Choosing to Trust Rather Than Please

week 3:5
Let Hope In

CHOICE 3: CHOOSING TO TRUST RATHER THAN PLEASE

Once we get to this place, there are two distinct paths that we can take in the so-called “Christian” life.

PATH ONE: PLEASING GOD – WORKING ON MY SIN to achieve an intimate relationship with God. This sounds, very, well, “Christian”. Sell out, fire up, shape up. But over time this path will make you cynical and tired. This path is characterized by self-effort and the goal, the focus, in sinning less.

One of the tendencies we have in Christianity today is that we focus on sin management—in essence, behavioral modification. While there are several problems with this path, the biggest I see is that the Gospels make it clear that Jesus doesn’t want to edit behaviors; rather, he wants to change hearts.

PATH TWO: TRUSTING GOD – TRUSTING GOD WITH MY SIN. This is simply LIVING OUT WHO GOD SAYS I AM. So there’s this path of trusting God but we initially don’t want to take this path because it seems far less heroic.

Hebrews 11:6 "And Without faith it is impossible to please God..."

Did you see the two paths in this verse? Did you notice that trusting God pleases God? If our primary motive is pleasing God, we never please him enough and we never learn trust. That’s because life on this road is all about

my striving,

my effort,

my ability to make something happen.

But if our primary motive is trusting God, we find out that he is incredibly pleased with us. So pleasing God is actually a by-product of trusting God.

While choosing path two seems like a no-brainer, in my experience, most of us choose to spend our time here on this earth exploring the guilt-ridden, failure-producing traps of path one. Path two doesn’t seem as spiritual or as heroic. And beyond that, the real reason we’re drawn to path one is because of our past. We’re hardwired for attention, acceptance, appreciation and affection and these things are usually attained through our effort.

And we’re not the first to feel this pull toward path one. In fact, the apostle Paul goes to great lengths to help the early Christians from making the same mistake. Their past—living the religious life of a Jew—set them up to go running down path one.

The early New Testament church really wrestled with this in the same way we do today. In fact, much of Paul’s writing in the New Testament is an attempt to address this issue. Let’s look at Galatians 2.

Quick background: Gentiles were being forced to live like Jews in order to be acceptable to Jews. Behind this social crisis, however, a more fundamental theological issue was at stake: Is the truth of the gospel or is the law the basis for determining fellowship between Jewish and Gentile Christians?

Early Jewish Christians had created a sort of equation that still exists today...

MORE RIGHT BEHAVIOR + LESS WRONG BEHAVIOR = GODLINESS

This theology comes with a significant problem: It sets us up to fail and to live in hypocrisy. Our determination to please God traps us in a formula that will leave us living exhausted and fake and even if we do experience some success than we’ll become prideful and judgmental.

Galatians 2:15-18 

We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners." We know very well that we are not set right with God but rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it - and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believe in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good. 

Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And you are ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sing? The accusation is frivolous. If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.

For some of you your entire Christian life has been about “rebuilding old barns”; you’ve placed all of your efforts in “trying to be good.”

Pleasing God is a great longing, but it cannot be our primary motivation or it will imprison our hearts. When our motive is trusting God, our focus is then living out who God says I am. As a follower of Christ you have received a new heart. You have a new identity. You’ve already been changed and now you get to mature into who you already are.

Galatians 6:12-15

Those who are trying to force you to be circumcised want to look good to others (optional medical procedure, for the Jews it was the mark of belonging to the covenant people of God) They don't want to be persecuted for teaching that the cross of Christ alone can save. And even those who advocate circumcision don't keep the whole law themselves. They only want you to be circumcised so they can boast about it and claim you as their disciples. 

As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of the cross, my interest in this world has been crucified and the world's interest in me has also died. It doesn't matter whether we have been circumcised or not. What counts is whether we have been transformed into a new creation. 

Paul is saying can you see the central issue? It’s not about a list of rules. You can’t achieve Godliness through striving. You’re no match against sin. It’s not work a little harder. Do a little more. The central issue is what God is doing. What counts is the inward transformation that He alone can do in our hearts.

