Articles
The Poverty of Our Faith
". . . the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe" (Ephesians 1:18,19).
WHY DO WE CONTENT OURSELVES WITH ONLY A SIP FROM THE LIMITLESS OCEAN THAT IS GOD?
It must be a source of sadness to our Creator that we don't even desire to know Him more fully nor to enjoy a greater measure of His goodness and glory. As the God who "is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Ephesians 3:20), He must surely marvel at our failure even to want the greater things He is able to give us. Our hearts have become pitifully small receptacles for His grace.
As finite creatures, we can never experience all that God is, but that fact is no excuse not to grow in our experience of Him. And if we're not growing in this way, we should look first at our own expectations. James diagnosed our problem when he wrote, "You do not have because you do not ask" (James 4:2). Since God is greater than even our greatest dreams, it is the meagerness of our true desires that holds us back. We're far too easily satisfied, and we "do not know what we should pray for as we ought" (Romans 8:26). So Charles Spurgeon gave good advice when he said, "We are poverty itself, and only All-Sufficiency can supply us . . . Be great in your experience of His all-sufficiency."
When it comes to seeing and experiencing more of God, we are certainly hindered by too little desire. But we're also hindered by too little ability. We don't have the spiritual vision to see any more than the smallest fraction of God's power, and so we see very little of what could be ours if we truly sought Him. This failure of vision should be on our minds when we pray. Nothing we can ask of God is more important than for the "eyes" of our understanding to be enlightened. We simply will not seek Him as we should until we see more clearly "what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe." These are things of such glory that when we see them, we'll want hearts and hands more capable of receiving them.
"If we be empty and poor, it is not because God's hand is straitened, but ours is not opened" (Thomas Manton).
