There Are Some Things You Should Never Trust Jesus For

That was a statement I made standing before 150 high school students one Sunday morning at my church, a few years back. I didn’t throw that line out just to get their attention. I meant it.

In the weeks preceding that Sunday, I’d had two different conversations, which troubled me.

The first was a forty-something man, I didn’t know all that well, who was unemployed. After some small talk, he told me with great enthusiasm about this job he’d applied for. “I’m really trusting Jesus to get me this job”, he gushed hopefully. “Would you pray for me?” I did, of course, but alarm bells were going off.

The second was a high school girl in a small group at my church, whose parents were going through a messy divorce. She, too, was “trusting” Jesus to put her parents’ marriage back together again.

Now, I know what each of these people meant when they said they were trusting Jesus. They were asking God to do something they desperately wanted done in their lives. That’s fair. I do the same thing all the time.

But, here’s what bothered me and this is how I addressed it that Sunday morning.