What has happened to our walks with God? What is meant to be careful God-focused, glory-oriented introspection and meditation on the Word has become a shallow puddle of selfish, worldly-focused striving for personal betterment. Our time spent digging through Scripture (if we open our Bibles at all) is not to decipher God's will and the furthering of His glory but a misguided striving for answers to personal problems, cure for depression, relationship advice, and direction. The icing on this pathetic and misguided cake is that once we are satisfied that we have been sufficiently "guided" we put down our Bibles to collect dust until we need to call upon our Great Problem-Solver again.

While I feel sadly negative in my ravings, I do not believe that this negativity is due to a flaw in my observations. On the contrary, the negativity is due to the vastness of the truth within. We have turned God's very Word into a glorified (at best) "How-to Manual" that we consult as a last resort when our own insights and the advice of our friends and family fail to be adequate. The travesty of this is scarcely worth mentioning, but I will digress.

Throughout Scripture we repeatedly see the Holy God as the Center and Sustainer of all things who works everything according to the counsel of His will. We have replaced this Sovereign God with a man-made idol of a divine and somewhat-powerful helper. We have made the Creator of the Universe who demands us to give Him 100% of our lives and fashioned Him into a benevolent and kindly friend who lives to make our lives better, who sits and waits for us to come to Him when we need assistance and is subsequently overjoyed when this occurs as if we are temporarily boosting His low self-esteem and restoring "a relationship" between this benevolent yet complacent friend and ourselves.

However, God is completely haappy and satisfied with Himself and we must forgo any inclination that we satisfy Him or further lift His spirits by coming to Him for spiritual or practical direction. No, dear friends, it is an unwarranted honor, a grace, as it were, to merely speak with Him (let alone have His very Word at our disposal, a fact we take for granted all too often). We have trivialized it such, can you not see it? We have tricked ourselves into believing that we are providing Him a needed service in coming to Him, a service for which He giggles and kicks His feet for joy upon its reception as would a small child upon receiving a rattle. But God is not "served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25).

The glory is found in the knowledge that we do not deserve access to the throne room of God, access to His personal chambers and impromptu access to His presence at our leisure. He graciously allows us such an honor, but He is not in the least in need of us to do so to feel important or loved. Our infinite God was completely satisfied with Himself, considering His own glory and vastness of perfection before the foundations of the world. We must fix our view on God and mentally and spiritually consider Him in His  rightful place, the Center and Fountain of all things.

Soli deo gloria!