When Those Guys is Us Guys

“No one calls on Your Name or strives to lay hold of You.”—Isaiah 64:7

Biblical zingers like this aren't always directed at the unrepentant, rebels, Pharisees and Sadducees, and people-who-smoke-and-chew. In fact, just about every time we're thinking, "yeah,those guys," God is prone to reply, “Hmmm. Anything hit close to home?”

Unrepentant, maybe not, but OK yes, we sure do like hanging out with its cousin Stubborn. And we can hardly help ourselves. It’s an attraction that’s been engrained deep within from birth (thank you, Eden), with roots deeper still simply by being an American, and double-knotted if you are a New Englander. A nicer word for it, or so we'd like to think, is “self-sufficiency”—which certainly has its merits for many things in life.

But not in the Kingdom of God, where roots of “one another,” and "My grace is sufficient for you," and “trust in the Lord” are deeper still and endless. And beautiful and rich.

And yet how often do we claim to walk with the One who does “awesome things that we did not expect” (verse 3), over and over again—and yet more often than we’d like to admit, we don’t lay hold of all that?  Or of Him? At least not right away. Because when things aren't working out the way we'd like, and "nothing is happening!," and God seems to be nowhere in sight, it's surprising how often all of that will be rooted in trying to be self-sufficient in serving, in attitude, and in pursuing the seemingly noble things of fixing stuff, and people, and patterns, and bad habits. On our own.

Condemnation? Nope. Much-needed course correction? Yup. Us guys. And every five minutes, actually.

Lord, thank You that Your Words aren't merely wonderful words of life, but that they also lovingly and surgically pierce the heart for our good. And that for every passage that seems to be directed at ‘those guys,’ healing, strength, wisdom, and perseverance awaits any one of Your kids who would swallow hard and confront the course correction that might be staring us right in the face—the one whose anthem is...

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the One I love. Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it—

seal it for Thy courts above…

...so that we would increasingly live and strive to lay hold of You (in spite of ourselves) at the dawn of each new day.