If You Need Me, I’ll Call You

Sunshine bright with glory bathed our tiny backyard. Blue sky beckoned. Winter months had been long for our four-year-old son, and he was ready for play.

“If you need me, I’ll call you,” he shouted a split second before the screen door banged behind him. Its echo slammed inside my head.

I plopped down with a grin.

“If you need me, I’ll call you,” what kind of twisted reasoning was that?

Yet, something in the phrase niggled at me. Do I treat God that way, I wondered? Did my life sometimes display the arrogance of one whose need of God seesawed on circumstances rather than bankrupt heart need?

“Can a man be profitable to God? Surely he who is wise is profitable to himself.” Eliphaz asked Job (Job 22:2-3;ESV). “Is it any pleasure to the Almighty if you are in the right…?”

As right as Eliphaz’ twisted reasoning sounds at first, it angered God. He implied God, being so removed in His loftiness, didn’t regard man’s trivial concerns. It was false.

Eliphaz’ counseled, all suffering resulted from sin. He slid easily into the idea that righteous living makes life easy. But, Eliphaz’s shallow view of God’s Sovereignty restricted God into borders that declared what An Almighty God could or could not do or even should or should not do.

Eliphaz couldn’t conceive an uncontainable God, One that sifted even deep suffering through His Loving Hand. 

In John 15, Jesus reminds us, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5; ESV).

Am I guilty of backwards reasoning? Do I at times put myself in the place of God, calling on Him as if He is meant for my manipulations rather than I am meant for His glory? 

“If you need me, I’ll call you.”

Who am I apart from my Creator? What need other than Him do I really have?

The memory of a child’s mixed up sentence reminds me today of this truth. 

The Vine is my life’s blood.

In perpetual need I call.

Another recent article I’ve written about those childhood mixed up “sentences” is at just18summers. “Momma is Jesus Here?”