“Trusting God”

(The Scripture lesson for this sermon is from Genesis, Chapter 12, verses 1-9;

 and the Gospel lesson is found in Matthew, Chapter 9, verses 9-13, 18-26)

Pastor Stan Larson

Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas

Sunday, June 8, 2008

 It’s summertime.  How many of you like to swim?  My family tells stories of me, that when my dad was in his first call and I was little; when we moved there I was still less than four.  When we went to visit some of the members who had swimming pools, they had to make sure before they opened the door, to put a vest on me, because I would be in the pool and out of the pool and off of the diving board and back in the pool before they could turn around.  We expect that of young children, right?  They get into all kinds of things, and one of the things with children as you are teaching them to swim, the parent or the adult is in the pool, and you’re asking them to jump in, right?  To jump in, and take that next step, to trust you, to say, “Its okay.”  Sometimes our children get to be almost too trusting; because if you have gotten them to jump into your arms, you know, they will climb up on things and jump, expecting mom or dad to catch them.  Hopefully, you do catch them.  But we know that they do trust us; and in our lessons today, we have that same kind of image here in both of our readings--coming to trust God. 

Trusting God means not just saying, “Oh I trust you,” but actually doing things, actually taking steps to follow where God leads.  In our day and time, we have come to talk about faith and believing as something that’s very much kind of up here in our head.  We believe, and we talk about, as we will later when we confess and affirm in the Apostle’s Creed, our faith by saying, “I believe in God”; and we talk about all of the theological concepts, and we talk about it up here in our brains. 

But in the Bible, faith, belief, trust is something about the heart.  It is about trusting in that other person, and saying, “Whatever you ask, I will do.”  When God asked Abram to get up and leave, saying, “Go to the place that I will show you, you and your household, and I will make you a great nation; I will give you children, and all of these other things”, what did Abram have to go on?  Did he have the Bible—No.  None of it had been written yet.  Did he have any creeds—No.  Did he have a lot of experience with God—not particularly.  If you go farther back, you find that God had spoken to Abram’s father, Terah, when they were even farther south down in Ur.  They had made it all the way to Haran; then his father had stopped, and God was now moving with the next generation. 

You know, he didn’t have all of the advantages that we have, all of these things and ideas that you read and think about.  What Abram had was God, God coming and saying, “I’m God and I would like you to do this.  I want you to trust me; I want you to have faith in me.  I want you to believe that what I say I am going to do, I will do.”  And Abram did it.  Abram trusted.  In the book of Hebrews, it talks about how by faith, Abram obeyed.  It didn’t say by reading his Bible and his Book of Order and his constitution and all of those things, he was led to believe; but rather he was led by faith, faith in God, trusting that God would be faithful to His promise, Abram did as he was instructed.

Jesus comes upon the tax collector, Matthew sitting at the tollbooth.  Maybe you have driven on a turnpike or maybe you have seen the highway police out with their stops for all the semi trucks, and there is a waiting lineup.  This would be the kind of thing Matthew was doing.  He was there to make sure all the proper taxes and forms had been filled out.  Can you imagine someone in a tollbooth--for instance, I drive to Tulsa where my sister is, and I go up the Muskogee Turnpike, and there’s only one person in the booth; imagine that that one person just gets up and leaves.  Now you don’t have the exact change; and you’re a little perturbed because gas is high and you have to pay a toll in addition to that.  Also, tax collectors were not well thought of.  But here was Matthew—what did Matthew have?  Did he have the New Testament—No.  Maybe he had some of the Old Testament.  Maybe he had heard some things about God,  He had never met Jesus before; but here was Jesus coming and saying, “ Follow me” and by faith, by trusting in Jesus, he got up and left his position and followed. 

We know that Matthew became one of the Disciples.  He followed for a long time.  He spent his life doing the other things that Jesus would ask of him…..by faith, by trust.  That’s what we’re asked to do, to trust in God.  I could ask you take out one of your bills in your wallet, and to see that it says, “In God We Trust”, and as the joke goes, “All others pay cash”.  But, you know we are to trust in God.  We have it right out there in front of us.  When we trust in God, we trust that what God asks of us, that what God looks for from us, God will fulfill.  God expects us to step out, not to sit around, saying, “Well, what are the risks, what do I need to do first, all these kinds of things that we are wonderful at doing; and Presbyterians, especially, when we come up with an issue, we say, “Let’s put a committee together; let’s talk about it; let’s debate it.

One of the things that was brought up at Presbytery Meeting yesterday was probably not out of the blue; I know we had talked about this before, but it was said that the motion that came before the floor hadn’t been discussed beforehand; it was to have all of our Presbytery Meetings, if they were two day meetings, to be on Friday and Saturday.  If they are one-day meetings or called meetings, they would be on Saturday, so that people don’t have to take off from work and that sort of thing.  And somebody said, “Let’s refer it to the committee—typically Presbyterian, good order and all that, but we said, “No, we want to vote on it”.  So, starting in 2010, all Presbytery meetings will be either Friday and Saturday, or Saturday so that our Youth, and people who work, can be there. 

