The God Who Doesn't Pay Attention

I have a question for you today:  Do you know “The God Who Doesn’t Pay Attention”?  Do you know that God? 

Your relationship with this god goes something like this:  you make a deal with him, you put together some kind of covenant, with really good stuff in it, like reading the bible all the way through in a year, supporting a missionary or a child in India, talking to people about Jesus and sharing your faith, giving up alcohol or chocolate for a year, etc., so that god will give you something better that you don’t have now.  You know—like a better job, a better car, a better home, a better spouse(!), or a better something.  And you follow through but God doesn’t.  You keep your end of the deal (you actually start supporting a missionary), but God doesn’t come through with his.  That’s “The God Who Doesn’t Pay Attention,” and that’s what I’m talking about.  Naturally, you struggle with this god, trying to figure out what kind of agreement or what kind of covenant you can make with him that he’ll honor and actually complete.

After all, you’re trying to work with him.

And somewhere in the course of your struggle with “The God Who Doesn’t Pay Attention,” it occurs to you that maybe God isn’t bargaining with you, that maybe he’s not playing the covenant game with you at all.  Keep that thought.

In fact, God is not making covenants with people at all.  He’s not doing it.  The truth is that God is paying attention to only one covenant now, and He made it with Jesus only—you simply get all of the benefits and blessings of their covenant.  God kept you out of the covenant equation and the pressure to keep it so He can give you everything as a gift forever.  Eternally.  For free.

Hebrews 9:15 says that, “. . . Christ is the mediator of a new covenant (He’s the one who brings us together with God and keeps us together, no matter what), that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance.”  (Parenthesis mine.)  It’s all a gift.  Forever.

2 Corinthians 1:20 For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God.

Amen? 

So the next time you think that God isn’t paying attention to your attempts at bargaining for yourself, of making an agreement for yourself, remember this:  You’re right.  He isn’t.  He’s paying attention to Jesus, and you’re far better off because of it.