©2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

10/21/01

Where Trust Begins

Romans 10:1-11

10/21/01 Where Trust Begins

ROM 9:33 just as it is written, "Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed."

Last week we laid the foundation for our entrance into Romans chapter 10

by looking closely at the last verse of chapter 9,

a verse in which Paul uses a quotation from Isaiah

to prepare us for one of the strongest discussions of the free will of man

found anywhere in Scripture.

God has given to every one of us who enters this world

the ability to choose for ourselves

how we will respond to Him.

We can choose to trust what He has said to us.

Or we can choose to reject Him as our God,

or ignore Him,

or play funny little mental games in which we pretend He isn’t there.

When He created us

He placed within us real,

true free will -

He gave us, His created beings,

the right to decide how we will respond to Him, our Creator.

I believe that is the greatest single wonder

in all of creation.

Sandee and I have been doing some remodeling at our house,

and in the process I had to pull out the kitchen sink,

along with the disposal,

and the all the dishwasher hook-ups.

This past week I spend about five hours

putting it all back in again.

After groveling around under that sink for an entire morning,

tightening,

and plumbing,

and fixing,

when I finally crawled out

and turned on that faucet,

I wanted it to work.

I wanted hot water to come out when I turned it to hot.

I wanted cold to come out

when I turned it to cold.

I wanted the dishwasher to run,

and I really wanted it all to stop

when I turned everything off.

Now, I didn’t create that system,

I just installed it.

But I got to thinking how incredibly irritating it would have been

if that faucet would have had free will.

If it would have had the ability to decide for itself

whether or not it would do

whatever I wanted it to do.

What if I would have turned the faucet to hot

and then discovered it just happened to be in a cold mood,

and was only giving out cold water that day?

And what if, every once in a while,

the sprayer would just let loose with water,

and hose down the entire kitchen?

Or what if some days

the sink just wasn’t in a water mood at all,

and refused to do anything?

Such a faucet would not survive long in my world.

We take our free will for granted,

because we possess it from the instant of our conception,

and because it forms the basis for our relationships with every aspect of the world in which we live.

Every minute we live

we are choosing how we will relate to our God,

how we will relate to the people around us,

how we will relate to ourselves,

and we never even think about our right

or our ability to do so.

It is the great given of our existence.

But from God’s perspective

it is a truly remarkable thing.

It gives us tremendous insight

into the nature of our God.

It is not obedience that He values so highly in us, His creation,

it is the CHOICE of obedience,

the choice that grows out of our willing trust in Him.

If obedience alone was His great priority in us,

if His goal was to have a neat and tidy,

absolutely moral universe,

He would never have created us as He did.

He would certainly never have created us

with the free will He has given us.

But neatness,

moral tidiness was not what He was after.

What He wanted

was a relationship with His created beings

that was based upon our understanding of who He is,

and then our willingness to trust Him as our God

as a result of that knowledge.

He wanted a true love relationship between us and Himself,

and true love can only exist

when there is the ability to choose not to love.

And as we finished up the last verse of Romans chapter 9 last week,

we saw that a major part of this whole process of God drawing us to Himself,

and offering us the choice of submission to Him

is His clear, careful revelation of Himself to us.

He does not ask for our blind faith.

He does not want the fear-based submission

of a finite creature cowering before the almighty Creator.

He wants us to know Him as He is,

and then, on the basis of that knowledge,

to reach out to Him in trust.

And so, to give us clear insight into Himself,

just so that there could be no misunderstanding,

JOH 1:14...the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Full of grace...

and truth...

And then,

as He walked among us,

as He lived with us,

in our confusion,

and in our fear,

and in our hatred,

and in our doubt,

and in the flood of moral sewage that is the flow of human existence,

our God put into words

what our spirits longed to hear Him say,

MAT 11:28 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

MAT 11:29 "Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls.

Which brings us back to the last verse of Romans chapter 9,

and the comments about free will

that follow in chapter 10.

"Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed."

You see, it is the same message,

the same truth,

the same communication to us from our Creator -

And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.

We can choose anything we want.

We can choose to place our trust in anything

or anyone we want.

We can choose to build our lives upon any foundation we select.

But if we choose Him,

if we choose to believe in Him,

if we choose to place our trust in our God

and in what He has said to us,

we have His word

we will never ever be disappointed.

And then, just as we would expect,

from that statement

Paul goes on to explain to us

what it means for a person to “believe in Him”.

And as we move into these verses,

I need to warn you

that this belief-in-Him thing

is not what we may at first expect.

Now, in context Paul is talking about the Nation of Israel.

But within that discussion

we are going to see him bring to light

the root struggle every one of us faces

in our relationship with our Creator.

OK,

the first thing he does, in 10:1,

is to state once again

his deep longing for the return of his fellow Jews

to their Creator God.

ROM 10:1 Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.

And then,

in a single statement

he reveals their problem.

ROM 10:2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge.

And before we go any farther in this passage

I need to warn you

that we will have to walk very carefully here

so that we allow ourselves to hear

what is really being said,

and not just what we expect to hear.

You see, it is very difficult for us to believe

that fervent,

sincere,

intense religious zeal in itself

is not valued by God.

And yet it is not.

