The simplicity of trust

It started in the garden when the enemy asked Eve if she could really trust God...really? Are you sure and in the end ...she wasn't.
 My life is full of people I trust and for this I am grateful. I trust Scott and when he leaves for a month I simply just miss him. I am not worried about his comings and goings...I am so grateful for this trust.
When my son tells me he is going to spend the evening at....... I know he is, I go to sleep at night knowing he will come home when he told me he would or let me know otherwise.

Because I trust, I have so much more time to worry about other things :).

So, what is it about trusting God that 1. I find so confusing and 2. difficult ? 
I don't know what it is about my life that God is responsible to work out? What am I responsible for?
Do I wait for Him to show me another way, or do I make another way trusting that He has given me the brain power to choose?  When I ask God to keep safe those I love...do I trust Him to do that, or am I trusting Him that no matter what, He is in control...and if that is the case...Why do I pray for safety?
Trust is the foundation of faith...but it ends up not being so simple or in fact is it the simplest thing in the world.  I watch a baby in the arms of her Dad...she sleeps, she trusts that he will not drop her and that he will keep her close. She doesn't even know she is trusting...she has no other way to feel.
I want my faith to be that simple...I really do.

This post is amazing...It is long, it is worth it.

The Lust for Certainty

March 24, 2013 By Ben Witherington

In an uncertain time, in an uncertain world, where the epistemic foundations of knowing have been undermined by post-modern philosophies of meaning (its all in the eye of the beholder, we create our own meanings. Objective reality does not break through our cloud of unknowing), it is only natural that there have been deep seated needs expressed for certainty, and perhaps especially religious certainty. Consider the cartoon below.

Where I see this lust for certainty on overdrive is in the conservative portions of the Christian Church, not only in Evangelical Churches but also in Orthodox and Catholic circles as well. It takes different forms. The lust for certainty in Fundamentalist and Evangelical circles tends to lead to rigidity about Biblical interpretation and so doctrine or theology. This often takes the form of cock-sureness about salvation.
The talk about eternal security is a good example. But alas, the NT talks about Christians having the ability to commit apostasy, to commit shipwreck of one’s Christian faith, and as John Wesley once said, you can’t make shipwreck of a boat you were never on. The truth is, we are not eternally secure until we are securely in eternity. Until then we have reassurance from God and grace sufficient to stand, but we have to live on the basis of faith every day, not on the basis of some certainty or an ironclad guarantee.
The lust for certainty tends to take a different form in non-Protestant Churches. It focuses on dogma, on ritual, on ecumenical councils, on the infallible ex cathedra pronouncements of the Pope, and so on. And unfortunately the drive for certainty in these ways leads to distortions of church history. For example, it is simply not the case that everything we hear in the Nicean and Chalcedonian credal formulations can be found in the Bible or even comports with and agrees with the Bible on important matters such as Christology. These creeds sometimes import into the discussion neo-Platonic notions of the impassability of God, or nice distinctions about the two natures of Christ, and so on.
The lust for certainty causes us to either fixate on the Bible or church tradition and dogma as the final resting place in which we can find certainty on matters of faith and practice.
But alas, for all this, at the end of the day, it is to God that we should look for reassurance of salvation, and for hope for tomorrow, and for strengthening of faith. As Paul says, as for today, now we see through a glass darkly, now we only know in part, which is why more humility is called for in discussions of all things pertaining to the faith.
As I like to say, God only reveals enough about the truth and about the future, to give us hope. He does not reveal so much that we need not live by faith every single day. He just doesn’t, and actually we should be thankful for this, because it drives us to depend on God every day, and not merely on our Bibles or our church traditions.
It is our living relationship with God that must be our final port of call in the desire for assurance about things. God longs for us to relate to him through prayer, and love, and worship. Through these things we get strength for the day and bright hope for tomorrow. And of course the Bible and our traditions are aids in our journey. But the goal of all such aids is not merely that we might know the Bible or know our traditions, but that we might know God! Here I would simply point you to the classic book by J.I. Packer— Knowing God which still has much to teach us, whatever faith tradition we may be a part of. I do not agree with everything Packer says in the book, but there is a rich treasury of insight in there.
It’s time to stop putting the dog back in dogma, whether we are Protestants, Catholic, or Orthodox in persuasion. It’s time to lay the lust for certainty on the altar, and accept that God alone is the fixed point in an ever turning world, not my understanding of God, not some ironclad guarantee of salvation, not some certainty that ‘we are the one true church with the one true dogma’ or ‘we have the one true version of the Bible’ and so on.
Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that there are not many things we can know with a high degree of certainty. There are. We can know our Redeemer lives. We can know that God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet and light to our paths.
We can have assurance of salvation, and claim the promise that no force in the world outside of ourselves can rip us free from the strong grasp God has on our lives, or separate us from the love of God. Salvation cannot be lost like one loses a pair of glasses. It cannot be stolen from us. It can only be cast away by a conscious, total rebellious rejection of what God has already done in one’s life— as Hebrews 6 and other NT texts remind us. Only so can one wrench one’s free from the grasp of the Almighty.
And there is a reason why God deals with us that way. Love must be freely given and freely received. It cannot be predetermined. Our relationship with God is a relationship between beings who have some real power of contrary choice. God does not make us an offer we can’t refuse. That would be manipulation and compulsion and coercion, not something freely given and freely received. Christ relates to his church like a groom relates to his bride– with a covenant freely committed to by both parties, and lived out on the basis of love and self-sacrifice.
And so it is that even in a post-modern world, when anxiety about God and our knowing God or having a relationship with God is high, we must not sell our birth rite for a mess of flower petal soup, even if it has the smell of tulips and five good ingredients.
Read through Hebrews 11 and the beginning of 12, and see that all the saints have had to live by faith, and had to give up on the lust for certainty. The reason is, the Christian life is a life where we recognize we are not the master of our own fate, or the captain’s of our own souls. The Christian life involves surrender, not control of our fate, our faith, our theology. The Christian life involves trusting God and his guidance every day.
As Hebrews 12 says, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the trailblazer and completer of faithfulness, who for the sake of the joy set before him endured the cross, disregarding it’s shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of God.”
The Christian life is like a race, not like a math test on which it is possible to score a perfect score or get all the answers right. The runner knows they must run to the end of the race and finish the course. It is not certain when they set out that they will do so. But a runner who follows the lead of the Lead Runner and has trained for the arduous nature of the race can have confidence he will finish. And this is because Jesus is running with us, every step of the way.
In 1993, when I ran the Boston marathon, I got down to the last two miles and was barely trotting, running on fumes alone. Even with all the cheering (I remember the BC students on the above ground MTA train rolling down the windows and cheering us on), I still had to finish the course without them carrying me, but I kept repeating, ‘Are you running with me Jesus, are you running with me Jesus’. He was, and I finished, and fell into the arms of my best friend Rick. They wrapped me in NASA foil, and totally exhausted I had a silly smile on my face.
I had moved on faith that I could finish, and I did when many didn’t on that hot day. I was not certain in advance that I would get there, to the Prudential tower and cross the finish line. Not certain at all, but I had faith, and I persevered…. and best of all Jesus was running with me, showing me the way, the truth, and the life.

