TO TRUST OR NOT TO TRUST, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Recently the Lord spoke to me and told me to guard my peace as my greatest treasure.  This is a peace that is not circumstantial but is the peace of God which can only be had through a relationship with Yeshua (Jesus), as many of you reading this already know. And with this peace comes a kind of freedom that can be had in no other way.  If you don't know the peace or freedom I'm speaking of, please keep reading. I have hope to share with you at the end of this article.  

Well, having said that about peace, I have had quite a challenge to my own peace recently. I am sharing this rather personal story with the hope that it will be an incentive to some of you reading this as I feel the issue is an important one. And besides, I believe it's the Lord who wants me to share it for the same reason and after all, it's really His story anyway. So here goes.  

I had to make a financial decision. I felt the Lord was telling me to sell an automobile that was of fairly substantial financial value as well as having emotional value to me because of the way I had obtained the car. But at this point, because of an accident I had which upped the insurance rate on the car it was putting a monthly burden on me. I have had no debt at all for over eleven years but lately I had a few expenses that meant I now had some debt.  Selling the car and purchasing a less expensive one would enable me to get out of debt plus reduce my monthly costs. 

But every voice in my life, family and friends, whomever I spoke with told me wisdom dictated that I keep the car and just pay off my debts over time like everyone else.

What to do?  Was I really hearing from God?  Isn’t there wisdom in the advice of many counselors, as the bible says?  Could the unity in the advice of EVERYONE in my immediate set of close friends and family really be God speaking to me rather than what I thought He was saying to me?  I spent  much time wrestling with this issue and the more I wrestled, the more my stomach hurt. That peace I was talking about – gone!  Or at least seriously misplaced. What a struggle. 

A few days ago I was told by yet one more of my “advisors” that I needed some counseling to deal with my emotions because I wasn’t seeing things clearly having a fear of being in debt and that debt was what everyone deals with. Well, I had once also been in debt and I know the difference between debt and no debt. Being in debt feels like a loss of freedom to me.  As I held this before the Lord, what came to me is that God doesn’t owe anyone anything. The Bible tells us that, “The heart of the borrower is in the hand of the lender.”  That’s how it felt, as if my heart was not entirely my own. Someone else had a hold of it. Though it wasn't what might be considered by some to be a great deal of money, I was surely not at peace about owing it. The Bible also says to “Owe no man anything but to love him.”  That's the only kind of owing I prefer.  

That sounds ridiculous in this day and age, but the debt of this nation and the debt of this culture we live in today is not normal or safe. I’ve heard more than a few prophetic preachers saying “Get out of debt as soon as you can.”  Some have stated that they see a financial crises coming – even this year.  Well, I’ve heard that before but I must admit I have the same inkling. Some concern has been linked perhaps to Passover (4/3-11) or Sukkot (9/27-10/4).  I was recently called “Chicken Little” and accused of fearing that the sky would fall, when I told someone my thoughts in this regard. I'm not fearful, but I guess time will tell whether it happens or not.

After being in this conflict much too long, I came to the Lord this week and made a decision.  I would rather put my trust in Him and what I believe He was saying to me than disregard what I felt was what He was telling me to do and choose everyone else’s advice instead. After all, everyone else was in debt themselves in some way.  Perhaps my wanting so badly to be free of debt made them uncomfortable with their own debt, though if the truth be told, I bet everyone who is in debt feels the stress of it in some way.  But the reason I made that decision is that I opted to obey God. I chose to trust in God. I would go with what I believed He had been telling me even though it meant going against what people thought.  Part of the struggle, I admit, was having to disregard what people I’m close to thought of me. I decided I cared more what God thought than what they did.

Still, was it an emotionally weighted decision?  You bet. But the minute I made the choice to go with God my peace began to return.  I have the sense that my life would go differently if I chose to go the way of what now seemed worldly advice as I doubt any of them had prayed about what they were telling me, rather than go with what I felt the Lord had been telling me. Trust the Lord and He’ll give you more to trust Him with. Doubt He is trustworthy and you’ll miss the opportunities of increased blessings. The whole bible reads like that from Abraham forward: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” Those are the words of King Solomon and he was supposed to be wise, right?  To this to I might add: ...and lean not on the understanding of others, even those who love you.  By not leaning on your own understanding it means not to make decisions only based on how you see things without input from or reliance upon God, but acting independently instead.  I made the decision that I would put my trust in God regardless of what the voices around me were saying.

So here’s what happened.  I put the car on Criaglist.com for a certain price. No calls. The second day I felt to reduce the price and continued to pray that God would send just the right buyer.  That evening I got a call from a gentleman asking about it.  It was pouring rain and about 9:30 at night. He wanted to come then to see it. Now?  Now.  Okay.  He liked it, but he’d have to talk to his wife about it. They both came back the next day and decided they would purchase it. 

We wound up spending a good bit of the day together and after he finally had to go off to work, the wife and I went and had lunch together. We had become immediate friends.  As it turned out, they had given – that is GIVEN – away a car of almost exactly like this one for the same amount of money to someone when God had told them to. Obviously they had been in a position to do it but still, it was quite an act of obedience. The woman to whom they had given it to said that she was feeling suicidal as she didn’t believe God even knew who she was anymore or cared what she was going through. This made such a difference in her life. It had given her hope. 

