Proverbs 30:7-9

Of all the things a person might pray for, this one asks for the middle. Not wealth — which almost everyone quietly wants and few would think to pray against — and not poverty either, but the unremarkable portion in between: <em>the food that is needful for me</em>, enough for the day and no more. It is one of the least ambitious prayers in Scripture, and one of the wisest, because of what Agur has noticed about himself.

He has seen that both ends of the ledger carry a spiritual danger, and named each one exactly. Fullness tempts us to forget — to grow so comfortable and self-supplied that God quietly becomes unnecessary, until we half-consciously ask <em>Who is the LORD?</em> Want tempts us the other way — toward the desperation that steals, that will profane anything holy just to survive. What is striking is that he treats prosperity as the more insidious risk, the one we would never think to guard against. We pray to be delivered from need. Almost no one prays to be delivered from having too much.

We know, if we are honest, that our sense of needing God tends to thin out exactly when life gets easy. The full barn quietly argues that we are the ones who filled it. So Agur asks for the one portion that keeps him leaning — enough that he is not driven to despair, little enough that he is not lulled into forgetting. Wisdom here is not a vow of poverty or a suspicion of plenty. It is the humility to know our own hearts well enough to ask for the amount we can actually hold without letting go of God.

Burroughs names the settled heart Agur is reaching for. Contentment is not finally getting the portion we would have chosen but a spirit that <em>freely submits to and delights in God's wise and fatherly disposal in every condition</em> — trusting that the measure handed to us, neither too much nor too little, comes from a Father's hand and is exactly what we need. Agur prays for the middle portion; Burroughs shows us how to receive any portion as the right one.