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, “Seek If You Have Not Found”, promises that genuine seeking with “your whole heart” and concentrated focus on God guarantees finding divine response through progressive purification and humble knocking at God’s door that will certainly be opened.
Here’s a different approach:
When David’s marriage began falling apart after fifteen years, his pastor urged him to “seek God with your whole heart” about reconciliation. “Narrow your interests until they are centered on God,” the pastor advised. “Concentrate, seek, and you will find God’s will for your marriage.”
David threw himself into spiritual seeking. He spent hours in prayer, fasted regularly, confessed every sin he could remember. He sought divine guidance about whether to fight for the marriage or accept the divorce his wife Sarah wanted. He knocked persistently at God’s door, waiting for supernatural direction.
Months passed without clear divine answers. David grew frustrated with God’s silence and began to question his own spiritual sincerity. Maybe he wasn’t seeking hard enough, wasn’t pure enough, wasn’t humble enough.
Meanwhile, Sarah took a different approach to their marital crisis. Instead of seeking divine intervention, she sought professional help. She researched marriage counselors who specialized in communication issues and found Dr. Martinez, whose evidence-based approach focused on practical relationship skills rather than spiritual solutions.
Sarah asked David to join her in counseling, but he insisted they should seek God’s will first. “We need to humble ourselves before God and let him show us the way,” he argued. Sarah went to counseling alone.
In therapy, Sarah discovered patterns she’d never recognized—how David’s conflict avoidance and her indirect communication style had created years of unresolved resentment. Dr. Martinez taught her to express needs clearly and set healthy boundaries. She learned that their problems weren’t spiritual failures requiring divine intervention but common relationship dynamics that could be addressed with better tools.
When Sarah filed for divorce, David was devastated. His months of spiritual seeking had yielded no divine guidance, no miraculous restoration, no opened doors. But Sarah had found what she was looking for—clarity about her needs, skills for healthier relationships, and peace with her decision.
David eventually realized that his spiritual seeking had been a way of avoiding the practical work their marriage needed. While he was waiting for God to provide answers, Sarah had been seeking real solutions from qualified professionals who could actually help.
The door that opened for Sarah wasn’t divine—it was the counselor’s office, where human wisdom and research-based interventions provided the tools she needed to make informed decisions about her life.
Reflection Question: When has seeking professional help or practical solutions been more effective than seeking divine guidance through spiritual disciplines?
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? 