Trusting is not really the same thing as just holding a correct idea in your head. It involves surrender, a “leaning against.” Trust results in actions. When we trust the Lord, we give up our own control and allow him to truly be God.    

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James 2:14-26. Proverbs 3:5-6

When we closed last week, I mentioned that, at least for me, this week’s phrase is in many ways the linchpin of the Serenity Prayer. Of course, the whole thing goes together – all these things we are asking God to give us are connected – but at least in my experience, trust is the key to all the other requests in this prayer. And in fact, I think trust is central to the Christian life. As we begin this week’s time together, let’s pray.

            [PRAYER]

            Let me start by putting trust together with a couple other words that may be more “churchy”: belief and faith. I think many of us are very used to considering faith as core to our relationship with God. We believe in salvation by faith alone, apart from works. We confess our belief that Jesus is Lord and Savior, that He died for our sins and has been raised from death to life. But I am glad the Serenity Prayer uses the word trust instead, because sometimes using a slightly different word can help us capture the depth of words that we are so familiar with that they may have lost some of their meaning.

            When it comes to the words faith or belief, I think that we have unintentionally lost some of the Biblical understanding of those words. Too often, in our churches, faith has become nothing more than a mental nod in the direction of an idea. And belief has become about having a good, solid list of correct doctrine in our heads. Now, I believe in good, solid, correct doctrine. I think it’s important for our spiritual health and living kingdom life in Christ. But when we limit faith and belief to things that are only happening in our heads (or our hearts), we have stepped away from a Biblical understanding of faith. Biblical faith is about where we put our trust. What are we relying on for our well-being?

            You’re probably familiar with the old illustration of the tightrope walker who is crossing back and forth between two skyscrapers with a variety of props – a ball, a wheelbarrow, a load of bricks. After crossing back and forth several times and demonstrating his skill, he asks the crowd, “How many of you believe that I can walk across this tightrope carrying a person on my back?” Having seen his skill, the crowd responds wholeheartedly that they know he can do it. Then the acrobat asks for a volunteer to be that person, and the crowd goes silent. I fear that too often, this reflects my own approach to faith. I am quick to assent that God can do the things that need to be done in life – but how quick am I to show that trust by actually putting myself in His hands without a safety net of some kind – just in case?

            When we ask God to give us this trust – and remember, this whole prayer begins with “God, grant.” We are not trying to make ourselves trust, we aren’t trying to generate our own courage to get out on the rope. We are asking God to give us the ability to respond to Him with trust. This is not about whether or not we can put the correct answers on the doctrinal questionnaire. This is about whether or not we can be willing to receive from God the ability to let go of control and allow Him, not us, to determine what will happen next in our lives and in the lives of those we care about.

            And to be clear, this part of the prayer is not about asking us to trust God for our salvation. I mean, yes, it would include that, but this is a prayer (at least as I understand it) for believers. For people who have already trusted God to deliver us from our sin. This prayer is more about our sanctification, about the ongoing work of God’s Spirit in us to display His Glory as He calls out the identity of son or daughter that He has given us in Christ Jesus. And trust or faith or belief is just as big a part of our sanctification as it is our salvation. It is God who has brought us into His kingdom, and it is God who is doing the primary work of making us holy. We are called to trust Him and surrender to that process. (And next week, we will talk more about what surrender looks like.)

            Having laid all that groundwork, I’d like us to take a look at some familiar passages about trust/faith/belief in Scripture. We will go back to James for the first passage. Let’s read James 2:14-26.

“¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? ¹⁵ Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶ If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. ¹⁹ You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

²⁰ You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? ²¹ Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. ²³ And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. ²⁴ You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

²⁵ In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? ²⁶ As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.”

            What is James saying here? Is he telling us that there are things we have to do to have salvation? Absolutely not. But I believe he is confronting the same problem that the tightrope walker faced. It’s easy to say we believe something. But the kind of faith relationship God calls us into is one that will inevitably result in action. James is defining what real faith, Godly faith is. He starts off with the illustration of a person in need. If we say all the right things about that person, but actually give him nothing, what good has it done? He is still hungry and naked. And in the same way, if our faith produces no action, then it is just a set of empty words. Our relationship with God is not about saying a magical set of phrases that give us a ticket into heaven when we die. It is about reorienting our lives so that God is in charge of them. If we trust Jesus, our lives should change! If they don’t change, that raises the question (I’m not saying it answers it automatically, but it should at least raise the question) – is my faith alive? Is it producing God-centered obedience in my life? If not, James has no use for empty words. He’s pretty clear – the demons know there is only one God. The gospels make clear that the demons recognized that Jesus was the Son of God. But that “statement of faith” is useless for the demons, because it results in more rebellion rather than transformation.

            We often tend to separate thoughts and feelings and actions into distinct categories. The Bible does not use some important terms in that way. Think about love for a minute. Biblically, love is less about what we feel and more about what we do. Think about 1 Corinthians 13, which is full of observable actions that show love. James is saying that faith is like that too. There is no such thing as a true living faith disconnected from actions. Some of our reformation and counter-reformation debates have put a filter in front of this passage that was not there for James’s Jewish Christian readers. It was obvious to them that living faith is always connected to action. And James brings up two examples from Jewish history.

            The first is Abraham, the father of the faithful. Now, I want to be clear here – Abraham was brought into relationship with God by God’s actions, and Abraham’s (or before his name change, Abram’s) decision to trust God. But everyone connected that decision to concrete actions in Abraham’s life: circumcision, moving across the world, sacrifice – even willingness to offer up Isaac! Those actions not only demonstrate the faith that Abraham had, they are themselves part of it. Faith is interwoven with the actions that he took because of his trust in the God who was speaking to him. The same thing is true for Rahab. Her righteousness – her deliverance – is built on trust. She trusted that Israel’s God was more powerful than the gods of Jericho. She trusted that the spies would keep their word. And she took action. I’m not even sure how I feel about some of the actions she took. (Does God need us to lie to protect His people?) But she took them because she trusted this God of Israel enough to take action, and in taking those actions, her faith came to life, and she was delivered (she was saved).

