All posts tagged trust

Lesson 8: Faith – Biblical Support

by Scott Noon on October 29, 2011 in Faith, Hope, and Love with No comments

Let me list the points our discussion has made so far: Faith is trusting God. It includes trusting also the goodness of his creation. That means we must trust God’s love in spite of what we observe humans doing to one another and what we remember they did to Jesus. To trust God is to live in his love.

I’m surprised I did not receive more calls for qualifications in light of the violent and acquisitive world in which we live. We are constantly rationalizing our acquiescence to the ways of the society and our ignoring of God’s will.

Let me offer some examples of how the New Testament sees this working out. Hebrews 11: 1-3 and I Peter 1: 5-9 agree faith goes beyond what we see around us. I Timothy 4: 1-12 and Romans 14: 13-23 say it reveals God made everything good, so we need not practice any kind of unusual spiritual discipline, such as observing special days or diets. Timothy puts it rather colorfully when he says faith keeps us from being carried away by “deceitful spirits, demoniac teaching, lying hypocrisy, or old wives’ tales”. That’s a pretty good description of what we hear when we turn on the radio and television.

We all know passages, such as Matthew 17: 20, that promise faith can move mountains. I imagine most of us do not take this literally and so do not test it in our prayers. We suspect the context shows the promises refer to being in a proper faith relationship with God who made the mountains and therefore can move them for us, if he wants to.

When Jesus moves from such hyperbole, he can get far more particular about faith’s function. In Luke 17:1-5 he says faith enables us to forgive other people’s sins seventy times seven times. Our new life enables us to offer new life to others; thereby participating in God’s healing of his creation.

We probably also remember a number of times when Jesus told those he healed their faith had made them well, indicating faith makes us whole people (Mark 10: 52). In fact, passages as Matthew 6: 24-34 picture faith trusting God to satisfy all our needs, even food and clothing. He promises to be there when we need him in the midst of life’s storms (Mark 4: 35-41), and especially in persecution (I Peter 1: 5-9).

These are simply passages in which the word “faith” is found. In many ways, the entire Christian life can be portrayed as a life of faith that trusts the promises God makes through Jesus. The secret of the good life is trusting Jesus’ Father who is able to fulfill his promises rather than the host of pretenders out there tempting us with hollow promises. Is such a life possible?

Lesson 5: Faith 1

by Scott Noon on October 29, 2011 in Faith, Hope, and Love with No comments

Biblical faith is best defined as trust. To have faith does not mean simply believing God exists or accepting some teaching about him. It is to trust God’s promises.

So when Jesus wonders out loud in Luke 18: 8, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, he could be asking if he will find anyone who still has faith in God or perhaps even one person who trusts anyone or anything.

Studies of trust in the past 15 or so years might support his concern. They usually begin with statements such as Sisela Bok made in Lying: “Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse…trust in some degree of veracity functions as a foundation of relations among human beings: when this trust shatters or wears away, institutions collapse”

These studies very often follow with empirical studies reporting a decline of trust in the United States over the past 50 years. One figure often cited is that 55% of American said they trusted other people in 1960 and only 35% were willing to make the same assertion in 2000. It certainly has grown worse in the past few years.

Bok believes this decline results from the lack of truth telling. “If I can not trust your word” she asks, “how can I trust that you will treat me fairly, that you will have my interests at heart, that you will do me no harm?”

Other scholars see two other causes: 1) the risk that has resulted from the tremendous power available to individuals as well as large groups and 2) the necessity of dealing with strangers in our global society. Strangers with power have always confronted people. However, the situation has drastically changed when the stranger carries an automatic pistol or powerful explosives rather than a knife and when it can not be assumed that he operates with any common moral standards.

Today we speak of risk management that operates by rational choice, but that is hardly what we used to mean by trust. Some might think this as a good situation, believing we might trust God when we can no longer have faith in anything else. Others see it as a devastating situation that has resulted, because people have lost their faith in God.

Either way, the question becomes, “Can we still have faith in God, and what does that involve? What do we trust God to do for us?”

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