How Life Works: Wisdom Living from Proverbs
04/08/2001 - Trust God
This morning we want to talk about what it means to trust God, I mean to really trust Him with our lives. When I think about trusting God I often think of the story of the famous French acrobat Charles Blondin. The Great Blondin lived back in the 19th century and was one of the greatest tightrope walkers who ever lived. He did circus gigs and thrill shows all over the world. But he's best remembered for his walks over Niagara Falls.
His first crossing was on June 30, 1859. And a million people came out and watched from both sides of the falls as he walked a wire stretched 1,100 feet long and 160 feet high over the raging waters. It took him 20 minutes. At one point he stopped in the middle of his walk and let down a rope to the crew of boat that was on the river below waiting in case he fell off. When they got the end of the rope they tied a bottle to it and Blondin hauled it up, pulled out a glass, and poured himself a stiff drink while balancing on leg. Then he lifted the glass and made a grand toast to the health of the spectators who were having coronaries watching him!
Well, his stunt was so successful and so lucrative that he came back the next year and did the same thing. But this time he took it up a notch. He walked across on stilts. He walked across pushing a wheelbarrow. He walked across with his hands and feet chained together. And then he walked across carrying a stove and cooked an omelet out on the middle of the rope.
But what people remember most about Blondin is when he looked at the crowd and said, "Who believes I can take a person across Niagara Falls on my back?" And everybody went, "Yeah. You can do it! We believe you can do!" And then he said, "Alright. Who wants to be that person?" And they all took off. Nobody wanted to climb on his back. Can you blame 'em? They all believed he could do it, but no one would trust him to do it.
And after they all split, the only one left standing there was his manager, a guy named Harry. And Blondin said, "Harry, you 'da man! Get on my back!" And Harry looked around and said, "No way! This isn't in my job description!" But he climbed up on his back, put his arms around his neck, hung on for dear life, and trusted Blondin to take across. And he did. In fact, at one point Blondin said, "I got to take a rest. Get off my back." And so the man crawled down and stood quivering on the rope for a few minutes, but then climbed back up again and Blondin ran the rest of the way across the rope. It was amazing! Everybody believed Blondin could do it, but only one man trusted him to do it.
When God says, "Trust me." He wants us to trust him. He doesn't want us to say, "Yea God you can do it, but don't ask me to crawl up on your back. I want to keep my faith right up here. I believe you can do all those things you did in the Bible, but I'm not ready to trust you with my life." But that's not the kind of faith God's looking for. He wants us to crawl up on his back, wrap our arms around his neck, and trust him to carry us through life. And it's a whole lot safer and makes a whole lot more sense than trusting Charles Blondin? I would have split too. But when it comes to my life, I don't want to trust anybody with it, including myself, only the God who made me and loves me and who knows what's best for me. Are you doing that? Do you know what it means to trust God everyday?
This morning we're going to look at just one Proverb. But it's the most famous Proverb of all. It could summarize the whole deal we've been talking about over the last few months, How Life Works . If you grew up in church you may have memorized it.
It's Proverbs 3:5-6 (p. 450) and goes like this, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.
Can we say that together? Now notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say, Trust in the Lord with half your heart, and lean a lot on your own understanding, in some of your ways acknowledge him, and sometimes he will make your paths straight.
That's not what it says. But often that's the way we live. And when we live that way our life doesn't work very well. We don't give God a chance to work, because God doesn't honor half-hearted trust. He wants it all. 95% devotion to God is 5% too short. He wants all our heart.
So in the moments we have together I want us to see what it means to trust God. I want to unpack this verse one line at a time, in four parts, and find out what God is saying to us this morning.
First, Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Trust is foundational to any kind of relationship. Think back to your dating days or maybe you're in them right now. You might start out group dating. Checking somebody out from a distance in the safety of a group of friends. That's cool. That's a good place to start getting to know somebody.
But eventually, if you really want to get to know somebody, you're going to have to engage with that person one on one. And one of the things you want to find out real early in a relationship is, "Can I trust this person? Do they show up on time? Do they say what they mean and mean what they say? Are they sincere? What's been their track record in other dating relationships? I'm not going to give my heart to someone I can't trust."
And you're not going to find out those things from a distance. You have to get involved with that person and it can get messy sometimes. And if there's too many letdowns and too many broken promises and too many dropped balls you cut bait. You're out of there. Because you just can't give your heart, your whole heart, to someone you can't trust. You'd be a fool to do that.
