God is Trustworthy

People are fickle

If you love politics then the first half of this year is going to be a real treat for you. Because not only do we have one election coming up, if things go as expected, we’ll have a second election only a matter of months later.

I’m talking of course of both the state and federal elections. In case you’re wondering, the federal election hasn’t been called, but most people seem to think that it will probably be a May election.

Now, while it’s possible someone here might think having two elections close to one another is great, I have a high suspicion that most of you are actually dreading the whole thing.

You’re about to get various promotional material in your letter box from all the political sides, each making huge promises to prove they are better.

The billboards are going up. The ads on TV are ramping up. If you’re lucky enough, you might even get a politician knocking on your door - yay!

And you know what - this isn’t going to slow down for many months.

One of the big questions that we need to answer as we get closer to polling day is: who do we trust the most to govern us?

But here lies the problem. Whether you support Liberal, Labour or one of the minor parties, at the end of the day, one thing that seems universal is the big promises that hardly matches what they are able to deliver.

We’ve got to the point where we actually expect this. The fact that what they can deliver is a pale imitation of their grand words, is just part of the process. As much as we might complain about it, we expect it.

I think part of the reason is because we know that people in general are fickle. To get ahead we bend the truth.

The end result is that while we can get levels of trust with others, our trust has limits. That’s because we’ve all been burnt before. Even those in the church have let us down, sadly, with some high profile cases.

Now when it comes to God, we know that things are different. After all, he’s God, he’s not prone to the nasty human attributes. And so we confidently state - we can trust God.

The problem is, that’s really easy to state when things are going well. But life is not just one long smooth journey. For each of us there are bumps along the way. Or maybe those bumps are more like massive craters that we go crashing in to.

At these times that we can start to apply the fickleness of people onto God. We perhaps won’t verbalise it, but this underlining assumption is there: what if God isn’t working for my good? What if God doesn’t really love me? What if I’ve done something so bad, that God’s decided he just doesn’t want me anymore?

Possibly we won’t ask these questions outright - although then again, sometimes we might - but there is an underlying narrative that can feed into this way of thinking - no one can be fully trusted.

You might have heard of the unforgivable sin. I have known people where this idea has gnawed away at them. They have constantly worried - what if I have done the unforgivable and God has rejected me.

The underlying narrative feeding this thought is that God is not trustworthy.

By the way, while the unforgivable sin deserves a fuller treatment, it boils down to a rejection of God.

And so the question for us today is: how do we counter this narrative that God isn’t trustworthy?

How do we bring ourselves to a point where - even when all the chips are down, we can still fully rely on all of God’s good promises?

Transformation

Well, for those who were here last week, we talked about the triangle of transformation.

The first step was to adopt the narrative of Jesus. And so, if we want to be able to have trust God in all circumstances, we need to look at what Jesus taught about how we should view God. And that is exactly what I’ll be doing very shortly.

But if I stick to that triangle just for a moment, we also see another point about soul-training exercises, and I’ll be sharing towards the end of the message, not one of your typical spiritual disciplines, but one that is very useful.

The third part is to then practice this in community - the part where, filled by the Holy Spirit, we do together.

Jesus’ narrative

But the task I want to spend most of my time on this morning, is exploring the narrative Jesus has about how we can trust in God.

Now, to consider the narrative of how Jesus trusts his Father, we can just take the entire four gospels, because every interaction Jesus has with God shows the underlying trust that he has.

Even as early as the 12-year-old Jesus who spent time in the temple, we see this picture of someone who has an undying trust in God.

Understanding prayer

But the passage I’ll explore in most detail this morning is actually a passage we would more typically go to if we wanted teaching about prayer.

But here’s the thing. It is sometimes easy to think about prayer almost as wishful thinking. Or if I use more familiar language, it’s our opportunity to present our petitions and requests.

But while I don’t deny that within our prayers we are encouraged to offers our petitions and requests, prayer is our means of communication with God our Father.

The way we pray then will tell a lot about how we view God.

Take as an illustration the way a child speaks with their earthly parent.

Now you might be able to think of a child that you could put in the ‘spoilt child’ category.

This child might speak to their parent in very demanding ways: ‘I want this’, ‘I want that’.

