“For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.”     – Psalms 84:11

One of the foremost arguments when discussing the concept of favor is that it’s works-based. That we can manipulate God’s willingness to dish out gobs and gobs of favor based on how we act or what we do. This idea is half correct.

On the one hand, God is a generous, loving God who wants to give us good things. And He is the one who controls the favor, not me. He’s the only one who provides for all my needs. My part is to just reach out and accept what He’s freely given. And that can prove to be difficult.

It’s not easy to fully comprehend that He genuinely wants to give good things to me, to bless me beyond anything I could conceive of. It’s also not easy to trust that He’s going to meet my needs, regardless of what my circumstances may look like. Because let’s face it, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we’re just not convinced everything’s going to work out in the end.

God provides us with everything – absolutely everything. (“What do you have that you did not receive?” 1 Corinthians 4:7) We can no more manipulate Him to give more favor than we can get Him to give us more oxygen each day. Or make the sun shine more. Or make the sky bluer. These things are all freely given, and in the same way they can’t be increased, we also can’t earn any of them. The only thing that makes us “blameless” in the earlier verse is our identity in Jesus Christ. So nothing we do can make God love us more than He already does.

But what we do moment by moment CAN influence His desire to favor us with more than we deserve. Just as a parent would want to reward a child for their obedience and wise or generous decisions, God wants to reward those who live according to His will. It’s simple cause and effect.

Kevin