GOD'S TRUST IN US
Our trust in God seems so right, so natural—of course God is to be trusted. That doesn’t seem astonishing but God trusting in us? Now that’s astonishing because we’re told that he knew human nature, knew its limits and its capacity for deviousness! (John 2:24-25) He was no fool and there were occasions when he knew people weren’t up to being trusted and yet…
I made promises I never kept, vowed with blood-red earnestness and broke my commitment and have nevertheless been trusted by people who saw more in me that my failures. I’m not sure if there’s anything in life that’s sweeter than that. I wonder if there is.
We need to exert ourselves to be trustworthy, don’t you know, because as Paul reminds us that’s what’s required of servants of God. (1 Corinthians 4:2—“pistis”, trustworthy, faithful) What a nonsense it would be if we were to think that it’s all right to care nothing about letting people down, about having them depend on us, grievously disappointing them and then dismissing it with a shrug. Their disappointment would be real but surely our casual way of treating them would be even more painful to them. A pox on that glib dismissal of obligation and on the callousness that would treat trusting people’s hearts like that.
God sees all this and while we can be unfaithful he remains faithful. More than that, we can prove faithless over and over again and he will continue to trust us and call us to be faithful in the matter. What do you make of a text like Isaiah 6:5-9?
Isaiah has joined the people in their unbelief though his didn’t take the form theirs did. They completely distrusted God and appealed to a foreign nation and its gods to deliver them while Isaiah believed in God but thought God must have righteous and powerful king Uzziah as his instrument. The leprous king Uzziah dies, Isaiah is in panic but is then convicted by a vision of God enthroned rather than an empty throne. God’s prophet confesses his unbelief and is forgiven. The word goes out immediately that God is in need of someone to be his spokesman, Isaiah pleads to be given the job and God says, “Go!”
This is so like God, isn’t it? Israel, so faithless generation after generation, and God still willing to have them work with him for world redemption. (Isaiah 49:1-6 and Acts 13:46-48, for example)
I wish we could worry less about our maybe stealing God’s glory! It won’t happen! It’s true that sometimes we hear preachers (and others) who more often than not talk about themselves rather than about God and we shake our heads in bitter disappointment, feeling we’re being robbed. God is not as anxious about his glory and reputation as we are. Right from the early days of Christianity people like the brilliant and educated Celsus went on and on about the pathetic nature of those that Jesus drew around him (Celsus overstated his case, of course). But Jesus didn’t and doesn’t care. He draws them and doesn’t mean to leave them as he found them though he loves as he finds them, and loved them even before he found them. He has little interest in education, social status, gender, wealth or any of these things that count much with us poor blind people.
Shamelessly, but not foolishly, he travels around with his gospel looking for people he can trust. He is looking for those who are willing to throw their “stubborn ounces” on to the scale on his behalf, to help him complete his Father’s wondrous enterprise. He sees many of us and he knows that this isn’t our time, knows that we won’t gladly gut it out if it comes to having to do that. And then he catches sight of you and tells himself that this is one he is looking for; one he can trust. And in the truth of his gospel he chooses you!
I know this happens. It has happened to me and I’ve seen it and heard it so many times. Have you never told the Lord Jesus straight to his face that it would be better for his own sake and for the Father’s gracious purpose if he passed you by, that you are more a handicap than a helper, more part of the problem than the solution?
And yet here you are, still soldiering on because he will not drop you and he will not relieve you of the commission he laid on you. He believes in you with an almost incredible loyalty! You’ve already seen that in him, haven’t you!
To be forgiven, graciously and fully is staggeringly wonderful and then to be trusted to be faithful—that’s almost beyond belief. And yet, wise and loving people are both forgiving and trusting others all the time and if they being flawed and very sinful can do it, and often are doing it, why should we be surprised that God is always doing it?
I know it’s tempting for others to forgive us and yet keep a very close eye on us—at times this must be the way wise people will work with us—wary and not yet ready to trust us completely, especially in the areas of our vulnerability. Sensitive sinners are themselves tempted to take a back seat, to avoid involvement in honorable and worthwhile endeavors. Shame paralyzes! They’re afraid of people thinking they are not taking their sin seriously enough if they eagerly get back into the fight too soon. (“Look at him. Didn’t take him long to get over what he did.”) However difficult it is for those of us who are like that, God would call us to get up and get on with his work and gut out our inner concerns and the outer frowns. We're tempted to think, "How dare he/she speak!" But in light of a sinful world's awful need and the Lord's call to us to gospel, isn't the more fundamental question, "How dare we not speak?"
The Lord Jesus called Matthew, a taxman who collaborated with the occupying forces, and whatever laughter or cynicism that generated in those who knew Matthew, the amazing thing is, he got up and followed Jesus and left his tax-stand and that entire life behind. Nobody thought he had it in him until Jesus called for it! They knew him—Jesus knew him better.
Once more, Jesus was no fool and knows how fickle we can be and still speaks to us as if he expected us to respond well. It was no foolish hope. You’ll remember the time when Pilate, trying to get out of the bind he was in, asked the crowd to choose between Barabbas and Jesus. The crowd hoarsely cries out, “Barabbas!” And when he asked, “What about Jesus?” Silence! Until someone yelled, “Crucify him!” And the crowd joined in. The Master had given them good news, good gifts, all his time and energy and understanding and yet they called for his hanging. “They don’t know what they’re doing, Father,” he said, asking for their forgiveness. It wasn’t a vain hope for later, tens of thousands, Luke tells us in the book of Acts, confessed they were wrong and gave their trusting lives to the Lord Jesus.
Look, it makes sense that our fellow-sinners are not always able to trust us—we’re going to have to live with that because that’s a mark of their own limitations. They aren’t God and we shouldn’t hold them responsible for not being God! But this doesn’t give us sinners the right to shrug at our limitations as if they weren’t just that—marks of our unlikeness to the Lord Jesus. We’re not God but we aren’t excused the call to imitate him as beloved children and to pursue his likeness as part of our life with him. (Ephesians 5:1-2)
It won’t hurt us to remember his joyful shock when he found astonishing and simple faith in the heart of a Roman soldier who loved a servant. (Luke 7:1-9) It will help us to remember that he trusted the loud-mouthed and cursing Peter, who had denied him. Jesus had his affirm three times what he denied three times and then he gifted Peter with a re-commission to feed his sheep and lambs. (John 21:15-17)
I like to imagine God approaching Job at the end of the sore times and hear Job saying to God, “You know, there were times when you made it difficult for me to believe in you.” I like to imagine God smiling and saying, “Isn’t that interesting, you made it easy for me to believe in you.” It’s because of his loving refusal to give up on us that people write such poems as this.
Because of Thy strong faith, I kept the trackWhose sharp-
set stones my strength had well-nigh spent;
I could not meet Thy eyes if I turned back; So on I went.
Because Thou wouldst not yield belief in me,
The threatening crags that rose my way to bar
I conquered inch by crumbling inch—to see The goal afar.
And though I struggle toward it through hard
years,
Or flinch, or falter blindly, yet within,
“You can,” unwavering my spirit hears;
And I shall win.
No comments:
Post a Comment