"Ten were cleansed, were they not?
Where are the other nine?
Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?"
Here is the peril of assuming we deserve things from God. We go out into the field and come back expecting the banquet. We are not at all surprised when blessings come but each occasion of suffering is a jarring surprise.
This is why it is so dangerous to have power. Power makes the sense of deserving come more naturally to us. It makes accountability harder to experience.
Because authority was given you by the Lord
and sovereignty by the Most High,
who shall probe your works and scrutinize your counsels.
The secret is a humility. It seems to be a theme we like to repeat here, but humility is the proper posture of the human before God. It correctly recognizes who we are and who God is. Humility avoids the errors we make when we believe that we deserve things. Once we believe that we begin, in our own small ways, to act like tyrants. And when we are frustrated by thinking we deserve what we don't get, we act like frustrated tyrants, who in turn act like frustrated children.
Instead, we receive every blessing as a gift under the tree of the Cross. This is unearned mercy. This is unmerited grace.
And one of them, realizing he had been healed,
returned, glorifying God in a loud voice;
and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him.
This doesn't lower our expectations of God. When the casual link between our deserving and his acting is broken in our minds we are free to expect even greater things of him because we are no longer the limiting factor in any way. Even our expectations for ourselves can increase, because we are no longer subject to our own limitations. We experience that apart from God we can do nothing, but with him all things are possible. We not only realize this truth. We desire it.
Desire therefore my words;
long for them and you shall be instructed.
It is a desire which God always honors. He will not love them lonely who seek him only.
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