“But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.” — Psalms 37:11

We’re on a mini-series discussing the different metaphors for trust. When I was thinking about the theme of today’s message, I started out musing on the obvious words that people routinely employ when talking about trust: humility, vulnerability, openness, etc. But then I remembered a curious word that is used in most Bible translations yet isn’t regularly used in common speech: meekness. We don’t like to think of ourselves as meek. When I picture someone who’s meek, I think of some old dowdy milquetoast minister who’d rather play an organ and arrange flowers for Mrs. McGillicutty than charge forth boldly to storm the gates of hell and change the world. But maybe I’m wrong, because there is someone who perfectly fits the image of meekness: Jesus. Come to me, He says, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Jesus…meek? Jesus, the man who violently chased the moneychangers out of the temple? Jesus, the man who cast demons into pigs and damned the religious leaders to hell? Jesus, the man who walked on water, healed the sick, raised the dead, and traveled around the countryside preaching to crowds of thousands?

Jesus was meek because Jesus walked in complete submission to the Father. He trusted His Father in Heaven so completely and depended on Him so absolutely that Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing (John 5:19). Jesus didn’t one day decide to go do his own “thang” and see how that shakes out. He knew that there was an eternal plan, a destiny, a reward greater than any earthly reward, and He had complete confidence that as long as He was walking in that path, everything would turn out for the ultimate good.

So if that’s what being meek is all about, I’ll be proud to call myself meek. (Hmm, isn’t that an oxymoron?) I want to trust and lean on God so completely that everything I do or say flows out of that intimate relationship with the Father. I tried going my own way and forging ahead on my own path, and all I got was a lot of running in place and frustration. Yet when I hide under the shadow of His wing, I am at peace. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

Trust, thankfully, is still a concrete word rooted in our everyday lives. When a parent grabs ahold of their little kid’s hand and walks across a busy street, that child is trusting its parent to avoid being killed by an oncoming car. When someone signs a business deal with me, I am trusting that person not to be a scam artist and a crook who’s out to rip me off. When Jane is at the altar ready to exchange vows of holy matrimony with John, she is trusting him to be a person of character who will not dump her and run off with the office secretary a month down the road. You could define trust in this manner: I have experienced enough of you in my life to put my faith in you and believe that you will do right by me.

Once you give out trust, you become vulnerable to one of two reactions when that trust is broken — and unfortunately, you will never live your life without experiencing the sharp stab of betrayal or loss at some point. The first reaction is to become angry, bitter, to withdraw into your little dark abyss of grief and horror and never come back out. People like that may look like they’re functioning normally in society, but scratch the surface and you won’t find a heart, you’ll find a brick wall fortified with heavy artillery.

The second reaction is to realize that trust is too valuable a thing to lose, and that disillusionment only serves to clarify and bring into crystal-clear focus the things that really matter the most. And thus my metaphor: trust as a form of disillusionment — you lose faith in something foundational and therefore resolve to spend the rest of your life seeking out that which is truly worthy of trust and faith.

I went through this experience, and my source of disillusionment was…me. Even though I grew up in a Christian home with a Christian worldview, and I loved God and Jesus as best I knew how, my ultimate trust was placed in my own person. I was my own best judge, my own best source of ideas, my own perfect arbiter of what my life would be all about. Yeah, God was there, and He was my King, but frankly I was off building my own little kingdom and only giving him some of the proceeds here and there.

It took a long and painful process — one that is still ongoing! — to bring me to the point where I realized how undeserving of faith and how untrustworthy I really am. We love to pride ourselves as being “good people” — but the fact is that, given different circumstances in different times, all of us are capable of committing the most horrendous evils. I had to become deeply disillusioned with myself in order to become aware of my deep need to trust and believe in something wholly good, something worthy, something holy, something pure, something powerful and mighty — something or Someone who had the ability to do a transformative work in me I could never do myself.