            James uses another line at the end that we may read differently. We make a lot of distinctions between body, mind, soul, spirit. And while this is a topic for another time, many of those distinctions come less from the Biblical revelation of human nature and more from Greek philosophy filtered through the Enlightenment. So, when James says the body without the spirit is dead, he is saying a person is intended to live with those in unity, not commenting on separable parts. The same thing is true of faith as an idea and faith as an action. They are two parts of the whole. When we trust God to make all things right, that includes taking actions that are shaped by that trust.

This next Scripture is one that I have held closely for over 40 years. I am not claiming that I have lived it out for forty years, but that I have seen how incredibly important it is for me. Proverbs 3:5-6,

 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.”

Let’s unpack this for a few minutes. Trust – believe in God – wholeheartedly. But not just with your heart. It affects your mind as well (and again, these are less discrete parts and more ways of talking about different aspects of a whole human being). Instead of leaning on my understanding, what am I to lean on? If I trust God, I am leaning on His understanding. What has He said about the way to handle the situation in front of me?

I’m a smart guy – and that has been one of my biggest problems. Because I have (or think I have) a lot of good ideas about what the solution to a problem should be, it is easy for me to think that I am the one who needs to bring the solution to the problem. But I’m not the one who makes things right. God is. Think about leaning, because it’s a good word to help us understand trust. If I lean on something, I am literally putting my weight on it. If it is unreliable (untrustworthy), I will fall over. And this proverb is telling us what – or Who – is trustworthy. And it isn’t me. It’s God.

            The proverb also tells me that this applies to all my ways. And again, acknowledging God is not just waving in His direction with a prayer. It is actively living in the light of His sovereignty and Lordship. I am confessing, not just with my brain or my mouth, but with my actions, that I am under His command as part of His kingdom. Not just when it comes to church. But in all my ways. How I work. How I play. How I rest. How I engage in relationships, from the most important people in my family to the casual encounters at the gas station. What do I do with my finances? My dreams? My sexuality? My hobbies?  I am turning all these over to God because I trust Him to direct me where He wants me to go – which may not be where I want to go.

            And that leads to one of the great difficulties we have – or at least I have – with trust. Some of the things that God makes right, He makes right in ways that I don’t approve of, and on timetables that I think aren’t good, and using people that I would not choose. But you see, I am not leaning on my own understanding of what is right – I am trusting God to define what is right. This was really clear to me in a Bible study with some close friends many years ago. We were reading through the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Have you read that recently? God tells Israel to do some things that I would call horrible. But my friend Matt made a really critical point that has helped me ever since. It all depends on how we start. If I start with the idea that I know what is good, and then evaluate God based on how He measures up to that definition, I will find myself in trouble. (I will be leaning, putting my weight on my own understanding.) If I start with the belief that God is good, and that I need to let Him define what goodness means, then I am trusting Him.

            As we move toward wrapping up this week, I want to share one more thing that has been helpful for me in working with God to grow trust in my life. And this also goes back to how we define trust/faith/belief. Trust is not just an idea that has no practical impact. And trust is also not defined by the way I feel about the actions God is asking me to take. This may be really simple for you, but it was groundbreaking and eye-opening for me. Early in my recovery journey, I told a sponsor that I just didn’t feel like I could do something he was asking. (It was something simple, like call him every day no matter what was going on.) His answer was, “You don’t have to feel like doing it. You just have to do it.” And I have come to believe that God wants the same thing from me. I can get trapped in my feelings of fear, or guilt, or some other emotion, and believe that because I don’t have a feeling of trust, that I can’t trust. But that’s not true. I can’t think of many places in Scripture where God commands us to feel a certain way. And I don’t think He ever tells us we must like one of His commands before we act on it. He does tell us to trust Him enough to do what He says, and leave the results up to Him.

            And that’s another hard part of this line. We’ll talk about this more next week, with the idea of surrender, but trusting God inherently means letting Him be in charge of what happens next, and that isn’t always pleasant. It never has been. Spending one hundred years building a boat probably wasn’t pleasant. Abraham’s journey to the altar with Isaac wasn’t pleasant. Living in slavery in Egypt for generations wasn’t pleasant. The exile wasn’t pleasant. And certainly, the cross wasn’t pleasant for Jesus, nor were the persecutions that came for His followers. Trusting that God will make all things right sometimes means that an angel sets Peter free from prison; sometimes it means that Herod is allowed to execute James the brother of John.

Trusting that God will make all things right does not mean that all things will go as I’d like them to go – that all my prayers for healing will be answered when I pray them, that God will open or shut the doors that I want Him to open or shut in my life or in the lives of people I love. I talked last week about the insurance situation that was causing major pain for a family at our church. God has not, in my view, made that right – at least, not yet. If anything, things have gotten worse. But I give up my right to decide what is better or worse in circumstances and trust God. After all, if He only did things that I liked or that made sense to me, what need would I have to trust Him? I don’t have to trust people much if they are going to do what I want them to do anyway. But trusting God is a challenge. That’s why we need to ask Him for the gift of trusting Him. That’s why we need to pray this prayer – or at least, I do.

With that said, let’s close again this week with the Serenity Prayer. I hope you’ll join with me as we pray.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.

Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it to be.

Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will – that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.

This week may God deepen the trust you have in Him and empower you to take the actions that display that trust, even when it looks foolish or weak or doesn’t make sense. Amen.