The Ease Of Mistrust

I sympathize with those who find it difficult to trust God in adversity. I've been there often enough myself to know something of the distress, despair, and darkness that fills our souls when we wonder if God truly cares about our plight. I have spent a good portion of my adult life encouraging people to pursue holiness, to obey God. Yet, I acknowledge it often seems more difficult to trust God than to obey Him.

God's moral will given to us in the Bible is rational and reasonable; the circumstances in which we must trust God often irrational and inexplicable. God's law is readily recognized to be good for us, even when we don't want to obey it; the circumstances of our lives frequently appear dreadful and grim, perhaps even calamitous and tragic. Obeying God is worked out within well-defined boundaries of God's revealed will' trusting God is worked out in an arena that has no boundaries, where we're always coping with the unknown. 

Yet it is just as important to trust God as it is to obey Him. When we disobey God we defy His authority and despise His holiness. But when we fail to trust God we doubt His sovereignty and question His goodness. In both cases we cast aspersions upon His majesty and His character. God views our distrust of Him as seriously as He views our disobedience. 

When the people of Israel were hungry, "they spoke against God, saying, 'Can God spread a table in the wilderness?...Can he also give bread of provide meat for his people?'" The next two verses tell us, "When the LORD heard, he was full of wrath...because they did not believe in God and did not trust his saving power" (Psalm 78:19-22, ESV). 

In order to trust God, we must always view our adverse circumstances through the eyes of faith, not of sense.

God's Decisions and Ours

"Romans 9 teaches the absolute sovereignty of God in the decisions he makes about the ultimate fate of human beings. That teaching naturally raises questions in our minds. As we have seen, Paul does not really try to answer these questions - at least from our perspective. For him it is enough to know that God has revealed himself as the one who determines these matters. We have no right to stand in judgment of what God does. We can judge him only by the standard of his own revelation, and by that standard, God certainly is "just." 

Nevertheless, Paul plainly believes in the reality of human decisions. We are not puppets or robots. Our decisions matter, and we are responsible to make the right ones - to accept Christ, to live holy lives, to love one another, and so forth. How can our decisions really matter if God decides everything? Theologians and philosophers have debated this issue for centuries. They have discovered no neat logical solution to the problem. We must be willing at this point to live with what we call an "antinomy," an unresolved tension between two clear truths. God determines what happens; I am responsible for what happens. Scripture teaches both, and therefore I am compelled to believe both, even if ultimately I can't explain their relationship. Many who have written on this topic use the term "compatibilism" for this general viewpoint. The term refers to the belief that absolute sovereignty and genuine responsibility are not contradictory but "compatible" with one another. I think this comes closest to the teaching of Paul in Romans and to the witness of the Bible in general."

Worship

"Christians are simply divided over worship these days. Some insist that God can be honored only through traditional hymns sung to organ accompaniment. Others cannot worship God without guitars, amplifiers, drums, and a worship team. Which style does the Bible mandate? Neither, of course. The Bible says almost nothing about the style of our worship. But it does say a great deal about other elements of our worship. Romans 12:1-12 makes two important points about our worship.

First, worship is not merely, or even mainly, what we do on Sunday morning. Worship is a "24/7' matter. We worship god when we give ourselves to him in service. We worship god when we show love to others, when we do our jobs faithfully and with integrity, when we play with our kids and nurture our families. God wants us always to be bringing glory to him by the way we live. A worship "service" is quite appropriate, even mandated by Scripture. But we delude ourselves badly if we think that God is interested in our worship only during that service.

Second, worship that God honors involves the mind. I don't think that God much cares whether the songs we sing to him are accompanied by an organ or by a guitar. But I am sure that he cares about the words that we sing to him. The words that we sing should not only stir our emotions but also engage our minds. Our worship songs should reflect that fact that we are creatures endowed by God with reason. He wants us to think about him as the foundation for true worship. The best worship songs will remind us of some truth about God, Christ, or the Spirit, or about God's plan and purpose. As we sing to ourselves and to each other, we will be taught, and that teaching will be the stimulus for praise, confession, and thanksgiving."