Some people live in the shame and despair of their own sin and never learn to trust. I pray God can use me to help people emerge from that dark shadow and learn how to trust again. When you trust and put your faith in Jesus, it’s not just a religious devotion — it’s a cry of a heart yearning for Someone who is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). My heart’s cry is that I will give all of my trust completely to God, every day, no matter what the cost, no matter what the circumstances, knowing with every fiber of my being that I serve a trustworthy God. What is your heart’s cry?

The point I want to make is that Christians struggle with the issue of trust just as much as anyone else. In some ways, I think we have it harder. The easy way out is to say “I’m not going to trust in something I can’t hold in my hand and understand.” It’s hard to trust in something so much bigger, so much more mysterious, so much more profound than anything we can grasp in the natural world. Sometimes it’s so difficult that’s it’s tempting to give up. But the wise man understands the limits of his understanding. Only a fool thinks it’s possible to obtain all knowledge through human reason alone. There are certain things that can only be grasped through personal experience and spiritual awareness.

In this sometimes glorious, sometimes dizzying, sometimes dangerous quest to entrust ourselves to the God we serve, it is helpful to consider the ways of trust and the facets of faith made manifest by our actions. As this series unfolds, I hope to relay some of the metaphors that come to my mind when I think about trust. The first one may be a surprising one: trust as disillusionment. What, you say? What on earth does trust have to do with disillusionment? Well, you’ll just have to tune in next week to find out.

I will trust in You
Let the weak say I am strong
In the strength of the Lord
I will trust in You

An oldie but goodie. It’d been on my mind a lot the past couple of days. Here’s a lovely video with the music that I found on YouTube:

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” — Colossians 3:3-4

Lately, I’ve been pondering on the idea of being hidden with Christ. What does that mean? How are we hidden? Hidden from what? Hidden for what purpose? (Until recently, I was also under the assumption that we were hidden in Christ, which is a little different meaning!)

As I was trying to get a picture in my mind of what this might look like, I was reminded of the state of humanity as God created it in the beginning. Adam and Eve did not live the kind of life we live. They were unaware of the existential nature of good and evil, of struggle and strife and pain. They had no need to fight for a cause, because there was no cause to fight for. They just were, living in a state of perfect bliss and right relationship to the Father. God was their covering, and they had no need to hide themselves.

But that all changed when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, their eyes were simultaneously opened and blinded. They were opened to the reality of the cosmic battle between the forces of darkness and God’s heavenly host, and they were closed to the unfettered bonds of love and pure motive that existed between themselves and between God. They knew evil — they became intimate with evil and capable of committing it — and they knew good, which illuminated their shameful disobedience and willful rebellion. And so they did what we all do, and their reaction was a natural one: they hid. They hid from God and from each other. They didn’t cover themselves with fig leaves because they were naked — they covered themselves because they felt naked. They were lost, vulnerable, and afraid. And rightly so, for nothing they could say or do would be able to take back the evil they had wrought.

Little has changed in the thousands of years subsequent to the Fall. We are still trying to hide — hide from God, hide from ourselves, hide from each other. Our sins always find us out, but we still think we can get away with it. All things will one day be exposed by the Light, and nothing we do under the shadow of darkness will be left undetected. But we don’t need to keep running away. We have been blessed with a new hiding place, a special place, and that is within God Himself. In His great mercy, He provided a covering for our sins and clothing for our nakedness in the person of Jesus Christ. When we come into relationship with Christ, He opens the door for us to step across the chasm that was created when Adam and Eve sinned and enter into the fullness of life that God originally intended for us. Our eyes are still open to the knowledge of good and evil, but our blindness has been removed and we can look upon God and humanity with unconditional love and pure motive once again. We no longer need to be ashamed of our nakedness (in a spiritual sense!), for we can wrap ourselves in the glory of Christ and come before God’s holy throne with confidence and assurance, cleansed by the blood of the Lamb.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

Hebrews 10:19-25

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

II Corinthians 12:9-10

I failed. I failed God. I made some promises to Him that I would do certain things or refrain from certain negative behaviors, and I broke them. I screwed up. God must hate me. Why doesn’t He just smite me now. I deserve it.

