Nothing diminishes
us more than the desire to be someone else--to possess in ourselves a benefit
someone else has. At perfect points in
our lives, the Lord gives us something...an insight, a strength, an ability, an
accomplishment and it is as magically attached to us as our shadow. Our problem is we do not trust the Lord
enough to be full of love in how He distributes His gifts; specifically how He
allots them with regard to ourselves. If
the Lord did not like you, then He would never have made you, never have let
you in on His grace, never have called you friend. Our God is perfectly truthful in all of His
dealings; if not then He is a devil and should be despised. He has told you that He loves you and that
love is complete and without room for more so in it He audits what comes your
way and does so to guarantee your total joy.
But when you snivel and complain and try to wiggle out from under the
dominion of Christ, you make a mess of all you have. Like a child who breaks his toy because he
wants his brother's toy, you smash your own happiness in the discontent you
hold in your hand. The parable of the
workers who were all paid the same wage but worked for different lengths of
time is not a teaching on the seeming unequal treatment of the Father; it is
rather a statement of how childish we all are with regard to the generosity of
God. Our work is in God's strength and
His ability, our adherence to the scriptures is by His power and determination,
our popularity and success is through
His good fortune. We are God's in every
way and the sway of our lives is His too so it is sheer lunacy to get bent out
of shape over the wage He gives you...it is far more than He needs to give and
it is perfect in its ultimate good. What
if those workers, instead of moaning about the coin handed them at the end of
the day rejoiced instead that it was a coin and it had the blessing of God
stamped upon it. The coin could become a
thousand coins in a moment as the Father determined and it could be kept at one
because the one was more likely to bring happiness than ten or ten
thousand. Who would in their right
mind want van Gogh's great talent at the cost of acquiring at the same time
his misery or would beg incessantly for Hitler's power to attract a crowd and
have along with it his filthy end. And
on the other hand, how many of us shoot for Stephen's lone convert as the end
game to our work...Imagine the child complaining about the terrible drive down
to L.A. just as his father pulls into the parking lot at Disneyland.
But he answered one of them, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you..." Matthew 20: 13a NIV
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