Only One Thing Is Needful: Choosing the Good Part

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about how God desires to meet our most crucial need. It is a need that we seldom contemplate as so often our prayer life is laden with petitions to have temporal needs satisfied and frequently we are discouraged with how God chooses to answer or not answer our requests. Perhaps the very things we are asking for are not the things that God most wants to give us.

When examining the Scriptures it is hard not to notice that when Jesus intervened in a life, a need was not just met, or a prayer answered, but a life was changed. Jesus did not just perform miracles for the sake of alleviating some discomfort or ailment but to display his love. It was Jesus’ love that motivated his acts of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and resurrecting the dead. For you see everything Jesus did was to give people what they really needed – Him. In fact, every circumstance that comes into a person’s life whether they are a believer or not is designed by God for the sole person of bringing that individual to Him. It is God’s will that no one perish (John 3:16) and it is in Him alone that we find perfect peace (Philippians 4:7). The Bible itself is the divine communicating with man. Every book details God’s action toward man, not man toward God. It is God who is reaching down to man continually to bring man to Himself.

The greatest blessing God can bestow is not helping us pay a bill, fix a broken relationship, or heal our wounded bodies, but to give us a new revelation of Himself. It is interesting to notice that the one thing that Moses asked for when he was commissioned by God to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land was a greater revelation of God’s glory (Exodus 33:18). He did not ask for strength, provisions, or more men. He asked for God Himself. Moses acutely understood what we so easily miss at times. Nothing is impossible for God (Luke 1:37). As God reveals Himself to us, we truly receive everything we have ever sought but so often we get caught up in the circumstances of life and miss God’s still, small voice that is trying to speak to us of His great glory. It is no wonder that when Moses met with God on Mount Sinai his face shone so brightly that he had to wear a veil. Such is the effect of a personal encounter with the Living God.

When this truth permeates our life, our prayer life will change. We will begin to pray for spiritual growth, discernment, and obedience instead of the next promotion, new house, or lavish vacation. We will no longer look toward Wall Street as the barometer of economic certainty but toward the Cross of Calvary. For it is at the Cross that we find what we truly need – unconditional, unfathomable, incomprehensible love. It is here on the hill of Golgotha that we discover our Savior, our Redeemer, our Blessed Hope and are able to join in unison with the Apostle John as he closes the Book of Revelation with the following plea, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” - St. Augustine