? He cannot do this by consistently meeting our needs. There has to be times of testing or trial ( a major theme in Scripture) where He does not meet our needs and we suffer. In those times, whatever is essentially self serving in our devotion will complain that God is absent and not being loving or faithful. We equate His presence with healing and deliverance because we assume that is what He always wants to do for us as a loving Father. But if He is about restoring pure devotion, His presence cannot always be healing and deliverance. There will be a dance that includes steps of having our needs met and not having our needs met, all designed to restore pure devotion to our souls.

We have a tendency to view the circumstances of our lives through a lens of discerning God's hand through experiencing His loving provision. What if we view the circumstances of our lives through a lens of discerning God's hand through experiencing the restoration of pure devotion to Him?