It's the same in your relationship with God. You can start out group dating with God. Like we are now. Pursuing God together in a group. In fact, that's a great place to start. Checking out God, like you would a girl or a guy from a distance, in the safety of others. You can listen to teaching from the Bible, you can learn about past relationships God's had, you can hear me or others give examples from our own lives, you can watch the lives of others who trust God. But eventually you're going have to decide whether you're going to engage with God personally. You're going to have to go one on one with God and find out for yourself if you can really trust him.
A heard about a man, who didn't trust God at all, in fact, he didn't believe in God. Until one day he fell off a cliff and was hanging by a branch 1,000 feet above a rocky gorge. And in that moment he had a change of heart. He said, "God if you're up there, please help me!" And he heard a voice say, "I'm here!" And he said, "Oh that's great, what do you want me to do?" And the voice said, "Let go of the branch." "Say what?" "Let go of the branch. Trust me." And the man thought for a second, looked down and said, "Is there anybody else up there?"
Sometimes trusting God means letting go of the branch. Letting go of whatever it is that's keeping you from trusting him. Maybe it's the fear that God's going to mess up your life? Or take away your fun? Or send you to Botswana as a missionary? Maybe it's the fear that if you call on Jesus as your Savior, he's not going to answer the phone. It's not going to work for you. Well, there's only one way to find out and that's to pick up the phone and make the call. And if God fails you and proves himself untrustworthy then you can bail. You got your answer. It didn't work.
But it's the testimony of many in this church and millions of people all over the world and down through the centuries that God can be trusted. And I'm more convinced now, after following Christ for over 30 years, that he can be trusted. And the mistakes and foul-ups I've made in my life are not his fault, they're mine. He's never let me down and never failed to forgive me for messing up. But you have to find that out for yourself. And the end of this teaching I'll give you a chance to take that step of faith in a private, personal way. Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Second, Lean not on your own understanding.
What does that mean? Does that mean that when you become a follower of Christ you throw your brains in a dumpster? No way. It takes all the brains you've got to walk with Christ. Does that mean you can't draw on your background or your schooling or your training or your past experience? No, not at all. All the experiences you've had in life have been given to you by God, even those that came before you were a Christ follower and their incredibly valuable.
Lean not on your own understanding means that we're wary of our knee jerk reaction to life's complex problems. It means that our human perspective, our logic and intuition is always limited. We need God's perspective on things or else we're going to muck up our life and it's not going to work very well.
A fascinating article was written, mostly for airline pilots, called "178 Seconds to Live." It was a study of twenty very capable pilots who had never taken instrument training before. They were great pilots as long as the weather was clear and they could see out the window. But when they were put in a simulator and told to keep their simulated airplane under control as they flew into simulated thick clouds and bad weather all twenty pilots crashed and burned. It was only a matter of time before each of them lost control and went down. And the average time it took to crash was 178 seconds, two seconds short of three minutes. Seasoned pilots with skilled intuition, but when they lost their reference point they crashed and killed themselves leaning on their own understanding.
All Proverbs 3:5 is saying is that even those of us who are pretty smart and have a lot of life experience, even those of us who did very well in school, like honor roll types, can crash and burn our lives, because logic and human intuition is sometimes flawed and dead wrong. We need more than our own understanding, we need the wisdom of God to live well. We need to trust God's Word and fly by it. It's our instrument for life. And when we're in doubt we need to always, always trust the wisdom of God. Are you getting a steady diet of God's Word, here on Sunday's, and on your own, and in your groups during the week?
In all your ways acknowledge him.
What does that mean? It means that we bring God into the loop of our lives and ask for his leading in every area. In all your ways acknowledge him, not just in some of your ways, because if we only acknowledge God in some our ways we put ourselves in real danger. In fact, whatever area of our life we decide to keep off limits to God can be the very area that takes us down. How many holes does it take to sink a ship? One, just one.
I'll never forget where I was on January 28, 1986, when I heard the chilling news that the Challenger space shuttle had just blown up 73 seconds after takeoff. It was a spectacular explosion against the bright, blue Florida sky. A multi-billion dollar shuttle was lost. But more than that, seven crew members died, including a high school teacher from New Hampshire named Christa McAuliffe.
