Do you trust me?
This scene from the greatest 2-D Disney movie ever made (don't agree? Get your own blog) is a magical and heart-melting moment that brings up an interesting question: do you trust me? Trust.
Believe it or not, this very idea of "trust" is something on which the majority of things in our society and our lives are built upon. You TRUST that when you give the dry-cleaner money and your suit that they will clean it to satisfactory levels and not simply spray it with skunk gunk and keep your cash. We TRUST that the better ingredients do in fact make a better pizza from a papa named John. We TRUST that the bell ringer outside of K-Mart (I like shopping there better. What can I say? I like an underdog) is truly going to give the money to that charity and not just use it to purchase the newest season of Vampire Diaries on DVD. We TRUST that the person we just said those three words that are hard to say will in fact reciprocate the feelings and actually mean it. Trust is something that hits all of us in one way or another.
We place trust in things/persons that we find to be "worthy" or our trust or things/persons that we feel confident enough in to do the things or be the person they claim to do or be. Being an Ohio sport's fan, you can imagine that I have some pretty ridiculous trust issues. "I won't stop until I bring a title back to Cleveland", so LeBron heads to South Beach to win 2 titles (I don't blame him. I have YET to eat a good Ohio orange). Being a number 1 ranked football team means you can trust them to win a National Championship, but when the opportunity arises we prefer to lose every chance we get.
And don't even get me started on baseball. Good grief...
What may be worse than blindly misplacing our trust is knowing about a trustworthy thing and then choosing to go another way. Imagine going in to take an exam at school. You get to class with your #2 pencils and equally sharp intellect and get settled in to your nice hard chair. As the teacher hands out the exams, she makes an interesting announcement. "Today, I have the answers to the questions on my desk. If you would like them, you may use them. Good luck." At the same time, the guy behind you taps you on the shoulder. "Bro, my little cousin gave me her answers to this test at her 5th birthday party yesterday. She does smarts good, yeah. You want them?" Here you have the person who made the test offering to give you the way to ace the test and someone who has no clue offering what they think is the best thing. Why would you take the 5 year old's answers?
That's something we could ask Adam and Eve too. See, in the Garden of Eden, they were able to walk and talk with the very Person who designed them. The One who made the entire existence around them. The One who is life Himself! He made plants and vegetation before there was a sun, yet He was able to sustain them anyways. Crazy, right? He had never failed them. He put them in a place of absolute perfection and basically asked them to trust Him.
Then there was a serpent who planted a seed of doubt in their minds. Instead of continuing to trust the maker and keeper of their lives, they looked God in the face and said "I understand I have all I need in You, but I need something more." That day sin and death came into being. The ultimate disgrace of this story is the fact that Adam and Eve would knowingly sever the life-giving relationship with the all-loving Creator of the Universe because of a failure to trust. Looking at it with hindsight being 20-20, we may comment on how silly of a decision that was.
But in reality, many of us make the same exact decision every single day.
This God is still around, and He has YET to fail those who trust in Him and follow Him. Seeing the sin that severed the relationship, He made a way to mend it and bring about life through the person of Jesus. (Romans 6:23). He has never left or abandoned His children (Deuteronomy 31:6) and desires that everyone come to know and follow Him (1 Timothy 2:4). It even glorifies Him and brings a smile to His face when those that follow Him have pleasures from Him (Psalm 16:11).
Even in the face of these things, we chase other things because we fail to trust Him. We don't really believe God will comfort us in difficult times, so we run to football, food, fitness, beer, sex, blogging, facebook. We don't really think God has given us what we need, so we see what others have and become envious. We want the gratification of intimacy, but instead of trusting what God says about waiting until marriage (Hebrews 13:4), we try and grasp it before marriage (either with someone or through the internet).
Brothers, sisters, humanity: we need to trust in God. We must return to the One who gave us breathe, the One who loves you, the One who desires to know you because He knows that in Him you can truly become the person you were designed to be. In Jeremiah 17:7, the prophet writes "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in Him". Trust in the One who has yet to fail and knows what is best for you is more than just a cognitive decision; it is a conviction that sparks action. We TRUST Jesus, therefore we delight in the path of His commands (Psalm 119:35). We TRUST God and know that He will provide us with what we need, so we help that person who is holding the sign by the highway. We go out of our way to share this word of hope to anyone who will listen and even those who don't want to, because His love is for all.
Christ is holding out His nail-scarred hand to you and I and is asking "I am life. I love you. Do you trust me?"
-Raymond Morris
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