The drum beat of war

"War is a red horse, bloody and cruel making life insufferable and horrid". E. Peterson

It's the unease that we feel that erodes our belief that everything will be OK.  The survivors of Sandy hook have hardly buried their little ones when the eyes of our corporate selves are riveted on another disaster. We wait not ever patiently for the answer of who was it, why did they and what now. We are being dragged from sorrow to sorrow in the seeming every increasing drumbeat of war. James calls it the war inside of us...we want something we can't get it...the worse of humanity displayed for all of humanity.
We work so hard to keep ourselves safe from the evil that rages. There isn't a life that is not touched with that stain.
If we shut off the screens can we live in oblivion? Is it the ability to know and see the pain that makes our worlds so small and danger so near?  We hear those drums because we know it doesn't matter anymore where you live as to how safe you can be. I have heard it in every interview at every tragedy..."we didn't think anything like this could happen here!"

We wonder the same things...we rage against the same evil...we stand useless in its aftermath.
But...

God, has a body....He has hands and feet and a mouth and a heart. We need to stop fighting each other...start fighting in the real war. 
Every bomber, every shooter if  they lived here in the US  was a neighbor in a community with a church.
Do not misunderstand, we are not responsible for the actions of a madman...I am just communicating that in our neighborhoods there are broken people who need to feel the arms of a God who has a body. We need each other, in community to stand against the evil that breaks and blows up and shoots down. We need each other to hope...because when we are with each other...God uses His body to heal, to mend broken hearts, to mourn, to rejoice...to fight another day.

a taste of a great read....read more if you have time.

Why doesn’t God just heal? He does heal, but slowly. Why? God loves each person so much He does not root all that is wrong immediately. If He did, then the structure of our being; body, soul, and spirit, would collapse. We would be mere rubble. Instead, he invites us to be transformed by renewal.
Our physical renewal begins in aging, moves through death, into life. We can, justly, put of this process, but not stop it, because the problems in our physical nature run too deep for superficial cures.
The same applies to our minds and souls. We can be saved, and once saved our healing can begin, but only begin. The problem is too deep for quick cures. You can “pray away” the problems, but only over long periods of time and with great suffering. The final cure, the severe mercy to heal our broken state, is death. We are judged by Christ’s merits, die with Him, and then come to new life.

 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/04/09/my-son-my-son-on-the-death-of-a-child/