There are certain little religious expressions or sentiments you hear repeated so often that you start believing they’re based on Biblical truth, even if they aren’t. Three things we, as people of faith, really shouldn't say.





“God helps those who help themselves” is one such sentiment.





Well...that’s true insofar as it goes: yeah, sure, God helps people who participate in their own well-being. No problem there. You want to help yourself get better or stronger or kinder or more generous, sure, God’ll be more than happy to help you help yourself.





The problem is, that expression is often said so as to imply that the opposite is NOT true: that God doesn’t help those who don’t help themselves.





And – Biblically speaking – that’s just…how shall I say it?... mean-spirited b.s.





God is constantly helping those who cannot (or will not, or choose not) to help themselves. In other words, God is constantly helping the help-less. In fact you might say God is a God OF the helpless, not to mention the hapless, the hopeless and the homeless. In fact, those are -- we, in those times are! -- the people God helps the most.





So I wish that expression would go away.





Here’s another one: “Everything happens for a purpose (or reason).”





This sentiment is often spoken in a well-intended way. Like when it’s said to people undergoing confusing or disappointing news.





In those cases, I guess people are trying to convey the idea that “it’ll all work out in the end,” or that seemingly terrible situations at the time and in the moment can actually be blessings in disguise. Like when high school romances, or a job, ends, and you don’t end up actually spending The Rest of Your Life Together.





Okay, fair enough, if that’s all people mean, and that's the only time they say it.





But unfortunately, people also say this when people are undergoing serious personal tragedy or trying to make sense of some other wider tragic situation. Like when someone dies. And some (again, well-intentioned) person says a version of "Everything happens for a reason," such as “God needed him/her in heaven,” or “their time was up.” And a particularly perverted version of this is when someone’s child dies and they hear, “God needed another angel.”





Wrong. Wrong on so many levels.





While some things DO happen for “a reason” (known or unknown, revealed now or later, or never) that’s not the same thing as saying “everything” happens for a reason.









Here's something I wish I could write in the sky and get across to as many people as possible:





As Jesus did with the blind man, God can bring good out of tragic and terrible situations, but that is NOT the same thing as saying that God causes every tragic or terrible situation to happen in the first place.





So those are two faux-religious sentiments that are simply un-Biblical, and that I wish would just go away.





And here’s a third one: it’s one I’ll explore a bit more in my sermon coming up this Sunday at The Falls Church Episcopal , (which, by the way, is going to be the first part in a five-part series on the Lord’s Prayer, titled, “Lord, Teach us to Pray.”)





And that sentiment -- a third thing we shouldn't say -- is “You can’t bargain with God.”



