God won't prove Himself to us.

This is so simple I'm surprised I haven't thought of this before. God won't force Himself on us, and therefore he won't prove Himself to us. That's why only a prayer of faith will accomplish anything. An answered prayer may in fact strengthen our faith, and years later we may remember that answer or miracle and it will anchor our faith for years or even a lifetime. But we had to have some amount of faith in the beginning.

"So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Rom 10:17. The beginning of faith comes from reading the Word, so that if you lack faith read the Bible and as you get to know God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son and their dealings and instructions for man, you begin to have faith and trust in our Creator.

I could say more, but why? It is very straightforward. I always wondered why God required faith in order to answer prayer. Now I know at least a key reason.

There have been times in history where many miracles were done, but in each faith was still required, even with Jesus personally ready to give healing and blessings. "And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith." (Matthew 13:58)

The Mote in my Idea

So many great ideas and companies are born because people wanted the product or service for themselves. We need something, and that thing does not exist yet. Or we interact with a provider of something, and they do it wrong or have such poor service that we decide to go into competition with them. Or we go to buy something and it simply costs more than we know it should, so we go create it, build it, do it - and a new company or idea is born.

Find a need and fill it, the saying goes, and what better need to find and fill than our own?

I think this motivating principal lies at the root of our tendency to be hypocrites - where we are finding the faults in others that are our own weakness and fault as well. Read on.

"And why do you look at the splinter in your brother's eye, and not notice the beam which is in your own eye?" Mat 7:3

But here is why we do that: Whatever our problems are, we are trying to improve and we're fighting our own bad behavior. Say we're trying to eat healthy. We may not be very good at eating healthy yet, in fact we may have just started some new willpower-testing regimen today, and we can hardly stand to see someone breaking the new rules we've just set up for ourselves, maybe downing junk food and soda, and our instinct is to jump all over them for it.

We've "geared up" mentally to wage war against the bad behavior in ourselves and when we see the "enemy behavior" we're going to start shooting, (unless we're self-aware enough to hold our tongue and recognize the source of our zeal).