Let me help you with that!

Any newspaper puzzle solvers out there? Anyone complete the New York Times Crossword puzzle on Sunday mornings? Anyone successfully complete the Sudoku puzzle on a regular basis? My wife likes the Crossword puzzle and the Sudoku puzzle but I like the Celebrity Cipher. The what? The Celebrity Cipher by Luis Campos. Never heard of it, here is a link to one so you can see for yourself what is it and even try to solve it. It is not as easy as you might think but my wife says it is not nearly as hard as the puzzles she solves (yes she is smarter than I am). None of this is my point, let me get on to my point.

Last week I was sitting at the kitchen working on the puzzle when my 7 year old walks up, hops in my lap and says "Let me help you with that!" She began to read the letters for me and asked if she could hold my pencil. She began writing on the puzzle without having a clue what she was doing. I waited patiently for a few minutes just watching her make a mess of the puzzle. After a few minutes she was done, jumped out of my lap and went on to something else. As the Lord tends to do he said "I have a lesson in this for you!" Here is what I learned from that brief interaction with my daughter.

We often think we know what we are doing when we try to help God. Without even realizing it we often say "Let me help you with that!" to God. As if he needs our help. Let me give you an example. Lord heal my mother! Lord cure my illness! Lord stop the pain! In other words we are in essence saying "Lord fix this situation the way I want it fixed!" We tend to think that if God does it our way it will be fixed or the puzzle will be solved when in reality it would just end up as a mess. God is sovereign, God knows what is best, God has worked the puzzle out long before we decided to get involved.

One of the most difficult verses and yet also one of the most comforting verses for me is found in the book of Numbers:

Numbers 23: 19 - 19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

God does not change his mind. We cannot argue him out of a decision. We cannot persuade him to do it differently. He has made up his mind, his perfect, omnipotent mind and our imperfect, limited minds cannot argue with him. I know what a few of you are saying; there are verses where God changed his mind. Exodus 32: 14, Jeremiah 26:19 and others. But did he really change his mind? Did he not know what the outcome would be and had this planned out well in advance.

I think if we look at the character of God throughout the Bible and we did an in depth study on what the word change really means we will see that God is perfect, he has a perfect plan and does not veer from that no matter how much we want him to, no matter how many times we hop in his lap and say "Let me help you with that!" Rejoice in knowing that God is in control, he does not need our help but he finds joy in allowing us to partner with him in getting the Gospel to the ends of the earth.