I’m not saying these things for rhetorical effect — I have actually felt this way on recent occasion. The guilt and shame of sin can be so overwhelming that it effectively refashions one’s entire perspective. Everything is tainted, nothing is spared.

King Saul, as recorded in the Old Testament, sinned against God and through weakness failed to deliver God’s righteous judgement against His enemies. His sin led to a removal of God’s favor upon Saul, and Saul’s response was to dive deep into the black waters of madness and despair. Saul was unable to see God as a merciful God of love but instead only saw the force of His wrath.

King David also sinned against God and had a righteous man put in the line of fire in order to steal away his buxom bride and sleep with her. His sin led to a removal of God’s favor upon David and the death of his son borne by the wife he wrongfully took. But David knew the father heart of God. David knew that He bestowed grace on those who feared Him. David knew that as far as the east is from the west, so far will God remove transgressions from those who call on His holy name (Psalm 103:12). David sought the Lord in grief and shame, calling to him for mercy, and God did indeed honor him in his repentance.

David believed in second chances. Paul the Apostle also believed in second chances. Paul, in fact, had more grace shown to him than almost anyone else in the Bible — the very man who zealously persecuted Christians and presided over the death of the first martyr became the undeniable leader of the 1st-century Christian missionary movement and the author of over half of the New Testament. What a transformation! Paul writes that nothing, nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Oh how true this is! If you have rejected God because of the guilt that chokes you, if you have turned away from God because of the shame you carry inside of you — don’t hold onto the lie that says that God has turned His back on you! He loves you with an everlasting love, and nothing you can do or could ever do has the power to change that. He is waiting for you with open arms, ready to forgive you and receive you into His infinite love and compassion. If your sin is so great that He is unable to wash it away and make you clean again, then Christ’s death upon the cross was in vain.

No matter how many times you fail, no matter how many times you screw up, you can start afresh. Begin anew. Make those same promises again. Make those same commitments again. It’s OK to do a reboot. It’s OK. God is in the second chance business!

We think we are masters of our fate because we can choose to buy a 42″ HDTV rather than a 37″. We think we are in control of our destiny because we buy a grande-sized Mocha Frappucino. We think that life is good because the ski trip to Lake Tahoe was a heckuva lot of fun.

The best lies are the ones that are 98% truth. The truth of the blessings we have, the beautiful and meaningful things we can be grateful for, is obscured by our selfish desires and our temper tantrums when things don’t go our way. Instead of ruling in the midst of our circumstances, we become enslaved by them. We use that 42″ HDTV to watch porn because our minds are being dictated by damaged passions. We buy that Frappucino to get a quick fix because otherwise the morning would suck and the world would look dimly depressing. We find out that being in Lake Tahoe is not the panacea of tranquility we thought it would be when we arrive back home to a stack of bills (all those Frappucinos and HDTV/Blu-ray/home theater purchases, dontchaknow) and a mile-high workload and an angry family squabble and a sick cat.

The problem is focus. There are so many little things to focus on in our daily routines that we forget the real focus of life: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever (as stated by the Westminster catechism). When we center ourselves on the knowledge of God’s love and fatherhood over us, His sweet children, we begin to see everything in a new way. Somehow the dire problems and conflicts begin to look a little less important, and following in the footsteps of Jesus becomes the singular priority.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God and his rightousness, and all these things will be added to you.” — Matthew 6:33

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never been in a situation where I felt like every fiber of my being was crying out for retribution, for payback, for satisfaction. I’ve never sought out vengeance, so I know for a fact that I’m unable to imagine what it’s like. When I picture someone having killed my brother, or father, or close friend, I don’t even have an emotional category for that.

