This is part of my year-long series exploring human-centered alternatives to the spiritual promises in Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Today’s entry, “Ask If You Have Not Received”, promises that “everyone who asks receives” from God, claiming that spiritual begging from a position of “abject poverty” guarantees direct divine response and supernatural provision for those who truly ask.
Here’s a different approach:
When single mother Tanya lost her job as a restaurant server during the pandemic, her pastor told her she needed to ask God for help—not just pray casually, but truly “beg” from a position of spiritual poverty. “Everyone who asks receives,” he assured her. “God promises to provide for those who come to him in desperation.”
Tanya spent weeks in intense prayer, asking God for financial provision, for her unemployment benefits to come through faster, for a miracle job opportunity. She felt spiritually poor enough—three months behind on rent, choosing between groceries and her daughter’s asthma medication, facing eviction. If anyone qualified for God’s promised provision, surely it was her.
But the promised answers didn’t come. Her unemployment claim remained delayed in bureaucratic processing. No job opportunities materialized despite her prayers. The eviction notice arrived regardless of her spiritual begging.
Meanwhile, her neighbor Patricia took a different approach to Tanya’s crisis. Instead of encouraging more prayer, she provided practical help. Patricia researched local assistance programs and helped Tanya apply for emergency rent relief. She connected Tanya with a food bank and childcare cooperative. She shared job leads from her own network and helped Tanya update her resume for office work.
The “receiving” that transformed Tanya’s situation came not from divine response to asking but from human response to need. The rent assistance program provided immediate relief. The job training program prepared her for better-paying work. The food bank ensured her daughter’s nutrition while finances were tight.
When Tanya found stable employment as a medical office assistant, it wasn’t because God had answered her desperate prayers. It was because Patricia had helped her navigate practical resources and human networks. The “direct relationship” that sustained her wasn’t with a divine provider but with a community of people who showed up with concrete assistance.
Tanya realized that her months of spiritual begging had actually delayed her from seeking the human help that was readily available. The poverty that had qualified her for God’s supposed provision was the same poverty that qualified her for effective social services and community support.
The wisdom she gained wasn’t supernaturally granted but practically learned: that asking for help from real people with actual resources was more reliable than asking an invisible God for miraculous provision.
Reflection Question: When have you found that asking for practical help from people was more effective than asking for divine intervention?
This story is part of my upcoming book “The Undevoted: Daily Departures from Divine Dependence,” which offers 365 human-centered alternatives to the spiritual certainties in Chambers’ devotional. Each day explores how reason, community, and human resilience can address life’s challenges without requiring divine intervention.
God or Delusion? 