Presumption

In a recent conversation that became a question and answer session about my motivation for adding on to my house—in style, no less—the topic of "presumption" arose. Presumption does, of course, exist, but it seems to me that presumption is taught primarily to keep would-be believers in bondage to fear.

The theory of presumption is that our ideas are bigger than God’s ideas, which is about as false a premise as you’re ever going to find. Abram merely wanted a son, and God called him the father of nations. He would have been satisfied with any son, but God insisted on giving him a son through the beautiful and beloved woman who had freely chosen to be his wife. Moses was resigned to being a shepherd in a foreign country, but God pressed him into becoming the savior of his nation. The Israelites wanted a slightly lighter load, when God had in mind to give them a land of their own, and not just any land, but a fabulously fruitful, wonderful land. And that is just a short list (I didn’t even make it out of Genesis!) of the occasions when God’s ideas were far bigger than the ideas of the human beings He was working with.

The incident of presumption that I’ve recently read about doesn’t involve what we might think of as "inflated faith" (having ideas that are bigger than God’s) but rather unbelief. Perhaps I could call it a faith based on fear.

The event was the Israelite’s first visit to Canaan. The spies brought back the report of how wonderful the land was, and the nation’s response was that it was too much for them to conquer; they wanted to go back to Egypt, or die in the wilderness. When God, in His wrath, said, "Very well. If you want to die in the wilderness, you may. I’ll give you exactly what you wished for,’ they panicked. At that point, they weren’t pressing in because they had believed God, they pressed in because they were afraid of the punishment He had prescribed. They weren’t in sync with God’s heart, and that was referred to as presumption.

I can tell you that the only way to keep in sync with God’s heart is to communicate intensely with Him frequently. Because it is God’s heart that we be continually conquering our circumstances, our circumstances will always be capable—without that intense communication, that is—of getting us out of sync with God. We are called to bring God’s will from heaven into earth, which means that what we see around us will generally contradict God’s will—otherwise we’d have nothing to do. There is nothing "out there" that will let us know God’s heart, and keep us in faith and out of presumption.

So if you’ve been taken by an idea that is bigger than what you’re comfortable with, don’t discard it, or shrink it out of fear of being presumptuous. It may be God’s heart.

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