It’s not unusual to want God to be good to us.
We want Him to give us good things, remove trials from our lives, and prepare the path that we need to walk.
We want these things because we want our lives to be easy, and “fulfilling.” We want our lives to be comfortable.
And while it may be natural to want these things, it is perhaps equally as natural to focus on the wrong outcome of them.
More often than not, we want God to be good for what it does for us. But God’s goodness is not just about us. Perhaps it would be fair to say that God’s goodness is not primarily about us. God’s goodness is about Him.
The Psalmist got this. In Pslam 67:1-2 it is written:
May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us, Selah
that your way may be known on earth,
your saving power among all nations.
Did you catch it? The purpose of God’s graciousness and blessing is so that His fame may increase; it is so that as a result, more people will know Him.
That means that the blessings God gives us aren’t about us, they are about Him. One of the ways that God uses our lives to make Himself known is through the good gifts He grants us.
If we had this focus, would it change the things we asked for? If we were concerned with more people knowing God as a result of the blessings He gave us, would it alter our requests?
I tend to think it would. I think we would be less concerned with a comfortable life, and more focused on a God-honoring one. I think, like the Psalmist, our concern would be with God’s face shining upon us – that God would be pleased with the life that we live. And that as a result, God would be made known.