Have Faith in God
Meditation for the week of January 25, 2009
Mark 11:22 And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
We recently took a real vacation where we had to fly a real airplane to a real cruise ship that took us to several spots in the Caribbean Sea. We had to trust a lot of people for that vacation to happen. We trusted my daughter when she said she had arranged the trip for us, that she was paying the bill and was going along to make sure we enjoyed ourselves. We had to trust my son-in-law to get us to the airport on time and that meant we had to trust his van to run in below zero weather. We had to trust the people who designed and built his van. We had to trust a flight crew to fly a plane to get to Miami which meant that we had to trust a plane with a lot of moving parts to be able to get about 150 people and their luggage airborne and to the Miami airport. We had to trust the people who designed the plane and the people who made it. When we got to the cruise ship, we had to trust the crew and the staff and the boat and all the people who designed and built and maintained that boat. When I got to thinking about the number of people and machines we were trusting, I began to think that maybe we should have stayed home. Most people cannot or will not follow directions and only one person would have had to foul up for our vacation to have been a bad experience instead of a good one. But we had a good experience.
if we can trust men and their machines when we know that men are prone to be undependable and when we know that machines tend to fail, why is it so hard to trust the designer of this universe who also designed the way of salvation after the man He had made failed? One day the Lord was in a boat and storm came up. The Lord was quite content to be sleeping in the back of the boat. The disciples were afraid the boat was going to sink so they woke up the Lord and asked Him if He didn’t care that they were about to perish. He was the creator of the universe. He was destined to die on a cross, not by drowning in a boat. How could the boat possibly go down with Him in it? But they didn’t have faith in Him and as a result they had a lot of anxiety that they didn’t need to have (See Mark 4:37-41). Even those of us who say we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, have trouble trusting Him when the storms of life come.
When people build things, they usually write an owner’s manual telling people who buy the product how to use it. Many people throw the owner’s manual away and as a result they never do fully understand how the product works. Sometimes they have to assemble what they have bought and they wonder why they have screws left over when they are finished. Sometimes the product has features that are never used because the owner didn’t read the instructions and sometimes people think the product is defective because they didn’t do what the instructions said to do. But the designer should know best how to assemble and use the product and it is nice when the designer has made a manual available.
God left us a manual. It is called the Bible. When he got done with creation, it was very good. But men don’t read the owner’s manual and when things go wrong they blame God rather than themselves. Men have marred that which was very good because they have not been where they should be when they should be there, doing what God has asked them to do, because “they want to figure things out on their own.†The problem isn’t with God and His manual, the problem is with people who don’t trust God enough to follow the instructions.
Trusting others is hard. We tend to think that we know what we are doing even when it is obvious that we don’t know what we are dong. That is why we have to repent to believe or trust in Christ. Sometimes we act like the fellow who said, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.†However, God knows best how to save us and He knows best how to keep us. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were smart enough to read the instructions and then to believe that He knows what He is doing and He knows how what He has created works best?
Trust lets us use what others have designed and made. We need to trust God since He knew what He was doing when He designed and made us.
Bruce Collins