God’s will is that human beings should enter into a moral relationship with him. All his covenants are for this purpose. “Why doesn’t God save me?” you ask. He has saved you, but you haven’t entered into a moral relationship with him. “Why hasn’t God answered my prayer?” He has answered it, but this isn’t the point. The question you must answer is, Will I step into a moral relationship with him? All of God’s great blessings are finished and complete, but they aren’t mine until I enter into a relationship based on his covenant.
Entering into a moral relationship with God requires exertion on my part. Just as God went beyond himself in his relationship with humanity, becoming flesh for our sake, so I must go beyond myself in my covenant with him. I can’t just sit back and wait. Waiting for God is like unbelief; it means that I lack faith in him, that I’m waiting for a specific thing to happen so that then I can have faith in that. God will never do the thing I’m waiting for, because that isn’t the basis of his relationship with humanity.
Faith in God is the rarest thing. Most of us have faith only in our feelings. We don’t believe God unless he places something in our hand, something we can point to and say, “Now I believe.” There’s no faith in that. God says, “Turn to me and be saved” (Isaiah 45:22), not “Turn to what I’ve given you.”
When I truly enter into a covenant relationship with God, letting go of everything else, I have no sense of having achieved something by my own merit. There’s no human ingredient in it at all, just an overwhelming feeling of being brought into union with him, the whole thing transfigured with peace and joy.
