Making Sure He Does Not Have To

Ruth prays for provision every morning, and she has spent nine years making certain that God is never in a position where He would have to provide anything.

She did not see it that way. Obviously. Nobody sees it that way, and if you had put that sentence to her a year ago she would have been hurt by it, and she would have had a right to be.

Here is how it actually looks from inside.

She prays. Properly. She asks God for the household, for the year, for the things that are coming, and she means it, and there is nothing performative about a woman praying at ten past six with nobody watching.

And then she goes and does what she calls being sensible, which is a set of arrangements so thorough that if every single thing she prays about went the worst possible way, the household would be fine.

That is not a criticism. Read it again. If everything went wrong, her family would be all right, and that is because of her, and there is a whole set of people who have never once had a frightening month because Ruth is the way she is.

The thing she saw, and she saw it in the car outside a supermarket of all places, was a small question that arrived out of nowhere.

It was: what would He actually have to do this month?

And she sat there and went through it and the answer was nothing. Not because the month was easy. Because she had already covered every route by which a need could arrive. There was no gap anywhere. There has not been a gap in nine years.

She has been asking a God she genuinely trusts for a provision she has structurally eliminated the possibility of.

Now hear me before anybody starts hitting themselves, because I can feel that beginning and I am putting a stop to it.

Ruth is not faithless. Preparation is not the opposite of trust and I am not going to stand here and tell a careful woman that her carefulness is a spiritual problem, because it is not, and that teaching has done a great deal of harm to people who deserved better.

Scripture praises the woman who looks well to her household. Joseph is commended for storing grain through seven years, and the storing was the whole point of the dream. Nobody in the Bible is rebuked for having a plan.

That is not what this is about.

It is about position, and only position. Because two things cannot both be the thing you finally rest on, and one of them is, and it is worth knowing which.

You have your own version of this. There is something you ask God for and something you have arranged so that the asking never has to be answered, and you have never once put those two side by side, because separately they both look like faithfulness.

Nobody is calling you a hypocrite. Not one word of this is that.

But there is a gap that has never been left open, and you might want to know that it was you who closed it.

The psalmist asks for something he cannot give himself

There is a prayer in Psalm 86 that most people read past, and the request in it is very strange when you notice it.

Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name.Psalm 86:11

Unite my heart. He is not asking for more faith and he is not asking for less anxiety. He is asking God to make one thing out of something that has gone into two, which tells you plainly that he could not do it himself and knew it.

That is the most encouraging thing in this whole message. A divided heart is not a thing you are expected to weld back together by effort. That is not my opinion: it is a written prayer, in the Bible, asking God to do the uniting, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who does that work in a woman sitting in a car outside a supermarket.

And you are already His. Not once your heart is united, and not once the arrangements loosen: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is settled ground, which is exactly what makes it safe to look at the rest of it.

Nobody is coming for your arrangements

I want to be extremely plain now, because this is the paragraph where a message of this kind starts telling people to dismantle the thing that is holding their family up, and I am not going to do that.

Nobody here is telling you to undo anything. Not one arrangement, not one plan. I do not know your household, who is unwell, whose school fees, whose care, whose bad year is still being recovered from, and a message that removes somebody's safety net from a distance is not ministry, it is vandalism with a Bible verse on it.

Nobody is telling you that having less would produce more faith either. That is the same idol from the other side. Choosing hardship on purpose still puts the amount at the center, and the amount was never the center.

Nothing here has to change this week for this to have done its work.

What is being handed to you is not a demand. It is a question. Which of the two do you actually rest on, because one of them is what you rest on, and Jesus said plainly that no one can serve both, so the arrangement in which they are both final has never existed.

And He has never once been unable. Whatever you have or have not arranged, the word says God is able to make all grace abound toward you, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt thing rather than a doctrine, and He has been able the entire nine years, whether or not He was ever asked to prove it.