The Lord Will Provide: On Monday, in a conversation about aging, retirement, and the uncertainty of the future, I told two of the owners of the company where I had worked for more than thirty years that I wasn’t worried. The Lord had always provided for us, and I trusted that He would continue to do so. I believe I meant every word of it. But sincerity does not always mean we understand everything going on beneath our own words.
Later I began thinking about the savings, the house, the backup plans, and all the carefully calculated ways life could still work if something went wrong. I found myself wondering whether I was really saying, “The Lord will provide,” or something closer to, “The Lord will provide, and if things become difficult, I still have several other things to fall back on.” That led to a more uncomfortable question. Was my confidence really resting in the faithfulness of God, or had His faithfulness simply become the spiritual language I used to describe a future I had already worked very hard to secure? Had I been trusting the Lord, or simply thanking Him for giving me enough earthly security that trusting Him no longer felt particularly dangerous?
That is an uncomfortable distinction. “The Lord will provide” can be a confession of faith, but it can also become the language we place over a life already padded with enough security that we are never forced to ask what we actually mean by it. After that, “The Lord will provide” did not sound quite as simple as it had before. The words were still true, but they had become more searching. Instead of reassuring me about the future, they began revealing how little I may understand about what is really holding me up.
There is nothing wrong with preparing for the future. There is nothing spiritual about refusing to save, refusing to plan, or deliberately placing ourselves in unnecessary difficulty and then calling that dependence upon God. The house, the savings, and the things we have accumulated over the years may themselves be part of the Lord’s provision. Let’s not pretend otherwise. But perhaps that is exactly what makes the question more difficult. It is possible to receive all of these things from the hand of God and then, almost without noticing it, begin resting in those merciful provisions rather than in the One who gave them.
We can become very good at attaching spiritual language to circumstances that already make us feel secure. “The Lord will take care of us.” “God is faithful.” “He has never failed me.” Again, all of those things are true, but sometimes I wonder how much easier they are to say when the refrigerator is full, the bills are paid, the house is ours, and there is some money left in the bank. It is one thing to confess that the Lord will provide when we have already calculated several different ways in which provision might come. It may be another thing entirely when every calculation has failed. That does not mean the confession was false. Perhaps it simply means that our motives and our confidence are rarely as pure or uncomplicated as we imagine them to be.
Perhaps we are not nearly as dependent upon God as our language sometimes suggests. It is one thing to thank God for a full refrigerator, a paid bill, a home, or money in the bank. It is another thing to discover that our peace depends upon those things remaining exactly where they are. Somewhere along the way, gratitude for provision can become confidence in provision, and the transition may happen so quietly that we continue calling both of them faith.
So perhaps the real question is not, “Will the Lord provide?” He will. The harder question is whether I have decided in advance what His provision must look like. Am I trusting Him, or am I trusting that He will preserve the structure I have already built around myself? I do not know that I can answer that as confidently as I once could. But maybe there is mercy in discovering that, because it leaves less room for confidence in myself and more reason to look again to Christ. MPJ