Now the ones who grumbled the most are probably pastors, because Saturday is normally our day off, preparing for Sunday.  But we trusted one another because we know that this is a good thing.  We know this is something we should be doing; we want more people there; we want our younger families, our young people to be able to come without it being a hardship for them.  We’re called to trust one another, to trust in God.  It’s a challenging thing for us because we would love to have all the things laid out for us.  Whether you’re in science or math and such, we’re used to being logical and having all the proofs laid out; and we know it’s going to work. 

But sometimes we just have to trust.  And sometimes we’re better off not knowing, but simply going on the fact that we can trust the person who is asking us.  When I was in western Kansas I had an old farmer who was very inventive.  He had a wonderful workshop I would have died for.  He had a metal lathe and he could manufacture anything.

But he was a farmer, and one of the things when you’re out there in the covered tractor in the hot sun, that you’d like, is for your air-conditioning to keep working.  Now we were challenged that way yesterday because the air-conditioning at Grace where we were having the meeting, quit working in the morning.  They got it working by the afternoon, but you know we were getting a little warm.

But the farmer looked at that tractor and he said, “There’s got to be a better way for this thing to work”; and he got it working.  He manufactured something that worked.  He sent the designs off to a company and they gave it to the engineers who said, “It can’t work.”  He said, “It does work.”  They said, “It shouldn’t work.” But it does work.  Who do we trust?  We don’t, by knowledge, know everything that we would like to know.  We will never know enough about God.  We’re called to step out as Abram, as Matthew, as the leader of the synagogue who came and asked Jesus to come, even though his daughter was already pronounced dead, to say, “I know, but I trust that you are the one who can do something about this.”  And the woman with the hemorrhage who said, “No one else has been able to help me for twelve years, but I know you can help me.”  There’s no valid reason.  There’s no scientific reason.  There’s no way that this should happen, but I trust you, because in you I see God and I trust God.  We are called to live in that way.  Maybe we don’t have to get up and leave everything behind.  Maybe we don’t have to leave our job behind.  Maybe we don’t have to do all of those other great steps as the people in our lessons today, but we have to begin to move to where our life is lived out of our heart, and out of that relationship we have with God which says, “ I trust you. I have faith in you, I believe in you; not just all of these concepts we have about you, but because I believe in you.

Do you remember back when you could do a deal and shake on it?  You didn’t have to have all the lawyers and all the paperwork.  I mean it’s nice to have everything covered, but you trusted the other person that when he said he was going to do something, he was going to do it.  This is the kind of trust we are to have in God.  This should be the foundation of our life in our relationship with God, to trust Him, because trust is at the very heart of our faith and our belief.  It’s not about our knowledge; it’s not about all the things we can say about God, but it’s the things that we feel, the things that we know in our heart to be true about God that let’s us trust God.  It’s not easy.  I never said it was easy for Abram.  He had to leave family and friends and everybody behind and keep traveling.  For Matthew and the other Disciples, to leave their friends and families and their work behind and give their whole life to the ministry of following Jesus, doing the things Jesus gave them to do.  For the leader of the synagogue to risk ridicule in the eyes of the people, to trust Jesus to come and heal the daughter, when everyone else in authority was saying, “No, you’re not supposed to do that”.   We are called to trust, to be trusting in God, for God, indeed, throughout time has proven to be faithful, not always in our time as we will find out later on, because God’s promises to Abraham take awhile.  We like our promises fulfilled now, we want them tomorrow, we’d like them on our time schedule; but we trust because we know that God is faithful.

God will fulfill all of the things that He says to us; and God asks us to step out in trust like that little child, to say, “I know that what you’re asking, you know I can do.  I don’t know I can do it, but you, as God, know that I can do it, know that it is possible; and you will be there to catch me and support me and to help me today and all the days of my life." This is what we are called to be about.  It is the heart of our faith to trust in God, to trust in the one who is our God, and to know that we indeed can put our faith, our belief and our trust in that One.    Amen

And as I said, there are times when we talk about our faith and what we believe; and it is becomes simply up here.  When we talk and affirm our faith according to the Apostle’s Creed, we say I trust in God, and then I can say these other things about God.  But at the heart of it is the fact that we trust God.  If we don’t trust God, then all of these other things are kind of irrelevant.  They are things we are saying about someone, but not the One who is at the heart of our life.

 So I invite you now to affirm our faith together using the words of the Apostle’s Creed.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

 and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into Hell.  The third day He rose again from the dead

and ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.  Amen