Give Me… or Make Me

Our hope and prayer for you today is that the Lord is continually making and molding you into who He needs you to be.  Let’s talk about that…

A couple of weeks ago we were at Teay’s Valley Baptist in Hurricane, WV for their Camp Meeting.  Brother Randy Hobbs from New Hope Baptist in Burlington, NC preached the paint off the walls for 20 minutes at the Saturday morning prayer breakfast.  In a passing comment, he mentioned a very intriguing fact about the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15.  He pointed out that the son told his father in verse 12 “give me” when he was leaving home with all his stuff, but, when that same son returned in verse 19 he approached his father with a different statement.  He said, “make me as one of thy hired servants.“  THAT IS POWERFUL.

I shared this thought in a devotional for some of the young ladies at the North GA School of Gospel Music this past Monday night.  They are the fruit of a generation who have gotten more than their parents, who got more than their parents, and so forth.  Due to societal expectations and the entitlement agenda they have as a whole become the “give me” generation.  This is not entirely their fault.  Parents go into credit card debt up to their eyeballs in order to appease their kids and meet up to the quota’s of all their peer groups.  We cannot embarrass them by not giving them everything.  I posed a question to the young ladies.  How would their parents react if this year when their parents asked what they wanted for Christmas their reply was, “Nothing, I have more than enough.”  Their response was shock, gasps, giggles and outright angered offence.  The point is not the stuff.  This translates to how we approach God with prayer and the life He has given us.

“The Lord will give us the desires of our heart” is one of the most misused partial verses in the whole of scripture (Ps 37:4).  I fear more often than not, we have portrayed the Lord as a heavenly barber.  “Lord, A little off the top, close on the sides, short sideburns, and cover up my bald spot, Thanks.”  Then we sit there and expect it to all turn out perfect just the way we requested it.  Give Me my stuff when I want it, how I want it, where I want it, and as much as I want it.  I have been that give me child of God.  But what we discover is that stuff and all that stuff we think we cannot live without ends up coming up short, losing its value or showing itself just to be unsatisfying.  We think we can Make our life better than The Creator.

In Genesis 1, The Lord spoke the words “Let there be” nine times and everything that is created was created from nothing. It takes us nine swings just to hit one good golf drive, nine attempts to make a good pound cake, nine arrangements to make the furniture in our living room just so.  It takes nine tries to get some ladies in an outfit to go to church Sunday morning.  The question I posed to those young ladies Monday night is the same one I pose to you.  Who is better at making things?  God made the human brain.  He made the optic miracle of an eye.  Who is better at making things? Us or Him?

If God can make anything out of nothing, then can’t we trust Him to Make Us much better than we can make ourselves.  We have heard the phrase, “self-made man or woman.”  The effort is admirable but the truth is we have the creative power of bacteria in comparison to the creator of all.  But, we say, “If I could just have… then I’d be happy.”  Is it a thing, a career, a position, a person?  Let us Give up on Give Me and Make up our minds that we need God to Make Us who he wants us to be.  If we do that then we will find that His ways are above our ways and His thoughts are above our thoughts (Is 55:9).  He has better plans, better methods, better results.  Let us let Him Make Us and we can trust Him to Give Us more than we can imagine or ask for (Eph 3:20).

God Bless You,

BroAdamB