Thursday, March 10, 2011

God Doesn't Play Fair

Back in the days when most people didn’t actually own a personal computer, I had a TRS-80 Model IV. The programs for this—at the time—wonderful machine were written in BASIC. The nice thing about that is that you could hit the Break key and edit the program. These days, with our understanding of the need for computer security, we can see that there are all kinds of things wrong with that, but back then, it allowed me to edit the games I had for the machine. If I wanted it to be easier to win, I simply had to change a few lines of code and run the program. These days, many computer games have cheat codes that will effectively achieve the same thing. You don’t have to play fair.

In life, God doesn’t play fair. When something doesn’t go the way we would like, we are often tempted to cry, “That’s not fair.” The evil seem to prosper and the righteous are persecuted. “That’s not fair!” But when we look at the bigger picture, we really don’t want it to be fair because it is God who isn’t playing fair, not the wicked. Look at the world. Many are eager to fight against the Christians, but they are also eager to fight amongst themselves. If they could come to some form of agreement, they might be able to take us, but God doesn’t play fair. Before Jesus left, he instituted the church. Churches give us a natural support group. We go to church and there are people there who build us up. They encourage us to do the work that God has called us to do. They train us to do the work. We go out into the world and we find that many of those church members are right there with us, helping us to reach the lost for Christ. After he left, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to indwell the believer. Through his guidance, we are better able to reach the lost for Christ. The lost world has nothing that compares to the things God has given us to use for his work. To use a military analogy, it’s like we’ve gone to a knife fight driving a tank.

We may not fully understand why God allows bad things to happen to us, but when we look at what he has done to help us through those situations and to share our faith with the world, it is very clear that we’re not in a fair fight. God has defined the parameters in his favor and since I’m on his side, I’m fine with that.

What blessings do you see in your life?