Is God good and can he be permanently trusted with our lives?
As people that call ourselves Christ-followers, we like to think and speak of ourselves as “people of faith” and yet more often than not, we do not necessarily count the cost of what it means to be people of faith. One of the things that I have had to struggle through and learn for myself is that there is in fact a risk that we take by being people of faith and placing the fate of our lives in the hands of somebody else other than ourselves. I think that part of the reason why Christianity is such a stumbling block to many is because of the charge to put one’s life in somebody else’s hands.
Society today is very self centered and the great deception of self centeredness is the notion that you can be self sufficient that you are therefore completely in charge of the events of your life. It is laughable to even think that there is a God up there silently behind the scenes orchestrating the events of the world. And so as Christ-followers we have to learn to buck the commonly held school of thought and hand the purpose and direction of our lives over to somebody other than ourselves.
This, I think, is part of what describes the so-called “leap of faith” - a paradigm shift in the understanding of who is in control of your life and for some people, that leap is too daunting.
If putting your faith and trust in God is a risk, therefore, then persons of faith take a huge risk. Not only do they take the risk of trusting in him, they take the risk of obeying him when he comes at them with outrageous requests and in the times that they call out to him, they take the risk of waiting for him in the hopes that he will do the right thing at the right time. Unfortunately, the more we become professional Christians, the less in tune we are to the risk of faith and the greater the tendency to take our lives back into our own hands.
The thoughts I shared earlier about the descent of a believer into a place of mistrust also have the propensity to wear away at our faith in the fact that God is in charge of our lives and his plan for us is good. The less convinced we are about our faith, the more we take back the control of our lives and instead of laying down our lives in risky faith - the kind that God calls us to - we start to do things the way we originally did and play things safe.
As believers in God, we have to bring ourselves to the point where we are certain that we can trust Jesus with our lives and with our futures even without the guarantee of success. In his word, he guarantees it, but our faith and trust in him has to grow to the point that we can say with confidence “Even if he slay me, yet will I still trust him”.
This is obviously easier said than done and in truth, the journey to this place of certainty about God’s character and plan for our lives is not an easy one.
In chapter 11 of hebrews, the writer makes mention of a bunch of people of faith. What the writer does not mention, however, is their transformational journey to the place of complete faith in God. The character that I love investigating and thinking about the most is Abraham and I would like to read the remarks that the writer makes about the faith of Abraham in this chapter of the book.
Please follow along with me from verse 8 of Chapter 11.
By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.
Listen also to what Paul writes about Abraham when he is speaking about his walk of faith to the Romans in chapter 4 of his letter.
The story of Abraham, his journey of faith and his interaction with God can be better seen in its context in Genesis and I would like to pick out just a few of those moments of interaction to give you a little bit of a snapshot into the life of this man of faith. So walk with me through Genesis and let’s start at chapter 12 of the book.
Genesis 12: 1 - 8
The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.
So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring [a] I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.
This is the first account of God’s interaction with Abraham. They MUST have had other interactions in the past and the only way I am able to hypothesize this is from Abraham’s reaction to God’s word to him. He obeyed.
But then something happens. All of a sudden, this man of faith who just left his home and moved far away under the presupposition that God was going to take care of him and bless him was suddenly scared when he got to Egypt. We read about this from verse 10 of the same chapter
Genesis 12: 10 - 20
Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you."
When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. And when Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels.
But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife Sarai. So Pharaoh summoned Abram. "What have you done to me?" he said. "Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, 'She is my sister,' so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!" Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.
What happened to this magnificent faith that the New Testament writers were talking about?
Lets take a look at another interaction between Abraham and God
Genesis 17: 1 - 8, 15 - 17
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, "I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. I will confirm my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers."
Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God."
God also said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her."
Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, "Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?"
By this time, Abraham had been walking mostly in obedience to God and even though he had had a few slip ups, God ups the ante and makes a covenant with him which is the covenant that we look to as gentiles grafted into the family of God. God even takes it several ridiculous steps further and promises that he shall reverse the effect of aging in both 100 year old Abraham and his 90 year old wife to the point that they shall have a child of their own. It is so ridiculous that Abraham falls to the ground laughing.
If he were instant messaging God, he would have typed the acronym ROTFLMBO!
The writers of Romans and Hebrews make Abraham out to seem like he was a person of incredible faith, but even he struggled through moments of unbelief, disobedience, and dishonesty and yet somehow he was able to come out on the other side and really trust God to do the impossible in his life. By the pretentious standards of many in the church, his unbelief would have been intolerable and his seeming lack of answers would have been attributed to his dishonesty. However, I am persuaded that the fact that he was able to move from a place of a lack of total trust in God and move to a place where he could trust him to give him a son at over 100 years of age truly is a leap of faith and perhaps this is why his story still lives on.