When we see this sort of behaviour we rightfully cringe, because it displays very poor respect.

By contrast, if we take an ideal child (and while some kids might be close, I think all fall short of the ideal tag), but the way they speak to their parents would convey the respect that they deserve. They would still ask for things, but in a way that understands who their parents are.

Sometimes I think our prayers can be a little like the spoilt child.

But this is where we can learn from the prayers of Jesus, because in them we can see the sort of trust that he would have us have.

Spiritual exercises in secret

Well, the passage we have is in , which places us roughly in the middle of a larger section we commonly refer to as the Sermon on the Mount.

Chapter 6 has Jesus addressing three common spiritual practices and helps us to better understand them. First it describes the spiritual act of giving, then prayer, and then fasting.

And there is a common theme throughout. These practices are not to be used to show off how good you are.

Instead (and this is the main point I’ll draw from them), they should be used to demonstrate our trust in God.

That is why in each case the exhortation to us is to do it in secret.

If we actually trust in God, then our concern is not in getting browny-points from people thinking we’re extra spiritual.

In verse 3, Jesus tells us that in giving, we should not let our left hand know what the right hand is doing. In praying, go into your room and close the door. In fasting, be sure to make your face look as normal as possible.

It is in this way that we can demonstrate where our trust lies.

The Lord’s Prayer

Now in each of these practices, we can see in Jesus’ narrative that our trust does not come from the world, but from God alone. Giving and fasting are good examples of shunning worldly things for the glory of God, but I want to zoom into the prayer he taught us to pray, because here we see what this trust looks like.

Now I’m not one who normally uses alliteration in my preaching, but in the main resource I’m using for my preparation, namely ‘The Good and Beautiful God’ by James Bryan Smith, he present six “P’s”, so I’ll use these as we dig into the prayer.

Present

The first thing we can find is actually in the way Jesus addresses God.

He calls him “Our Father in heaven”. Now the way we our society has come to understand heaven, this can be a bit misleading. You see, we can think of heaven as this far away place, and so this designation to our ears can make him sound detached, however this is not how the Jewish hearers would have understood it. They would have more likely understood heaven in this sense, as the atmosphere around them, and so “Our Father in heaven” is actually akin to saying “our Father who surrounds us in the very air we breathe”.

And so our first lesson is that God is near us. Or because I’m going to use a bunch of ‘P’s’, we can say, God is present.

Pure

After addressing God, the very next thing he does is to declare: “hallowed by your name” - which literally means - your name is holy.

The message Jesus is saying, is that there is nothing bad about God. He is pure in everything.

And so the second ‘P’ is ‘pure’.

Powerful

The very next thing he says is to declare in his prayer what God is going to do.

Notice that this isn’t actually a request, but rather an expectation, or you could say, trust, in what God is going to do.

He says… “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.

Jesus is teaching us to trust that God is powerful to do his work in all places.

So the third ‘P’ is ‘powerful’.

Provides

So far this narrative can teach us that the God Jesus knows is trustworthy on what you might call a global scale, but he also teaches us that we as individuals can also put our trust in him to meet our needs.

In verse 11, the prayer says: “give us today our daily bread”.

Jesus shows us a God that cares for our every provision. He cares that you have food and water. He cares that you have shelter and that you can be secure. These things matter to God and he can be trusted to provide.

So the fourth ‘P’ is “provides”

Pardons

Not only does he provide our physical needs, he also takes away that which prevents us from being close to Him - our sin.

And so the prayer talks about God forgiving our debts, (or sins or trespass - depending on your translation).

I’d suggest that often when we struggle to trust God, it is actually on this point we struggle - how could God love me when I act the way I do? We struggle to trust that God actually wants to forgive us - but the narrative Jesus presents, this is exactly what he does.

So the fifth ‘P’ is ‘Pardons’.

Protector

In the final part of the prayer, Jesus says: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one”.

This part is also very important as we consider a God that is trustworthy.

You see, God wants to protect us from the trials that we will inevitably face. He knows the evil that abounds, and he will protect us from it.

So the final ‘P’ is ‘Protector’.

