Who Do You Trust?

Intro

Ronald Reagan once famously said that the 9 most dangerous words in the English language were “I’m with the government, and I’m here to help.”

Another person once said “never trust a man who is in love, drunk, or running for public office.”

Or better yet, “giving money to a politician is like tipping the guy who just burglarized your house.”

There is no shortage of jokes and quick jabs offered up at the expense of those we would call leaders in our government.

And many of them are based on the reality that so often those in leadership either make promises that they cannot keep or worse yet, never intended to.

And despite all of this, it never fails that come election season we are subjected to the same empty promises and even bold-face lies, yet we take the candidate of our choice and we raise them up on this pedestal as if they are somehow going to fix all our problems.

Last week we started to talk about the gospel of Jesus. And we established that gospel, simply put mean good news.

But what’s so good about it? Why do we call this news good?

We concluded that what makes it so good is that Jesus is the fulfillment of generations of prophecy.

That he alone came and died on the cross and was raised back to life so that he could once and for all set us free.

Set us free from the prison that our sin had put us in. He came to open our spiritually blind eyes to the fact that we were dead in our sin and apart from him had no hope.

That apart from him all that awaited us was an eternity separated from God in hell not because God hates us but because we chose our sin over him, we chose our will over his.

But Jesus changed everything. He set us free from the penalty of sin and the power it had over us.

That is what makes it good news.

We also said that this good news demands a response. And that the first response needs to be an acknowledgment of our need for rescuing in the first place.

But I asked the question as we closed last week if that is all our response needs to be? Is there more to it than simply acknowledging our need?

That is what I hope to answer today.

Power in the Text

In the book of Psalms we find the writer of Psalm 146 describing the reasons for his praise and it centers around one common theme, trust.

Psalm 146:1-10 NLT 1 Praise the Lord! Let all that I am praise the Lord. 2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God with my dying breath.

3 Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. 4 When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them. 5 But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God.

6 He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He keeps every promise forever. 7 He gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The Lord frees the prisoners. 8 The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are weighed down. The Lord loves the godly.

9 The Lord protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows, but he frustrates the plans of the wicked. 10 The Lord will reign forever. He will be your God, O Jerusalem, throughout the generations. Praise the Lord!

The writer of this Psalm is making it clear in verses 1-2 that he believe that God is worthy of praise. So much so that it is his desire to spend the rest of his life telling others of God’s goodness.

Then he goes on to give some of his reason as to why he believes God is worthy of our praise.

Psalm 146:3-5 NLT 3 Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. 4 When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them. 5 But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God.

He he asserts that people, even powerful people are of no use.

They are fragile, unreliable, and without staying power, and consequently no help at all.

The writer understands something about human nature and our propensity to look to those in power to solve our problems. To look to those in leadership to be our rescuers.

He says do not put you confidence in those people for they, like your and I are finite, limited, and mere mortals.

Whatever they promise to do, they likely don’t have the capacity to do it, and even if they did, they will not live forever. Once they are gone, so are the plans they made.

Instead the writer tells us to put our hope, not in humans, but in the Lord who is infinite, unlimited, and immortal.

He is the only one who has to power to character worthy of our trust.

In verses 6-10 he explains how his power and Character make him trustworthy.

He is the creator of the universe (v 6)

He is the one who frees, rescues, heals, and lifts up (v 7-8).

Once again we see a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do, the good news.

He protects, cares for, and provides for his children and those who depend on him (v 9).

He is a king whose kingdom and reign will never end (v 10). There is nothing that God sets out to accomplish that will not come to pass.

For these reasons and others not mentioned here, he can be trusted above all else.

Big Idea/Why it Matters

By focusing on the issue of trust, this psalm speaks to human life in a way that is felt and experience by every generation.

Think about it, what are the temptations regarding our allegiance? Where do we so often place our trust?

In democracy or the constitution?

In the president or our political party of choice?

Do we put our trust in the advancements in our science and technology to solve our problems?

