Do We Look at People or Things to Make Us Happy?

I am reading a study on the Minor Prophets by Hampton Keithley lV and I thought about how I used to look to men to make me happy. Husband or boyfriend. That was the person I felt I needed to feel loved, happy and whole. Of course, I was wrong. I needed all that from God. No human being could fill that need for anyone else. Here is an excerpt from the article on Hosea.

The Problem Explained

If we read between the lines in these references to Jeroboam and Jehu, we see the real problem. The problem was that they were pursuing their own agendas or goals and they changed their concept of God in the process because it was too painful to have the real God around.

Application: Are our own agendas more important than God? We need to recognize that we usually have internal agendas that are deeper than our worship experience.

First we need to back up to Jeremiah 2:27 to set the context. There we see further descriptions of their sinfulness and how they “had their own way.” It says, “They say to a tree, `You are my father' and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’” But in a time of trouble, they will say, ‘Arise and save us.’”

Ryrie points out that the words “tree” and “stone” refer to things used in the worship of Baal. So it seems more appropriate to apply this to how they looked to Baal to give them life and happiness. For us it refers to how we look to things or our spouses to give us life. We depend on our own efforts to make life work and when things don't work, we expect God to come through.

Israel was pretty bad. They totally forsook God. We often compare ourselves to them and think we aren't nearly so bad. We certainly haven't totally forsaken God. We certainly don't worship golden calves. Maybe we don't worship golden calves, but we have other false concepts of God and other things we seek after. Maybe we don't totally forsake God, but we mix our dependence on God with our dependence on other things.

We see nothing wrong with depending on our own resources and depending on our bank account, our work, our wife, our kids, our ministry to fulfill us. We only use God as a Force or Genie to help us in our pursuits. Listen to your prayers. How many times do you ask God to “HELP” you do something. When you do that are you saying that you can do most of it ... that you just need a little help to finish the task? It is man's natural tendency to want to make it on his own. Our natural tendency is to want to earn our salvation by being good. But even after we recognize that salvation is totally by faith, we still want to have lists of do's and don'ts. We think if we change our behavior we will be able to accomplish what we want. Whether it is overcoming depression or some bad habit.

We are determined to pursue our own self-interests, so we redefine God. We have decided what it means to really enjoy life - for most of us that is having enough money so we can buy all the things we think will make us happy - so we expect God to bless us.

For others it might be that perfect relationship with the opposite sex, because we think that person will be able to fill our deep longings, so we expect God to bring along the perfect mate. And when He does, and the marriage is not perfect like we had planned, What do we do? What do you do? When you pray for something and you don't get it, who do you blame? Do you blame God?

http://bible.org/seriespage/hosea