I grew up amid the Kansas natural gas fields. Refineries gleamed in the dark night like distant metropolises. Their waste fuel stacks blazed with eternal flames celebrating superfluous abundance. Abandoned salt mines stored gargantuan reserves; supply lines snaked off in every direction through the waving fields of wheat.
When I bumped up the thermostat on a frigid Kansas night or filled a tub with hot water, I never gave a second thought to the reservoir somewhere at the other end of our gas pipe. My father, who worked in the industry, undoubtedly had a different perspective … but limits to the reserve never entered my mind.
It’s a different perspective being hooked to a tank rather than a pipeline. You realize, that you have no idea how many hot showers, loads of laundry, meals or sinks full of dishes are bottled up in that little can. It just doesn’t look like much … it looks like scarcity.
This a microcosm of the difference between relying on God’s resources and my own. For … going against the immoral grain of society, for persevering in marriage, for resisting my own fallen tendencies, for fighting off emotional fatigue … my resources are limited and exhaustible. But there is a pipeline of grace that was opened by the cross of Christ. It leads to an inexhaustible reservoir filled with God’s sustaining power for life and obedience. When I burned through resources in my youth, I depleted a vast, but finite supply of gas. That is not true with God’s power for living. In fact, as we learn to rely on his supply, our ability to access it grows. Turn up the heat, bathe your life in God’s abundant grace, wash every aspect of your character clean, drink in His blessing … taste and see that the Lord is good. There need not be scarcity in your relationship with Him.
2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
(see also Ephesians 1:3; 1:17-18; 3:16 and Philippians 4:19)