Our Creator never has wanted a world filled with deeply religious people.

He doesn’t want our intense religious activity.

He doesn’t want our perfect church attendance.

He doesn’t want us diligently doing things FOR Him.

What He wants,

what He has been seeking in us

from the first day of creation

is just one thing - trust...

our willingness to trust Him,

our choice to trust Him.

We call it faith in the Christian community,

but I hesitate to use that word much anymore

because it has been so abused,

so twisted and confused

by 2000 years of religion

that it has ceased to have any real meaning to most of us.

So, for this morning,

we are going to call it “trust” -

our willingness to trust our Creator.

But even that word has risks with it.

What does it mean to “trust” God?

How do I do that?

Where do I start?

Am I suppose to trust Him with my future?

Am I suppose to trust Him with my finances?

Am I suppose to trust Him with my health?

Am I suppose to trust Him with my love needs?

What does it mean for me to TRUST God?

The most recent evil to paralyze our nation

is now the threat of anthrax.

I saw a brief interview with Dan Rather this past week,

following the discovery

that one of his fellow CBS employees

had been infected.

He said, “The real enemy we face now is not anthrax. The real enemy is fear.”

He’s right, of course.

Anthrax has infected a tiny number of our people,

nearly all of whom will fully recover.

Fear paralyzes our entire nation.

So then what does it mean to “trust” God

in this kind of society,

with these kinds of threats and fears?

Where do we start?

How do we go about it?

OK, I only have a few minutes left this morning,

and the two things that I really want most to share with you

are both going to be crammed into these last few minutes.

The first one we will see directly from the next few verses in this passage.

And let me state it in a single sentence

before we read it together.

God has given every person in the entire human race

exactly the same starting place

for our entrance into a trust relationship with our God.

It is trusting Him with the greatest single issue in each of our lives -

our moral guilt before Him.

And listen carefully to what He says.

Paul gives us this truth,

this starting place,

within the context of his discussion about Israel’s failure to trust God.

And he says,

ROM 10:3 For not knowing about God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.

ROM 10:4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

We will need to read a few more verses

to get to where Paul is going here,

but I can’t let that 4^th verse pass

without holding it up to make sure we see what’s being said.

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

In these two verses

Paul turns our eyes onto the great first need of every one of us -

the need for an absolutely righteous life,

a life that will enable us to then live in a growing trust/love union with our God forever.

He tells us that Israel’s great failure

was their determination to attempt to establish that righteousness themselves,

through diligent obedience to the moral law of God.

But in that fourth verse

Paul tells us that each of us faces a choice-

either we choose to believe in Christ as the means by which we receive true righteousness,

or we believe in the law,

in our ability to obey our way into a good standing with God.

Obedience matters.

But it always has been

and always will be utterly powerless

to in any way,

at any point,

at any time,

either before or after our entrance into the family of God,

improve our standing with God in any way.

Now, just so that there is no confusion about what he is saying,

Paul goes on to say this:

ROM 10:8 But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart"-- that is, the word of faith which we are preaching,

ROM 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved;

ROM 10:10 for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.

ROM 10:11 For the Scripture says, "Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed."

Trust in God,

belief in Him must begin at this one point -

our belief in and confession of Jesus Christ as our only hope of salvation,

and our only means of becoming truly righteous,

not through a righteousness we earn

by diligent obedience to the moral law of God,

but a righteousness that is given to us by our God,

through His recreation within us

of a new heart,

a holy heart,

a heart that longs to please and honor Him.

And there is one more thing I want to share with you

before I end for the day.

You see, I can’t help but think

that once again we in the great church community

have missed the real message in this whole salvation thing.

Once again, I think we’ve gotten it a half a bubble off.

“Salvation”,

as it has so often been approached in the church world

so often ends up as nothing more than the product being marketed by our little man-made religious systems.

It is purchased by the customer

with the currency of faithfulness and devotion.

And by the time we get done with this whole thing,

it all once again comes back to us,

putting us in the center of the universe.

But, you see,

it isn’t about us,

and it never has been.

It’s about HIM,

and about our discovering the true nature

of who our God really is.

God is not selling salvation.

He is not offering it in exchange for the promise of fervent religious activity.

God is seeking those within His creation

who will use their free will

to choose to trust Him.

And the first step in that trust pilgrimage

is trusting Him with our sins,

trusting His promise that Christ hung on that cross

for our personal moral disobedience.

And please,

please do not misunderstand me.

Salvation is absolutely real.

Hell is absolutely real.

Entrance into the family of God is absolutely real.

But it is not a product being marketed by God

in exchange for promises of faithfulness.

It is, quite simply, the starting place of trust-

our trust in our God.

If we can trust Him here,

with the greatest need we have,

then we can begin to trust Him,

one step at a time

with all the other issues in our lives.

When Paul wrote this crucial section on the free will of man,

he began it and ended it with exactly the same sentence:

And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.

And then, in between,

he reveals to us where all true belief begins.

It begins with our reaching out to our God

not with our hands filled with all the things we think we have done for Him,

but with our hands filled only with our need,

and our guilt,

and our utter helplessness before Him.

It begins with our saying simply, “My God, my God,

You alone are my only hope.

I now choose to trust what You say to me here.