SoulWork
Love of Unimaginable Proportions
What to do when you find yourself praying to the quid pro quo god.
Mark Galli | posted 3/04/2010 08:50AM
A couple of recent conversations suggest how hard it is to exorcize the quid pro quo god. Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase meaning "something for something." The quid pro quo god is one who does something for us if we do something for him, and the one who refuses to do something for us, or even punishes us, if we fail to do something for him.
Put this way, it seems impossible that anyone in their right mind would believe in such a god. The rub, of course, is that none of us are in our right mind—that's one of the effects of sin. And one reason we're attracted to the quid pro quo god is that he's a god we can get our minds around. He makes sense. He seems reasonable and fair: We do our part, he does his, and all will be well.
The problem is our part, which we tend not to do well at all. And when repeated efforts at doing our part fail, we discover that the quid pro quo god turns out to be a demon. Naturally, we try to exorcise this demon without success.
For example, I received a moving e-mail from a reader who, though she recognizes how distorted her view of God is, cannot shake off the distortion. She says that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder; her obsession is a fear that every secular enjoyment is a sin and, she says, "unless I give them up, God will surely discipline me." By "secular enjoyment," she means things like listening to classical and country music, and collecting classic fashion magazines (Vogue, Harper's Bazaar).
Then she writes, "My husband passed away a few years ago and, to this day, I cannot get out of my head that God took him because I could not get rid of the above things. … You cannot imagine how I fear that perhaps God took the most important person in my life to discipline me for idolatry."
In fact, I can imagine it. Because I think we're all disciples of the quid pro quo god to one degree or another.
A friend—with no obsessive-compulsive bone in his body—told me recently that he feels he is stuck in a job he doesn't like because of the quid pro quo god. He likes many parts of the job, but there are some areas he despises, and he simply avoids doing them. He feels a stirring within that he should be doing something else with his professional life. But he feels that the quid pro quo god is not opening up new opportunities for him because of his failure to perform well in those despised responsibilities.
Then there is the pastor friend who feels that his small church will never grow because he battles on and off with pornography.
And on it goes. Every one of us has a secret sin and a private fear about that sin—that it's the cause of some hardship or the reason we're not being blessed in some way.
Most of the time, we realize this is a demonic lie. As Jesus said, God sends rain on the just and the unjust—that is, whether rain happens to be a blessing or a curse, it has nothing to do with our behavior. This is one of those biblical ideas that daily life verifies.
Think about the megachurch pastors who didn't merely look at pornography but carried on affairs and who nonetheless were blessed with mega-growing churches.
And what about those of us who have gotten promotions or job offers that were a definite step up in the world—and yet we recognized we were not really qualified for the position! And we took it anyway!
And what about the many loving, godly spouses who have lost a partner.
And finally, what about that fellow from first-century Galilee, who by all accounts did everything right and absolutely nothing wrong, who abided by all the dictates of the quid pro quo god and still ended up dead in the prime of life.
March (Web-only) 2010, Vol. 54
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