My friend, Robyn, has a cat called Mabs. Mabs greets Robyn wildly every day when she gets home from work, purring and rubbing up against her legs. This is also Mabs’ way or demanding food, which Robyn promptly gets and places in a bowl in the enclosed porch – Mab’s domain.
However, when Robyn goes back inside the house, Mab’s invariably follows her, continuing to madly purr, rub and meow. At which point Robyn retorts, “Mabs, you stupid cat, your bowl is just through that door full of yummy food – just go and eat it!” Yet it still usually requires her to pick up Mabs, take her out to the bowl, and just about rub her nose in it, to get her to register the food, eat and enjoy!
Sometimes we can be like Mabs! Paul tells us that we have been blessed in Jesus with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms (Eph 1:3 – often summarised as “salvation and fullness of life“), yet we can go about our lives as though we have little or no good things to celebrate. With this we also agitatedly cry out and complain that we deserve much more.
If God has already given us every possible good gift. The only things that can stop us knowing and enjoying them are: 1. not accepting that we are desperately in need of God’s gifts because we think we are managing ok by ourselves; or, 2. we haven’t seriously tried trusting that every blessing is already ours, and living as though this is true.
Let’s see how great our need is, and not pretend that we can “make it” by ourselves; and trust that God will enable us to see and enjoy every good gift that He has given to us in Jesus. Our “bowl” is full of “yummy food”, and we need to “just go and eat it“!
Grace upon grace, Jonathan.