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What if we have been eating all kinds of junk food, and when we have become obese we pray for a miraculous return to normal size? What if we fooled around all the year and prayed that we would pass the exam in first class? What if we spent our money carelessly and prayed that God should miraculously wipe out our debts? Imagine if God answered all such prayers! We will have a world where everyone will be indulging themselves and getting all the consequences removed, encouraging everyone to indulge more!

"Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Ga.6:7). Just like the law of nature that says if we drop something it will fall down, this is a law that God has set for mankind. The more serious the negative consequences our actions can produce, the more careful we will be to avoid such actions. Isn't this law good? When we are young, we don't have much first hand knowledge of how this law works, and so we imagine that 'nothing will happen' whatever we do! But the older we grow, we experience more and more of the consequences of the wrong choices we make, and we wish we had never made those choices. On some rare occasions God may miraculously wipe off the consequences in answer to our prayer. But what happens more often is that God allows us to face consequences that will teach us and others who see us to make to make wiser choices. We can't blame God for not answering our prayers in this context, because He is wise in letting us reap what we have sown.

We can begin to learn many precious things from God when we begin to acknowledge all our sins, mistakes and folly before Him, instead of blaming our parents, circumstances and other people. It may be that we have spent all our life blaming others that we find it extremely difficult to take any blame on ourselves. But God's word is very clear that we have all sinned (Ro.3:23). The first thing God wants from us is to acknowledge our sins (Je.3:13). Don't be taken up with thinking of what others have done to us, even though that may be very tempting. We have to give an account only of ourselves to God (Ro.14:12). Leave the others to do that themselves.

However we may have messed up in the past, our future will be better if we have learnt our lessons from the past. Even if some of the consequences may never leave us on earth, we can make our life in heaven much better if we learn our lessons and change our attitudes and behaviour here.

How necessary for parents to teach their young children that there would be bad consequences for bad behaviour. That is what will prepare them for the future and save them from much harm. How foolish it is to protect them with a foolish understanding of love and keep overlooking their mistakes or covering up for them!

"Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time" (1Pe.5:6). In our context, this humbling means to acknowledge how foolish and wrong we have been, and to change ourselves now.

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