Sola Christo

I think that I have already referenced this in an earlier post, but I think it bears deeper examination. Plus, I was listening to a sermon the other day while I was at work, and it kind of touched on the same idea. Just for reference sake, the sermon was called “Putting Out the Fire,” preached by Steve Stodola at Highlands Baptist Church in Colorado. Why that matters, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t want to plagiarize or anything. To give you an idea of what he said, I’ll just list his main points here.

1. My greatest problem is sin.
2. My greatest sin problem is unbelief.
3. My greatest opportunity is to believe God.

My greatest problem is sin. “Well,” my first reaction was, “duh. If you’re a Christian and you don’t know that, you’ve been living under a rock or something.” And that is true. All Christians know that our biggest problem, the biggest obstacle to obeying God and even to truly knowing who God is, is sin. So then, Mr. Stodola is like, “Make a list of the major sins facing you right now, the ones you struggle with.” So I’m like, okay, I can do that. I started listing, and you know, I was humbled by all the ones I came up with. But that’s off the subject. I was thinking things like being lazy, not having the right priorities, discontentment, pride, and stuff like that. Mostly stuff in my mind, because outwardly, I’m a very good actor, and I don’t do that much that is bad, I just think things that are not godly.

So then he says, “My biggest sin problem is unbelief.” And I’m thinking, wait a minute here. I just listed my biggest sin problems, and unbelief is not on the list. I believe in God, and I believe God (not necessarily the same thing). I don’t have a problem with unbelief. But as he went on, I was forced to admit, that, indeed, I don’t believe God. I guess this ties in with the post I published earlier, “Trust,” but I wanted to go more into it than I did in that one. Every time I sin, I am saying, “God, I don’t believe you are who you say you are. You say you are holy, and I say I am trying to be like you, but when I do this, I don’t really believe you are holy. I don’t believe that you will do what you say you will do. I say I believe you will do it, but I don’t really believe you will punish me for this sin, because if I did, I wouldn’t do it.” Do you (the readers of my blog, few though you be) understand what I am saying? Every sin indicates a lack of belief in some part of who God is and what he does.

That brings me to the last point: “My biggest opportunity is to trust God.” And isn’t that true? If my biggest problem is sin, and my biggest sin problem is unbelief, then it makes sense that my biggest opportunity, then, would be to trust him. And now we are back to the trust part. I am starting to believe that the Christian life is all about trusting God (no, duh!). If God is good, then I can trust him, and I will obey him; if not, then I can’t and I won’t.

I think that one of the biggest issues facing me right now is hurt. Not my own, no, at least not directly. Indirectly, I hurt because so many people around me are hurting. I hurt because I can do nothing to change what is happening in their lives. I don’t even know what the right thing is to say! All I can do is listen. Fortunately, I’m good at that. (Yes, I know that surprises some of you, but life is full of surprises.) Anyway, since this blog is supposed to be my “spouting place,” I decided that it was a good place to spout today. Obviously.

Well, since I have stopped being coherent, I’m going to stop now. You (all the three of you out there that read my blog) can expect more from me later.

I think that one of the things that God has really been teaching me is the meaning of trust. I know that many times in my life, if someone had asked me, “Do you trust God?” I would have been like, well, yeah, of course I trust God. What Christian doesn’t trust God, you know?

Something has changed this semester. It started with God actually preparing my heart to trust him back in December. Oh, I knew that I didn’t really trust God. I said I did, but how could I have trusted a God who was barely part of my life? Over Christmas break, however, as I started to really learn who my God is, he started teaching me to trust him. At that point, it was in the simple things, like, knowing that there is a purpose for my having a job at Meijer, of all places. Then we had my pastor’s retirement service. I can’t talk in a public place like this about all that when into that, but suffice it to say, my pastor can really still preach! God convicted me about not trusting his plan for the future. Some people don’t believe that God really has a plan for each individual life–I don’t see how they can read the Bible and believe that, but whatever. If I didn’t believe it, I would be completely lost.

After that, so many things started happening at once. My church no longer has a senior pastor–that was a big blow. Then my dad lost his job. I had nowhere near enough money to pay my school bill when I came back to school. I didn’t know what my plans for the rest of the semester or even for this summer were. I had a problem with a sin that I abhorred, but yet it kept coming back. It seemed like everything that could go wrong, did. And I had to learn really fast how to trust God.

When I was younger, I always made the excuse that I didn’t know how to trust God. I think what I was really saying is that I had nothing to trust God about. I sure do now! Even as these things were happening to me, however, I learned that there isn’t really a “how” to trusting God. I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Now I am going to do such and such and such, which will make me trust God.” That isn’t the way it works. When all these things hit me at once, I knew that I couldn’t handle them all. As I told my dorm sup, “If I try to worry about all these things at once, I’ll go crazy!” And I would have.

I say all that to bring me to what this blog is really supposed to be about: the meaning of trust. Trust isn’t some abstract term that has no meaning for my daily life. I have to trust God everyday, for everything. I cannot possibly mistrust God. How could I say to him, “God, I don’t believe you know what you’re doing. I don’t believe that you are good, God”? In one sense, the sense that I am talking about, trust is simply believing, everyday and about everything, that God is good. He is good when bad things happen to me and when good things happen. He knows what he is doing. In I Corinthians 12:9, God says, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

I haven’t even gone into yet what God has showed me as I trust him. Maybe I will in some other post. It doesn’t really matter, though. I will trust God even if I never know why I have to go through the things that I do. I trust God.