In military might?

In ourselves? In the financial security we build up?

From the perspective of this psalm, to be wicked means to be self-ruled.

In contrast to the self-centeredness or self dependence of our culture, the good news challenges us to be God-centered and God-dependent.

To be righteous means that one’s life fundamentally depends on God.

Our response to the gospel begins with an acknowledgment of our need for rescuing that must develop into a trust in God to actually be the rescuer.

In other words, we have to come to a place where we recognize that human power and authority are unreliable, but God’s good news is the source of freedom to all who put their trust in him.

We are humans are actually hard wired to trust. It is this implicit trust that makes it possible for us operate our lives.

Think of the many decisions you made this morning that required you to implicitly trust something that you didn’t know for certain.

When you woke up to get here you trusted that I would be here and would be prepared to have Church. If not, you wouldn’t have shown up.

You trusted that the food you ate for breakfast was made in a way that makes it safe to eat. You didn’t milk the cow but you trusted that when you put it on your cereal today that it was safe and that the expiration date is accurate.

If you go out to eat after the service today you are trusting that you aren’t going to get poisoned by someone. You likely won’t know why made your food but you believe that they are inherently not going to hurt you.

We could go on and on. You put money in the bank because you trust that it is safe there. You go to work everyday because you trust that your employer is going to pay you for it.

You send your kids to school because you trust that they will be safe and looked after.

We all trust implicitly. Some more than others. But if you didn’t trust others then you would not survive because you would have to avoid all contact with others and use nothing that passed through their hands or other man-made systems.

And while this implicit trust is necessary to function in society, it is also dangerous because it can cause us to put too much trust in those we shouldn’t.

Not only can it cause us to put too much trust in others, but it steals our trust away from the one that deserves it the most.

Application/Closing

In his comments on Psalm 146 Augustine wrote: “Brethren, here we receive a mighty task; it is a voice from heaven, from above it soundeth to us. For now through some kind of weakness the soul of man, whensoever it is in tribulation here, despaireth of God, and chooseth to rely on man. Let it be said to one when set in some affliction, ‘There is a great man, by whom thou mayest be set free;’ he smileth, he rejoiceth, he is lifted up. But if it is said to him, ‘God freeth thee,’ he is chilled, so to speak, by despair. The aid of a mortal is promised, and thou rejoicest; the aid of the Immortal is promised, and art thou sad??”

I know, he can be a little hard to read. Let me translate.

Other words he says that we are given at difficult yet worthwhile challenge and that is to not lose hope or allow our trust in God to wain when life gets hard.

Because for whatever reason that is what we have a habit of doing. There are people who will claim to have the answer to our problems and we flock to them. But if someone says God is the answer we ignore them.

And usually, what ends up happening is we are let down by those we believed would help us most.

Have you ever been betrayed by someone in the Church? When we read Psalm 146 we tend to think of political or governmental leaders, which it certainly is speaking of.

However, we can also put misplaced trust in leaders in the Church to the point that we allow human failure to turn us away from Jesus.

We should hold church leaders accountable but we shouldn’t lose faith in the good news when they fail to live it out.

God is the one who brings liberation. Our trust must ultimately be in him.

The good news forces us to reconsider where we place our trust. Do we trust in God or in human leaders?

Ultimately, the church should model trust in God alone.

And sadly, line has been blurred in the last 10 years or so as the Church has gotten more and more involved in politics and becoming a platform for certain candidates, which I believe is a mistake.

Jesus came and preached about a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. I think sometimes we lose sight of that. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our earthly kingdom that it becomes the priority.

This is not to say that the Church should not be a voice for truth and teach and encourage its members to vote in a way that aligns with Biblical principles.

But let us never forget that we are not of this world, but rather we are citizens of a different kingdom because if we don’t it is too easy to put our trust in the wrong king.

Let us never forget that our hope is in the Jesus and the good news he came to fulfill. Anything short of that will leave us disappointed.