Now, here, sometime later, God had not only somewhat supernaturally provided the cash to purchase this car without financing it but here I was selling it for the same amount that they had paid for the car they had given away in obedience to the Lord. 

Add to this that the Lord had told this couple to get entirely out of debt by this winter. They had purposed to do so. They had obediently sold an even more expensive automobile. The tenant of a rental property they owned called and said he wanted to buy the house without their having advertised it. They sold their high end large home by the time winter had come, officially December 21st of this year, and had moved south to another city, to where they felt God was leading them, which happened to be my city. They had downsized to where they owed nothing including no mortgages and were now renting a nice home. The car they had purchased from me was not a frivolity but a necessity and they were able to pay cash for it. We were clear confirmation to one another that God had said the same thing to both of us - get out of debt to the best of your ability - now!

[Note: Everyone of us is in a different situation and we each need to know what God is saying specifically to us in regard to debt, or mortgages, or possibly downsizing.]

As the wife and I had lunch together, she turned out to have an interest in the Jewish roots of Christianity and the Feasts of Israel, all those kinds of things that my life is all about. So we felt that God had put us together as kindred souls. Plus they had prayed that the Lord would lead them to the right car to purchase just as I had prayed He would bring whom He wanted to have it.  This was more than a transaction for a car, the whole thing had the Lord all over it. There were so many confirmations that not only was I to have sold it but that it was this very couple who was to purchase it. The Lord had arranged the whole thing. I love when those kinds of things happen that prove how involved God is with our individual lives. My peace was entirely restored and so was my amazement once again at how “God works all things together for those who love Him.” If ever I had a set of lessons on always trusting the Lord, this was it.

So I leave you with these thoughts:  The Lord is worthy of your trust, even when logic and even your own emotions may say otherwise if that’s how you feel He’s leading you, or what you’ve heard Him say to you either directly or through His word.  Protect your God-given peace.  Value it beyond anything else, for in it is the wisdom from above – where God is, that He can see the down the road and knows what’s best for each of us.

Secondly, I share with you what I have heard from Him, to be careful what you put great value on, because many things that are considered of value today may cease to have the same value. That which is of the greatest value is peace with God.  He will take care of you and provide for you. That means put what you own in proper perspective. Let your treasure be in heaven, that is to say, value your relationship with Yeshua (Jesus) beyond whatever is in the here and now and over what people may think of you. What we have today will last only for a time, but what we have with Him lasts forever.  This life on earth will be ours for just so long but peace with God carries with it an eternal weight of glory!   

To anyone to whom the peace of God is alien to you, or if you’ve never put your trust in the Lord before, or you find that you’re not sure about where the real value is in your life – talk to Him.  He will listen.  He will hear you. And He will let you know He does.  He cares not only about you, but for you – with a loving heart beyond what you can imagine.  Tell Him the things that are on your heart.  Those things you’re afraid of anyone knowing? He already knows them. He’s just waiting for you to open up your own heart and unburden yourself to Him so He can release you from the weightiness of misplaced values and trusting in your own understanding that turned out not to be wise after all. He is the God of forgiveness and of comfort.  Put your life and all you own in His hands. So is your forever! He can take better care of both much more than you can.

DOING WHAT WE VALUE

I've been reading Jonathan Edwards.  No easy task. It's like brain exercises. Y'all know who he was? A significant voice for the First Great Awakening revival in America. I heard a wonderful story about his little daughter, though really it is about his wife. A letter his little girl wrote to one of her friends said (my paraphrase), "My father is a circuit rider and he rides his horse through the land to preach to the people in different places and sometimes I go with him.  My mother stays home and prays for him and sometimes when she comes out of her room, her face glows so much from being with God that she puts a cover over her head."  Wow!  That I know of, only Moses had that kind of God-glow about him, after spending 40, no make that 80 days, on the mountain with God.  No food, no water - just the glory of God.  And it wasn't a glow that wore off in a few hours.  It was there upon him for quite some time. Wish I knew how to pray or get into God's presence like that, don't you? I imagine she had to learn and grow into that level of such intimacy with God. No one starts out that way, right?

I'm thinking that at least one great reason that Edwards was so successful in his preaching, even though supposedly he just read his sermons while thousands got saved when he did, was due to her prayers.  You know what they say, "Behind every great man is a great woman." But there was a also a whole lot of wisdom on his part.  One of the valuable things I've learned from reading Edwards was how he makes the point of addressing some very practical things which he then applies to God. Take for instance, that we can know much about what God values by what He does. A simple example is that He blesses generosity and kindness, and withholds blessings where there is stinginess, bitterness or resentment. We can tell from where the peace is what is pleasing to God.

I recently had a big decision to make about something critical to me. What seemed more or less logical to me did not line up with the fact that my stomach felt like someone was plowing it up with a backhoe. No peace! When I finally decided to forgo my logic and put it all in neutral, willing to go in a direction my natural inclination didn't agree with necessarily, my tummy settled down and happily my peace returned.  Edwards helped bail me out of the situation so I figured God put that book in my hands since it had been on my bookshelf for years but I never before felt equal to the task of trying to interpret what he was saying. Now it just seemed like the time. I love when God does something like that - gives you just what you need when you need it out of the blue.

