God by default wants to bless us
There are many examples in the Bible of God punishing people when they did not listen to Him. So it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking God is always looking for reasons to punish us. The more I have been reading the Bible and praying, the more I see that in fact, it's exactly the other way around - God by default wants to bless us. We are His children. He wants us to have good things for us spiritually. Again, this is different to giving us the equivalent of a bunch of candy, which I have written about before . Even in the book of Job, where Job suffered an incredible series of calamities, none of these came from God. They all came from Satan. This is not to say that God didn't punish people - there are plenty of examples of that in the Bible too. The message I'm trying to get across here is that God by default wants to bless us. Again, blessings are things which are good for us. Often these may take the form of spiritual gifts, such as wisdom, but can take the...