Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t anymore, but I used to. Do you know what my number one resolution was almost every year? “I want to get closer to God.”
But as every year passed, I never took the steps toward making that connection. I didn’t go to church, my prayer life was non-existent, and I definitely didn’t read my Bible.
However, around 2010, my desire for a relationship with God grew even stronger. I was desperately seeking to know my purpose—I guess you could say I was having an existential crisis, like Barbie. So, I pursued God even harder for these answers.
I finally started looking for a church. I began to pray more, and I started reading my bible. I was searching HARD for the answers. “Why am I here, Lord? What do you want me to do with my life?” But it seemed like the harder I searched, the less I could see. I grew so frustrated because everyone else around me seemed to have these “spiritual epiphanies” except me.
Then, one day, in true God-like fashion, He did what He always does, He had someone speak a message that applied directly to me:
Matthew 6:33: But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Even though I’d heard this verse repeated a million times before, its meaning never struck me. I never understood what it meant until that moment because, again, that’s what God does. God was basically telling me to seek Him and His kingdom first, and everything else would fall into place. There was just one thing: I had no idea what it meant to seek His kingdom.
If you grew up in church between the 1960s and the 1990s, it was all about the prosperity gospel, which taught us that our faith equals material and financial success. Bible verses like James 4:2, “You do not have, because you do not ask,” had many Christians thinking that this applied to material wealth. So many verses similar to this one were misinterpreted as all about us when the Word is about God. Only through reading His Word can we learn who He is, who He created us to be, and how He wants us to show up in this world. But our perception has been skewed. Through false, harmful teachings, we’ve come to view the Bible as a book of genie requests and God as our own personal genie. But when those genie requests didn’t work for us or the people around us, many wandered off to false gods, just like the Israelites did when their impatience took over and their faith failed.
I’m trying to say that the Bible doesn’t “work for us” because it was never intended to. It’s not a book of commands to pray to God to get Him to move on our behalf.
God wants a relationship with us and wants us to want Him more than we want things from Him. It’s just that simple, but we have to get out of our own way. And since the prosperity gospel has taught us all wrong, we must be willing to forget what we think we know to understand and absorb what is.
Let me leave you with this: What if someone came to you daily seeking things? This person hasn’t taken the time to get to know you. There’s even a whole book written about you that they can read to know you better. But instead of reading it to get to know you, they read it to try and figure out how they can benefit from knowing you. They are more interested in knowing what you can do for them than caring about who you are. That’s the perspective most of us were taught to have about God, and when He didn’t show up for us, we decided He wasn’t real instead of thinking maybe we’re the ones who’ve got this God thing all wrong.
When Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33 to seek the Kingdom of God first, he’s saying to us, “Hey, come sit with me, spend some time with me. Get to know me and who I am, and I will take care of all that other stuff that you concern yourself with on a daily basis.”
It’s okay if you struggle with skepticism of the Bible. Pray about that. Ask God to help you with that. Just come to Him honestly. Let him know you have doubts and that you’re skeptical because I’ll tell you a secret: He already knows you’re skeptical anyway.
I hope this has helped to shift your perspective and look at the Bible in its proper context. Remember, it’s not a book of Genie requests. It’s a book that shows you (among many other things) who God is, who He created you to be, and how to experience the kingdom of heaven here on earth until the two are joined together once again (that’s another topic for another day).
A Girl's Guide To God 