It’s a natural thing to want to demand that someone pay for what they have done. There must be consequences for their actions. The blood of the innocent cries out for justice. But then I remember that someone has already paid the price. Someone has already suffered the consequences. Someone has already been punished, tortured in loneliness and executed in despair. Such terrible deeds have had their just redress. That person bore the full brunt of a righteous retribution. His name is Jesus Christ.

We don’t think about the death of Jesus in those terms very often. Jesus is always the answer for our sins, for the bad things we’ve done. But Jesus didn’t just die for my sins, or for your sins. He died for the sins of the whole world. And that means ALL of them. Their sins. The sins of a murderer. The sins of an adulterer. That person who in a single moment destroyed your family, your reputation, your livelihood, your reason to live.

You may think you can find wholeness and peace by destroying them in return, but you can’t. Only in the arms of the One who took on the sins of mankind and paid the ultimate price can you find restoration and resurrection. Bring your anger and your sorrow to Him, and He will bring you the justice of eternity.

I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel, but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own free will. For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother–especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts concerning the letter that Paul wrote to Philemon entreating him to welcome back his former slave Onesimus, who had been with Paul for a time in prison. It’s interesting to note that Paul doesn’t ask Philemon to take him back as a slave like before. Bear in mind that Philemon possessed some degree of wealth, as he was a man with room to spare in his house for guests and was, obviously, a slave owner. So it would have been perfectly acceptable for him to bring Onesimus onboard as his household slave once again and simply forget all that had transpired to bring bad blood between them. Reset the clock. Start over again. A fresh beginning for Onesimus. Wouldn’t that have been a great and benevolent gesture on Philemon’s part, especially in that day and age when class and title was very much part of the fabric of society.

But that’s not what Paul is asking of Philemon. He’s asking him to go above and beyond the bounds of courtesy. He’s asking him to take a step further than society might approve. He’s asking him to forgo the traditions of the culture and instead forge a path of reform, as Christ would transform the relationship between master and slave into one that reflects the familial heart of the Father.

In doing what Paul requests of Philemon, we effectively see the end of slavery — not through policy change, not through the coercion of law or war, not even through religious decree, but by spiritual adoption individually via the transformative power of Jesus Christ. Paul is putting meat on Christ’s mission statement: to set the captives free (Luke 4:16-21). Philemon is being challenged to act on his faith in a way that very much upsets the typical balance of power — Onesimus no longer a slave but his brother and equal in God’s sight.

There are slaves in our world today. We are all enslaved by something — anything that holds mastery over us is our master. That’s why Paul often referred to himself as a slave for Christ. He was declaring that only Jesus would be able to command Paul’s destiny. I wonder if we Christians would be better off thinking of our mission not as ministers of salvation or purveyors of a religious order, but as reformers who subvert the world’s system by adopting people into God’s own family. Jesus didn’t come to turn free-thinking men into slaves, as some would suggest. He came to turn oppressed slaves into free men. I believe we need to do the same — not by force of law or strength of will but by entreaty from the heart in love.

So I’ll steal something that someone else talked about that has been worming its way into my subconscious. One of the speakers at the Whiteboard Sessions last week was Vince Antonucci, and I picked up his book I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt and started reading it on the plane. Wow, what a cool book. The thing that struck me was the chapter where he talks about not just serving Christ out of religion, not just “having a relationship” with Jesus like he was some chum from college, but actually abiding in Christ and letting Him abide in you. He compared this to a baby in its mother’s womb. It would be foolish to ask the baby (if it could talk!) if it had a “relationship” with its mother. Relationship? That’s the understatement of the year.

It got me thinking. How much do I abide in Christ and He in me on a daily basis? Am I just going through the motions of being a “good” Christian and performing all my spiritual disciplines without actually being in that special place? Will I place so much of my life in His hands that it changes how I approach everything else in my life? Can I really trust that His Spirit living in me gives me the authority and ability to bring light to the world around me?

I need to Abide.