And shortly after it was over President Ronald Reagan ordered a full- scale investigation of the tragedy. He, along with every other American, wanted to know exactly what happened. And you know what they discovered? They discovered that a little "O-ring," a seal, a gasket had been defective and had allowed heat to leak into the eternal fuel tank and it ruptured and exploded. Just a little seal, a little gasket that nobody paid too much attention to brought down the whole shuttle, it's crew and the American space program. It doesn't take much to bring down our lives.
God says acknowledge me in all your ways. Don't keep anything off limits to me or it may bring you down. Don't take that risk. It's so easy for us to trust God and follow his wisdom in like nine out of ten areas of our life, and pat ourselves on the back, and yet keep one area off limits. Maybe it's our career or our ambition or our money or our sexuality or our drinking or our friends or how we talk or how we treat our body. "God you can have the other nine," we say, "but this one's mine. Back off!" And if we're not careful, eventually that one area can get out of whack and affect the rest of our life and pretty soon life isn't working very well anymore.
Does that mean that God expects us to be perfect? No. That's why Jesus died for our sin. That's what grace is all about. But he does what us to submit every area of our life to him. For some it looks like this. When they get out of bed, or when they're in the shower, or driving to work, they pray, "God, thank you for this brand new day. Today I want to trust you for everything that happens. I want to bring you into the loop of my life. Take control of my day." But they don't just pray that once. They talk to God later that morning and then again at lunch and in the middle of the afternoon. When they're tempted to lose their temper, or cave in to lust, or get greedy, or jealous. "God I need your help in this area." That's acknowledging God in all our ways. And when we do that we take the risk out of our life in that area. We patch the hole that could sink our ship.
Do you have any areas that are off limits to God? Today's the day to turn them over to him. I'll give you a chance to do that in a moment. In all your ways acknowledge him.
and he will make your paths straight.
What does that mean? Does that mean that God will make us healthy, wealthy, popular and thin? No. Does that mean we'll never have a problem? No. Jesus said, In this world you will have trouble, count on it. We need to be careful what this promise means. We can't put words in God's mouth. God doesn't say he'll give us everything we want. Instead, he says he'll make our paths straight. We've been saying all along that trusting God and following his wisdom will make our life work well. He will give our lives direction and purpose, meaning and focus. He will guide our lives and keep us out of the ditch. He will protect our lives. He will work in and through our lives. He will give us a deep sense of peace and inner satisfaction. He will add quantity and quality to our lives. And he will lead us to heaven when we die. And that's not a bad way to go. But the adventure starts with trust.
When we don't bring God into the loop of our lives it is so easy to get all tangled up. It's so easy to get the steps out of order and find our path going nowhere. And we do damage to ourselves and we do damage to others.
Last week I went to all day workshop on how to reach the next generation with the good news of Jesus Christ. And what's making it such a challenge these days is the fundamental lack of trust. So many in our culture have been damaged by violence and abuse and broken families and broken promises that they don't trust anyone, anymore. So why should they trust God? And often the first step to reaching friends like that is to get up close to them and let them see how God has been faithful to us. How trustworthy God really is.
So you have a choice to make this morning. Are you going to trust God or not? Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.
You can fly on your own, try to manage your own life, take your own risks, do the intuitive thing, bat .300, little better, little worse. Or you can take God at his Word and get on board with the plan he has for your life. There's an adventure with your name on it. It has some hardship and some difficulty, we all go through that stuff. But the benefits are incredible. And it all starts with trust.
As we close, I want you to bow your heads for a few moments of reflection. Some of you are new around here and you just might want to say to God. "God, so far so good. I like what I've been hearing. My trust factor is going up each week. You're showing me some things. You're proving yourself to me little by little." For some of you that's the biggest trust step you can take right. Just to tell God that you're going to stay on this journey.
But for some of you that isn't enough. You're ready to take a bigger step. You need to say, "Today God, I want you to come into my life. I believe Jesus died for my sin on the cross and I receive him as my Savior. Forgive me of my sin, pour your love into my heart, lead me and guide my life and to take me to heaven by your grace." Some of you need to take that trembling, trusting step today. The only way to find out if God is trustworthy is to take the shot. And you can do it now in the quietness of your heart.
And some of you need to make this a time of rededication where you say, "God there was a time when I fully trusted you, but things change. I got smart. I thought I could do it on my own. But I can't. I put some things off limits, but I need to resubmit them to you. You know they are. I want to acknowledge you in all my ways. I want you to direct my paths in this life and all the way to heaven." Can you do that? Whatever step of faith you need to take, do it right now in this moment of quiet. Seal the deal between you and God.