Cause and Affect

You know that “Check Engine” light that goes on and stays on if your car has more than 25,000 miles on it? I heard a new theory on why it happens.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” he told me, as I offered a suggestion about how to reset it and make the light go off. “I pray every morning, but sometimes I forget. I noticed it started coming on when I hadn’t prayed for a couple of mornings in a row. Now it just stays on all the time.” He concluded philosophically, “I must have done something wrong.”

Do you think God sends people messages through the warning lights on the dashboards of their cars? Do you normally see your life as a series of events that are determined magically by how you are living?

I confess I still have this kind of primitive, superstitious thinking sometimes. There are days when everything seems to be going wrong. After the third or fourth shoe drops a thought may crawl into my head that the deterioration of the day may be due to something I’ve done or left undone.

I will not tell you here that nothing ever happens in your life that is an indirect cause of something you have done; especially something you have done wrong. I will tell you here, however, that this is not the way God generally calls to us.

I want this to be clear; whatever circumstances your life has, and whatever message you are reading into them, here is the message God wants you to hear and receive: God loves you, no matter what you have done. Paul wrote in Romans 8:1 that “there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.”

If your car’s dashboard or anything else is telling you something, and you think it is from God, it must agree with this.