Here’s the temptation for me. I often start to think that I’m only about 3 issues away from really being used by God to do something big. So I’ll list my 3 issues.

And then I go to trying to solve those issues. But the reality is I will never solve all my “issues”. 

Why?

Intention not to sin is not the same as the power not to sin.

In fact, I kind of hope you don’t solve your issues because then you would become self- sufficient. The goal of spiritual maturity is not for you to get all of your stuff “solved”. You never will. The goal is to learn to depend on – to trust- what God says is true about you, so that together you can begin dealing with stuff. You will not know God’s power until you give up on your power, which is actually no power at all.

Let’s think about it this way.

In this life, those of us who have trusted Christ will have sin issues, and we will always have the identity God gave us. They are constants. Unchanging realities.

Pleasing God: Working on my sin issues _________________________________> 

Trusting God: Trusting who God days I am ______________________________>

It’s key to ask yourself which of these two constants defines my life focus? Which offers me the hope of experiencing the other? If you opt for the top line you will never experience the bottom line. But, if we focus on the bottom line, we will experiences unparalleled transformation regarding our sin issues.

Do you see why trusting God is so important? To resolve our sin issues we must begin by trusting who God says we are. God did not design us to conquer sin on our own.

One of the biggest problems in Christianity today is that so many Christians see their sin as an gigantic cavern that is creating distance from God.

One of the biggest misconceptions in Christianity: WE BELIEVE GOD LOVES US, BUT WE ALSO BELIEVE HE’S PRETTY DISSAPOINTED IN US. That our imperfections, that our sin is causing this growing gap in our relationship with Christ.

Illus. > There’s an illustration that has been used for decades and decades to help people understand our need for Christ. I’ve used it and I guarantee you’ve heard it. People will say your standing on a cliff and on the other side of the cliff is someone you want to see (God). There’s no way for you to get to the other side. Sin separates us from God. You can yell back and forth but it’s a deeply unsatisfying relationship.

This abyss represents sin. SO the question is how do you get to him. The answer is you don’t. Not unless you can find some way to remove the sin from your life. But the problem is last time I checked you guys were all human so not only can you not do anything about the sin that you’ve already committed but your actually contributing to this gap on a daily basis.

This is an accurate picture of someone who doesn’t have life in Christ but the illustration makes no sense if you’re a Christian and yet this is how so many Christians are living...as if there is a cavern of sin that separates them from God and they feel distant from Him as if there salvation never took place.

You now have Christ in you!! It’s not God on one side and you on the other both of you staring at this gap of sin saying now what are we going to do. What if we stood in front of our sin taking full responsibility, but realizing we have Christ in us who we are trusting his provision for the very sin we’ve just committed.

What if we truly believed we were without condemnation? 

What if grace really was that strong?

What if God through Jesus really took away any element of fear or condemnation, judgment or rejection?

What if He did really put his love and power inside of them?

What if we’re not supposed to put on masks...that it’s ok to be who they are in the moment, with all of our mess?

What if God really will run to the ends of the earth and do the most horrible, unthinkable things, that when they come back, I’d receive them with tears and a huge party?

Grace is believing that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and we do not have to get it all together. It’s not the absence of trouble but the presence of God. It’s making contact with something unseen, way bigger than we could ever imagine in our wildest dreams. It’s realizing the abyss of our past is no longer holding us back from God.

Living for acceptance and love is slavery; living from acceptance and love is freedom.

So which path will you journey down? Will you seek to trust or please?

Sin does not make you second-class. When he looks at you, he doesn’t see a prodigal, a servant, or a screw-up. Instead, he sees his son, his daughter.

He doesn’t see your past, but you—whole, forgiven, restored, completely. I wish we could give you a brand-new beginning but that’s impossible. Your past can’t be totally erased. However, your past can be restored. Even if you can’t have a brand-new beginning, you can have a brand-new ending. God’s grace is a surprising reversal of the way things work in this world and reminds us that our God is no normal God.

There is none like him.

Unconditionally sung by Katy Perry sums this post up very well!! (Maybe her thought were intentional :) )