Part of what I learned from my reading has served to be a kind of reconstruction for me in how I'm thinking through my everyday life. We all have intentions, call them goals. There are major goals and there are sub-goals that help us arrive at the major goal. On top of that there is a chief goal or perhaps two in your life. The choices we make in our sub-goals determine whether or not we actually attain to the major goals, and the major goals will determine if the chief goal is actually ever reached.  The goal of a happy marriage, for instance, is greatly dependent upon choices of time spent together, of what you choose to share with one another, and of whether you honor each other or take each other for grated. The same applies to friendships you value. 

All this may sound obvious, but it made me aware of how many times I make choices that derail or never feed into my sub-goals, so that I live with a relative sense of having missed the mark somewhere and not getting to what I really intend.  It's also possible that I've not really articulated to myself what I really want, what a goal of mine really is. Many of us just go through our days dealing with things as they come, but without defining what our personal druthers would be.

It's all about choices. As I thought about it, I realize how much our distraction level must far exceed what someone in Edwards' day may have. We live lives of a lot of distraction, do we not? If he was a circuit rider, traveling to one church one week and then another on a different Sunday of the month, it's likely that those good folks were blessed with a sermon once a month, with all that time to ponder the message in between his visits. So that, assuming they thought about it, it was a well-thought out sermon message for them. In which case, it likely became a part of them, in their innermost being. We on the other hand are surfeited with so much Christian input that it all sits like veneer on the top layer of our minds, and we're off to the next one before we ever absorb into our spirits what we last heard or read in our own time with the Lord. 

The statement above about knowing what God values by what He does, brought me into awareness that I 'does' a heap of stuff that I don't really value. There's a whole lot of time wasting in our lives today. I mean in terms of reaching our major goals. Certainly part of my chief goal is to stand one day before The Chief (aka Lord) and not wish I'd heeded the Bible's warning to use my time wisely. I now have a new goal, to heed Paul's words, "See that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.  Therefore do not be unwise but understand what the will of the Lord is" (Eph. 5:15-17). Another translation says "Make the most of every  opportunity in these evil days and don't act thoughtlessly...." The major here goal is godly wisdom; the sub-goal is to make choices as to how I use my time.  That doesn't mean I'm compulsively doing something spiritual every minute, but it does mean I portion my time out and not fritter it away so that at the end of the day I have little to account toward my chief goal which has to do with my relationship with God.     

I'm not trying to put some kind of legalistic "you better or else" yoke upon us. I wouldn't want that any more than you would. I've found my rest in God and I see this as more and deeper rest, not more 'trying'.  But I have been made aware that if my goal is to live for God so that He is my greatest and 'chief' delight, and to know Him so that I am strong in times of trouble and prepared for whatever might come, and so that I have become so attuned to His voice so that I'm not in doubt as to what He may be saying to me, both in times of quietness as well as in times when I need to know NOW what He's telling me.  It's been said that we are all as close to God as we want to be. I find that a challenging statement. I find I am newly aware of how I'm using my time which may or may not allow me to attain to my sub-goals.

If at the end of my day, or if at the time I set for having something accomplished I'm not even close, it could be that I've allowed what has no value to me whatsoever, except to keep me distracted and occupied with what has no real value. On the other hand, there is the practical side of things. When I got started writing this, I had intended to put in a load of laundry so it would wash while I was writing. But I chose to ignore the laundry and keep writing. Now I wish I'd put the laundry in because it still needs to get done and I could have done both at once.  You may think it foolish that I even mentioned this, but I wanted to be sure my words weren't taken to have some unrealistic super-spiritual sense when really, all this, including how we live with God, is part of the way we manage our every day lives. Jonathan Edwards' wife Sarah, had eleven children, ten of whom lived, to care for, plus being a preacher's wife added a lot to her responsibilities. Surely she was a lady who made wise choices as to how to utilize her time if she had that kind of access to the presence of the Lord.

As I said, it's about choices. What is your chief goal?  May I suggest that you don't just answer it in a perfunctory manner, telling yourself what you think you should be saying.  Give some quality time to thinking through what you really value and want to grow in with regard to your relationship with the Lord. Maybe some of what you have been doing, even for years, still hasn't gotten you to what you wanted with Him.  Should you keep doing it, or is there another way to reach the goal of knowing Him more deeply? If, for instance, memorizing a verse a week isn't really bringing you closer to Him, maybe letting one verse at a time sink into the deepest part of you will prove to be a way of reaching a new level of relationship with Him. Make a few sub-goals to reach a major goal, so that your major goal becomes a part of the chief goal o your life. I'm doing the same re-evaluating (call is a spiritual reconstruction) at this time and finding two things: The grace to make wiser choices more often with my time, and a deeper sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and what is pleasing to Him. That's for sure a whole lot more rewarding, profitable and enjoyable than wasting time on meaningless distractions, wouldn't you say?