God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
God delights to give His children “every good…and every perfect gift” (Jas. 1:17), but if the physical blessings we desire were always and immediately given at our request, God would become nothing more than a big slot machine in the sky, and our prayers would become meaningless tokens mechanically fed into an apparatus as a means to achieve our whims with which we have no relationship. God would receive no glory, and we would pray our souls into a black hole. Whether God answers our prayers with a “no” or “not yet” or “yes,” His goal is to draw us closer to Himself in a relationship so that we might view Him as our ultimate reward.
Conscience is to the soul what pain is to the body. We would like to avoid pain as much as possible, but at the same time we recognize that pain is a gift from God. If you didn’t have pain, you would destroy yourself. Pain is critical to physical preservation. And so the conscience is critical to spiritual preservation.