You see, while your personal circumstances may seem to invalidate the promises of God, Abraham’s life tells another story. It is so easy to get people fired up with a message about God’s promises over one’s life, but the truth of the matter is that the excitement quickly wanes when the journey from promise to answer takes a little more than a few years and countless hours of prayer.
Talking in abstracts sometimes makes it seem like the lessons are not applicable, so I would like to share with you a story from my own life.
When I first moved to Ottawa, I was on FIRE for the Lord. I had been commissioned by my home church in Uganda to come to North America and be planted as a catalyst for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. I also moved to Canada to further my education in computer science, and for a little bit of adventure, but primarily because I had responded to the call that had been made from the pulpit of our church to be a part of bringing the Gospel back to the continents that brought it to Africa. However when I got here, I found that the church - in particular the church leaders - were not willing to even let this overly presumptive Ugandan man serve in any capacity on one of their teams. I will readily admit that I thought I had all the answers to all the problems besetting the church and I needed to go through a period of having the hot air removed from my balloon, but it was incredibly crushing to be told time and time again that I would not even be allowed to play the keyboard in the church that I belonged to.
When I look around me, I see congregations emptying, churches being decimated by pride and power grabbing and I can honestly say that what I see with my eyes is not encouraging. I pray weekly that we would have a service that is not a duplicate of services that we may have had in the past and even though the songs and sermon titles change, there seems to be a nagging sense of sameness that is, frankly, discouraging. All these things around be have the paralyzing effect of invalidating the promise of God to me that I would be a part of his work of transforming his church.
I have spoken about my transition to Canada quite frequently and so it is no secret that the adjustment that I had to make to my life by moving here and the dreams I had for what I wanted to do with my life had to take a back seat to what God is still taking me through. I do not say these things in order that I set myself up as the example that you should look to and pattern your lives after... I’m not the greatest role model for faith, but what I do know is that every time I have chosen to walk by faith, I have had to take the risk of placing my life, my plans and my future in God’s hands and sometimes, his plans differ greatly from mine. However, even if his plans drastically change my life, I do so because I choose to have faith in God and my faith - being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I cannot see - can only be anchored in God’s character as a good and trustworthy master.
The toughest lesson that I have had to learn and work through which is clearly mirrored in the life of Abraham is that I will never know what God can truly do until I come to the end of myself. For as long as I have the power to control the events in my life, there is always a sense in which I do not have complete hope and faith in God’s ability to work in me because I can always fall back on my own ability. I find, therefore, that God brings us periodically through situations in our life that are beyond our control to glorify himself through our lives. His glory is truly manifest when we trust him and he comes through in the stuff that only he could have done in us and our circumstances.
I’ll be the first to admit that this is a TOUGH lesson to learn because nobody wants to go to the place where total trust in God is no longer a cerebral concept, but a day-in and day-out final and only resort.
Without divulging too much detail, I will just let you know that even right now I am walking through a situation that is going to require a miracle to reach the other side of. I have tried everything that conventional wisdom says I should do and I have come up empty and so the real test of my faith is on - the test that I can be certain that God will pull me through even though I cannot see how in the world he is going to pull it off.
When I was thinking over what I should bring as a word of encouragement and refreshing to this incredible team of people, I felt increasingly that we should talk about the question of faith and seriously pose this to us this morning:
Have you settled the question that you can trust God with your business?
The reason for this question is this: the way you live your life, the choices that you make and your personal willingness to follow God, put your trust in him and cling to him even without the guarantee of success is a very telling starting point of an honest personal dialogue. More to that, in order that your faith may grow, it WILL be continually tested and therefore you have to settle the question within yourself. This testing is not because God is insecure about his place in our lives; rather it is that our faith will grow and that we shall become more firmly established in our relationship with almighty God. Listen to what James says about the trying of our faith:
James 1: 2 - 8
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.
Friends, God CAN be trusted with our lives and even though I started out this sharing by talking about our walk of faith as if it is risky business, the truth of the matter is that there is no risk when we choose to follow God wholeheartedly. We may not always understand what he is doing, how he plans to do it or how he is going to work things out, but we can always rest in the assurance that what he promises, he will do. Just like his promises to Abraham continued to be fulfilled even long after Abraham had passed on into glory, we who serve him can rest assured that he shall work in and through our lives whether we walk this earth or whether we pass on into our rest.
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