We all do it! We read the Bible, sometimes so fast that when we are finished, we couldn’t tell someone what we just read. Growing up in a pastor’s home, in church, and in Christian school, I did a lot of that. It was never personal. I don’t really remember being taught to study the Bible for personal spiritual growth or to understand my God more, I only remember being taught to read it because it was the right thing to do…well that didn’t help me at all…nor did it help the 90% of my “Christian” School classmates that are either sitting in a chair in some church somewhere not using their gifts and talents for Christ, or they are off the Christian journey all together.
All of that to say, I was reading through Proverbs 30 yesterday and ran across this prayer from Agur. I have read Proverbs 30 before, but I never paid much attention to what it was saying: The entire prayer is great, but two areas stuck out to me, one I will blog about later after I have time to think about it, but here is the quote from verse 8b-9
“..Second, give me neither poverty nor riches! Give me just enough to satisfy my needs. For if I grow rich, I may deny you and say, “Who is the Lord?” And if I am too poor, I may steal and thus insult God’s holy name.”
Talk about Contentment! “Give me just enough to satisfy my needs.” This is a hard prayer to pray. Especially when it is so much easier to pray “God give me more!” “God bless me more!” Agur was content to have his needs met. When I read this, I said ‘Wow!’ because it jumped out at me, but I have to be honest, this is hard to grasp. At first I didn’t even highlight the verse because I didn’t want to be responsible to live it. It may just be because I live in America and the one with the most money and the biggest toys win. Honestly, God has provided for all of my needs, but I wonder if I lived in a third world country where poverty is the daily expectancy, would I be content with ‘just enough?‘ Ouch, this one is tough…
Good verse. What we need now is to get a Prayer of Jabez crowd and a Prayer of Agur crowd to duke it out! haha I’m just kidding of course. I’ve never been a fan of the way that people have used the Prayer of Jabez as way of trying to convince God to give them more. This more definately seems more in place with the way our mentality should be.
And about what you said at the beginning, I know exactly what you are talking about. When I younger, I used to force myself to read one chapter of the Bible each night before I would allow myself to crack open the latest Star Wars novel. I soon found myself just skimming quickly. When I was eleven, I discovered that my meal time prayers had become ritualistic and that I was just saying the same thing each time without so much as a thought. I decided that day that it was better for me to say no prayer at all than a false one. To this day, I will often not think to pray before eating, but if I do, I mean it and will take some time doing it.
Nick, I’m with you man. This is tough. The word “enough” seems to be absent form our lifestyle these days. Thanks for the challenge!