Wednesday Night Lesson Recap: What Would You Ask For From God?

If you had the opportunity to stand before God for a moment and ask him for something, what would it be?  Lets say that this was the only thing, outside your own salvation that you could ask for, what would it be?  It’s a pretty tough question when you stop and think about it.  We live in a society where we ask for things all of the time.  We ask him for good health, for safety, for friends, for all kinds of things.

In Proverbs 30: 7-9 the author of the chapter asks God for two things.

1.     To keep falsehood and lies far from him.

2.     Give him only what he needs, not making him rich or poor.

The first request is important because we know that God hates liars. He calls Satan the father of lies.  We see in both Psalm 101:7 and Proverbs 6:16-19 that God hates liars and says they have no place in him. If we are deceitful than how are we supposed to be effective and useful examples of Christ.

If people can’t believe what we say about the everyday, how can we expect them to believe us when we talk about God?

The second piece to this is falsehood, which is connected to lying.  It is easy to be lead astray and sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe because the lie sounds almost better than the real deal.   If we listen the wrong teaching we quickly find ourselves being lead in a direction that is away from God.

The second request from the author was for God to not make him rich or poor but only give him his daily bread.  What does that mean?  What is the problem that the author says about being too rich?

The problem with being rich = forgetting about God and becoming prideful which leads to thinking only about myself.

The problem with being poor = becoming jealous of others and stealing what they have and then sinning against God.  Also thinking of myself with jealousy.

Being given what I need = understanding that what I have comes from God alone and not from my own doing. 

So if you notice if we have too much or too little our attention is only on ourselves and not on God.  The challenge is for us to live in such a way that we are in constant focus on God.

So How would you pray to God or what would you ask him for?  It’s challenging and sobering to ask God to give me only enough to survive.