Appendix 2. A Proud Heart
Those who live as God’s servants are blessed indeed: they have been given a peaceful heart to carry through a harsh world. Yet people want to make God their servant. They turn things around and give God orders, telling him to stand behind them and handle everything they plan and decide so well that not one thing fails. I hope you will take a moment to ask whether you are like this yourself. When God gives them time, opportunity, and the means to turn back, they say they have no time to be faithful, busy as they are with their hobbies and with living as they please. Then, when they see the plenty before their eyes about to slip away, panic sets in. They make a show of turning back, and soon they are complaining that they have turned back, so why does God not help them? Did they truly turn back? On the strength of a brief pretense, where does anyone find the confidence to tell God so boldly that he must help?
Take a simple example. A father kept after the child he loved, nagging that they had to study. But the child paid no attention and stayed absorbed in the worldly amusements they enjoyed. With the exam a month away, the father warned that if the child did not start working hard now, they would regret it. As the day drew near, fear set in, and the child began studying three days before the exam. Seeing the child work so hard it almost seemed too much, the father was grieved and asked why they had not started sooner. The child snapped back: could he not see they were studying now?
What the child meant was that, having turned back at last, they deserved his help. And when the father said that, yes, the child had worked hard for three days, but ought to repent of not doing their best before that, the child grumbled. Had he not said that anyone who turns back is forgiven, even after doing wrong? Was he now asking them to repent of their past mistakes as well? Such words and behavior, though, are the thinking of a very small child, one who has not grasped at all what the father’s words mean.
Are you, too, standing before God with a childish faith? Whether a believer works hard for a whole month before the test and wins a prize, or studies for three days, does poorly, and is punished, none of it has anything to do with God.
God has simply told you to make the tests you face into an opportunity for reward. Without the wisdom to understand his word, you may never grow into a person of real stature, and you may find it hard to stand on your own. When he tells you to live diligently by his word, he is urging you toward your reward. God does not gain glory because you worked hard, and God does not suffer because you sinned. Of course, it must grieve the Father’s heart to watch souls who do not share in his glory. But failing to do your best is a sign that the center of your life is you. Once a human being becomes the center of life, neither the word of God nor the counsel of brothers and sisters in the faith can be heard. God looks with pity on such a soul, and all he wants is for its center to be turned to God, so that it may be blessed. If you have the wisdom to live the life now given you by the word, with all that is in you, then you have been greatly blessed as one of his people, and it shows that you are receiving the great reward only God can give.