august 17

And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:19

I remember hearing that there is a difference between ‘wants’ and ‘needs.’ And God promises us that he will take care of our needs, whereas wants were things he was more interested in curing us from.

As it says in Psalm 23 – the Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want.

In other words if you are a Christian it is a sin to want anything.

Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet...

Thou shalt not want. It's the 11th Commandment.

I’ve used this line of reasoning on my daughter who has no problem wanting things. I say, Anna Rose, there is a difference between wants and needs. I promise to take care of your needs. Wants on the other hand are discretionary.

What’s discretionary, she asks. It means they are more likely to happen if you stop asking me for them, I say.

There is a problem with all this logic of course.

Because whether I want to or not, I often get Anna Rose what she wants. However the biggest problem with the wants v. needs logic is that it’s not true.

First of all, God doesn’t give us what we need. Most of the time, he gives us way more than we need.

For instance, the amount of calories a person needs to survive ranges between 600 – 1000 calories per day. The USDA recommends adult males should eat between 2000 and 2500 calories and women 1800 and 2300 calories per day. Look in your refrigerator and cupboard when you get home, count the calories and see if God has provided enough food for just your needs. He not only has covered your needs of course, he has provided enough to cover the USDA recommendations twice over. In fact, he has probably provided enough sustenance for you to eat too much.

Here is another need. Water. You go anywhere to practically any faucet in this country and there is an unlimited supply. All doctors recommend is 2 quarts. And even that amount is debatable.

How about shelter? A shack would suffice. How many of us live in a shack?

The point is that God doesn’t give us just what we need. And if you find yourself beginning to think you ‘need’ that four bedroom house with air conditioning and a pool, you need to go on a mission trip and wake up and see how the rest of the world lives.

That’s the other thing. There are people. People who believe in God. People that God loves. That Jesus died for. Who will die today because they don’t have what they need. There are children who will die today because God did not provide for them what they needed.

We can debate this if you like. There is enough food and water in this world for everybody. But how does that affect the little Haitian child who is dying today because her mother doesn’t have any milk for her and so she has to give her contaminated water, which will give her dysentery, which will kill her.

The fact is that God doesn’t give us what we need. He gives some people more and some people less. This would be a good time to recall the moment Jesus fed the more than 5,000. These people were in need. They hadn’t eaten for three days, and remember what Jesus says: “You give them something to eat.”

But although it is very important, I’m not here today to tell you how God wants you to fix the imbalance…in fact, I’m not sure if that is the main point from Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000. Because, from the disciples perspective, the big take home for them was the fact they had so many leftovers! Jesus, once again, provides to the point of waste – where I’m sure there were people somewhere on the other shoreline of Galillee starving to death.

All this to say, God certainly cares about our needs. But as Jesus points out, even bad parents do that. However, and this is radical when you think about the implications, what God goes out of his way to show us is that he also cares about what we want.