Two concepts that I’ve had trouble understanding for years, that I’ve just recently begun to wrap my mind around, and that have both given me so much peace about the Race.
Where God’s jealousy confuses me:
The first time I ever heard the idea that God is a jealous God, I was really little and heard the pastor say it in church. I remember thinking that that made no sense because my mom had always told me jealousy was a sin.
Then a little over a year ago, I was wrestling with this idea again. One of my best friends and I were drifting apart, while I also had a sprained ankle and couldn’t run cross country for awhile. I was crying to God one night asking why he was taking so many good things away from me.
And those words came into my head: “for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…” and I thought, “God, I love you, and I KNOW you’ve got some kind of plan here, and I’m trying real hard to trust you…but right at this moment, telling me you’re jealous of my friends just makes you sound like a jerk. With all due respect.”
Where Psalm 37:4 confuses me:
Once upon a time when I was five, my Sunday school teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, “Somebody’s wife.” I remember at some point telling my mom, “Why do I have to do school? I’m not gonna go to college when I grow up, I’m gonna get married and then I’ll be too busy taking care of all my kids.”
While my dreams got a bit more practical as I got older, that’s still always been what I wanted most in the world.
By the middle of my sophomore year of college when I still hadn’t been asked out since I was sixteen, I started wondering what in the world was up with God. Then a speaker in chapel talked about Psalm 37:4. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. So of course, I thought “OH! That’s it. Right now I care more about finding a husband than I do about knowing God. I need to put God first and THEN he’ll send me that guy.”
So I did. And while that was a good revelation and a huge stepping stone in my relationship with God, I hadn’t quite understood the verse yet.
How the Psalm 37:4 issue got cleared up:
I was in Costa Rica on my first mission trip and my life was being turned upside down. We were having dinner with one of our host pastors, and someone had asked them what it’s like to give up their lives to serve God in another country. David answered “All we gave up was what we thought we wanted. God has shown us what we really want.” And then our professor quoted that verse, and explained that it doesn’t mean God grants all our wishes when we put him above everything else.
When God is truly our delight, all we desire is all of him. His plan for us becomes everything we want.
How God’s jealousy became my favorite thing about him:
Earlier this week I was thinking about how hard college was and why. I wrote about all of that here, but the conclusion I came to was that God was only first place in my life if he would also let me have other good things with it. They’d be less important than him, but I still needed them.
But God doesn’t just want to be our first; he wants to be our first AND our only.
When I realized that God is the only thing I need, the lightbulb came on: he’s jealous, not because he wants to be the only thing that satisfies us, but BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SATISFY US!!! He isn’t like the friend we all had in middle school(or maybe you were that friend to someone else), who’s jealous of your other friends because she wants to be your favorite friend. He’s jealous because he knows what will truly fill us up, and it’s himself. He wants to give us everything, because he IS everything. We could have all of him, yet we choose to take some of him and some of everything else. We think following him is the biggest sacrifice we’ll ever make, when really we’re already sacrificing so much more by holding onto things that compared to him are worthless.
Where these two ideas overlap:
As I’ve explained in earlier posts, within a few weeks of coming home from Costa Rica, God called me to the World Race. It’s nothing like what I thought I wanted even months before that trip, but now it’s everything I want. I want to have no other choice but to solely rely on God every day. I want to see the world he made and the people he loves instead of ministering in my own comfortable pocket of the world to the familiar people who live just like I do. I want to learn to live in true community with other believers. I want to see him do big things, things I’m afraid to even ask for, much less to believe that he’ll actually do them.
And if going on the Race means giving up other things I want(and it does. I’ve spent plenty of hours crying with God about them. Read this, this or this), it’s nothing compared to what I’d be giving up if I stayed. God is sending me on this journey because he loves me enough to give me everything I want. It may not look like it to the rest of the world, but this is the abundant life that he talks about in John 10:10. Even though there are plenty of things I have my doubts about, I’m finally trusting him.
I know that he’s the best thing.
I know that he is worth it.
I know that he is all I need.
I know that he is all I want.
He is jealous for me, because only he can give me the desires of my heart.
