It's About Trust

This past Sunday, my pastor spoke about Jesus' temptation by Satan in the desert. Satan tempted Jesus three different ways, and Jesus had an answer from the Word for each temptation. But what all three boil down to, and what all of our temptations boil down to, is trust. Do you trust that God cares about you? Do you trust that He is concerned if you have financial trouble and don't have enough to eat or a place to live? Do you trust that He has your best interests at heart, and if you follow His lead, things will go well for you? Do you trust that God wants to see you in Heaven with Him one day? Pastor's point was that every sin we commit in some way comes back to a lack of trust that God loves us and cares about us. If we don't trust Him, we'll try to do it ourselves, and that's where sin comes in.

I think we can take that idea a bit further, though. I would submit for your consideration that there is nothing else we can trust in except God. We certainly can't trust in other people - people are very complex creatures, and every one of us lets someone down from time to time, despite our best efforts. We can't trust things that aren't alive, either, things like financial market forces or things that occur in nature like weather patterns or medical facts. There are certainly patterns at work in all of those things, but they are so complicated that they are beyond our comprehension, and they can be affected by things we can't foresee. Heck, I live in Oklahoma... I can tell you that you can't even trust it to be cold in the wintertime and hot in the summertime.

You may think that you have one thing you can trust: yourself. If you think that, you are wrong. You can't trust your own memories, for example... any psychologist can put you in a situation where you are absolutely positive you remember something that happened, and you are absolutely wrong. Witnesses to crimes get details wrong all the time, not because they are lying but because they don't remember just right. When a witness is being questioned, the interrogator has to be extremely careful not to provide information for the witness that he will later be sure he supplied himself. We can't even trust our own judgement, because sometimes we just don't have a complete enough understanding of a situation to choose wisely, and sometimes there are factors we weren't aware of.

To be completely honest, you can't even trust your own eyes. Have you ever had a fever and hallucinated something, and it seemed completely real? Have you ever been on medicine that gave you weird visions, or had a bit too much alcohol and saw something that wasn't there? If our bodies get the least bit out of whack, or have even a tiny bit of any of a huge variety of chemicals introduced into them, we get all messed up. It might not even take something that extreme to throw you off course... try not going to sleep for two or three nights in a row and see if you still have a clear picture of what's going on around you. Even eating the wrong kind of food, even legitimate food that is good for your body, can make weird things happen given the right allergy or in combination with something else. Your brain is a huge chemistry set, and if the wrong chemicals get in there, you definitely cannot trust your own five senses.

There is nothing in this world that you can trust 100%. The only thing in existence anywhere that is trustworthy is God. If you choose to put too much trust in anything but Him, you're setting yourself up for trouble, disappointment, and ultimately, utter failure. But if you do put your trust in Him, you are setting yourself up for a life where success is not only possible, it is probable. Or, dare I say it? If you put your trust in God, success in your life is guaranteed. It may not look like what a man on the street thinks means success, but you will obtain success that you know in your heart is the best kind of success there is.

Trust God today. All the way, without reservation. See where it gets you!

How Far is "too far"?

The following question came to me via Formspring:

Is there anywhere in the Bible that specifically lists what sexual impurities refer to, or how far "too far" actually is?

Here's my answer:

The short answer: no, not specifically. This is related to something we were talking about last night at my church, actually. There are two concepts in the Bible that you have to understand: "Law" and "Grace." "Law" means a set of rules that you follow in order to keep things square with God. The Ten Commandments are the most famous example of this, but the concept is throughout the Bible. "Grace" means that you are square with God because of the sacrifice of Christ Jesus on the cross. Under Grace, whether or not you follow rules and regulations does not determine if you are right with God; whether or not you accept Jesus' sacrifice for you determines whether you are right or wrong with God.

That is not to say that there are not right and wrong things to do even if you are living under grace. For example, a Christian under grace is not allowed to rob a convenience store at gunpoint. If he does, although he is forgiven by God when he confesses his sin, he is not forgiven by the owner of the convenience store or by the local police department. There are consequences of his actions which are not wiped out by Grace. So, there are "right" things to do, and there are "wrong" things to do, even if they are not necessarily always codified in specific sets of rules in the Bible.

The reason the Bible doesn't necessarily set up specific sets of rules for every circumstance is that, first of all, God doesn't WANT us to live under a Law. Part of the reason God gave the Law to the nation of Israel was to demonstrate how impossible it is to always perfectly follow a set of rules. Living that way is a losing game. And second of all, God has actually written His Law on our hearts (see Hebrews 10:16 http://esv.to/Heb10:16). If you have accepted God's sacrifice through Jesus, your heart knows right from wrong. You know when you've crossed the line; you don't need a playbook with diagrams and a tape measure to know whether you've gone "too far." Under grace, The Law which is external becomes unnecessary, because God's Law is internal to each of us.

But you don't need a rulebook to determine whether you have sinned or not anyway, because from God's perspective, the sin is not something you do with your body, but something you do with your heart. Matthew 5:27 (http://esv.to/Mat5:27) says that if you even look at someone with the intention of having sex outside of marriage, you have already sinned, whether you actually follow through with it or not. This is not to say that you can't be attracted to someone and desire a physical relationship, because sexual attraction was created by God. But the instant of the sin is probably sometime around when you go from "I would really like to go to bed with that person" to "If given a chance, I WILL go to bed with that person."

So: the Bible doesn't particularly give specific "how far is too far" rules, although doubtless you could find some in there if you look around enough. The reason why is that you already know the limits, because God has written them on your heart; if you choose to look for rules and regulations, you don't have to look any further than there. When the sin has occurred internally, the sin has occurred from God's perspective. My advice to you is: keep your mind pure. Keep your hands from going where they don't need to go. Keep the parts of your body that need to be covered, covered. And if you make a mistake in your heart, bring it before God in prayer and make it right; don't beat yourself up about it. Live under Grace; don't go looking for the Law to tell you what to do, because the Law is merciless in meting out punishment when you mess up.

Something for lunchtime

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

[Matthew 4:1-4 ESV]

A very familiar passage, and I was NOT reading that passage today but this one:

“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

[Deuteronomy 8:1-3 ESV]

Very interesting:

Jesus	Israel
Led by (Spirit of) God into wilderness	Led by God into wilderness
40 days	40 years
hungry	hungry
being "tempted by the devil"	being "humbled" and "tested" by God
refused to supply for Himself	received supply from God

I suspect that Jesus had been thinking about this passage as he sat there, out in the wilderness, hungry. It was on the tip of his tongue when the devil came along. He may well have been hanging onto hope that just as God had supplied for His people back then, He would supply for Jesus now. (Of course, God did so, when the time was right.) Pretty cool!

The other two verses He quoted are from Deuteronomy chapter 6, specifically verses 16 and 13. Draw what conclusions you may from that... maybe He had spent a few days meditating on that passage as well.