Trusting God like Jesus

And so, while this passage shows us how to pray - it also gives us an amazing insight into the God Jesus knows.

He is a God who is present. Who is pure and powerful. He provides and pardons. And he is our protector.

He is a God who is pure.

The task for us then, is that as our thinking becomes more aligned to the worldly way of thinking - that is, that no one can be trusted. That God has better things to think about than you.

He is a God who is powerful

…to instead replace these thoughts with the God that Jesus show us.

He is a God who provides

When it’s hard

Now I want to again suggest that this is easy to do when things are going well, but much harder when things are not.

I want to actually move to another point in scripture where Jesus is faced with the sort of anguish which I want to suggest is perhaps beyond our comprehension.

I’m talking about when Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane on the night he was betrayed. You can find it in starting at verse 32.

Again we see Jesus praying - something you’ll note he does a lot of! And as he prays we get further insight into his trust of his heavenly Father - this time, showing us what it means to trust God when it’s hard.

It’s a short prayer, but also very powerful.

Mark

Mark 14:36 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

‘Abba, Father,’ he said, ‘everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.’

Now, there are actually a number of things we could pick up on in this short prayer, but for now I just want to focus on the word ‘cup’.

Wh

Now the thing to recognise with the

As Jesus uses this word ‘cup’ here, he is drawing on numerous images that various Old Testament prophets used, including Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

These prophets used the cup as a metaphor for God’s wrath and divine judgement.

In the case of Jesus, all of God’s wrath was about to be focused on Jesus as he hung on the cross - taking on the sin of all the world.

Jesus knew full well what was about to happen. And it caused anguish - real anguish.

And yet, here is amazing thing about this prayer. Despite knowing what is about to happen, Jesus trust in his Father never wavers. In fact, we can see the rock solid trust that is there.

Even calling God Abba indicates the level of trust. It’s a title that speaks of the intimacy and trust that Jesus has in God.

He boldly asserts all things are possible, and recognises that the path God has for him is for the best.

Now each of us have gone through various levels of suffering. For some, that suffering might have been quite extreme.

But as the writers of the Hebrews reminds us - in Jesus we have someone who can sympathise with us because he has become human and experienced the pain we suffer.

The beautiful thing about this, is that we can join our story to God’s. We can fit our hard, painful story, to the hard painful story of Jesus and see that through all of this, we can still trust God.

It is not easy. The pain is real. If you’ve lost a loved one, or suffered significant health issues - or even if you’ve gone through strains on relationships or whatever it might be. The pain is real.

But seeing the narrative that Jesus gives us about God, we can begin to look beyond this and see God’s mercy and love that he is offering us.

God truly is worthy of our trust.

Soul-training exercise - counting our blessing

Now, I mentioned earlier that I want to offer a soul-training exercise to help us as we try to avoid the narrative that God can’t be trusted.

The one I want to suggest is not one we would normally think of as a spiritual discipline, but I believe it should be.

It is what James Bryan Smith calls in his book - “Counting Your Blessings”.

It’s the discipline of taking the time to notice the small details of life.

You see, we often describe life as a roller coaster. The problem being things move so quickly. Particularly when we are in the down parts, all we can think of is the health scare, or the relationship problem, or the financial trouble (or whatever it might be). These big ticket items take up all our thinking and its hard to see anything else.

But, if we take the time, preferably with a notepad and pen, and actually write down the blessings in your life, it can force us to slow down and see that God is blessing you in many ways.

You might start with something small - like the beauty in the flowers in your garden. Or maybe the smile of a loved one. There are smells that make you feel happy, or the sounds that are just delightful.

The benefit of this soul training exercise is that as our eyes are opened, we can see just how active God is.

He wants to protect you, to love you, and to shower you with blessings.

That doesn’t mean your life isn’t full of trials, but it does mean that in both the good times and bad, there is a God in whom we can trust.

Conclusion

Trust can be a hard thing to give. The more we get burnt, the more reluctant we are to give trust.

But as we look at how Jesus trusted God, even in the toughest times, we can see that we too are able to trust in God no matter what.

It’s not always an easy thing, but as we consider the blessings of God that already exist in our life, we can see that God is trustworthy.

Let’s pray...