Trust

The word trust features heavily in our everyday lives. But what is it?

We place our trust in a huge number of people and things. For example, we trust bus drivers – to turn up at the right time, and to drive in such a way that we don’t get damaged. We put our faith in taxi drivers in the same way (excepting the taxi driver featured in BBC’s Sherlock), and we trust that they will take the most direct route to our destination. We have faith that the builders, plumbers & electricians who built our houses, workplaces or schools have completed their work to an acceptable standard, such that the buildings can function as necessary and not fall over. We trust supermarkets and the people that work in them to provide us with food that is safe to eat. We put our faith in our government to make decisions on our behalf that will be the best for our country. We also place our trust in people in different ways – we trust friends with secrets and problems. We trust girlfriends or boyfriends to remain faithful.

You may have noticed that I have used the words trust and faith almost interchangeably. This is because they mean exactly the same thing.

The words trust and faith describe the confidence that we have that someone will act in an honourable way. Think about the word entrust – by entrusting something to somebody, we are passing the responsibility of looking after that something to them. Trust is important in that situation – we need to have faith that they will be responsible and act in the correct way.

Very often, trust is not something we can just switch on. It takes time to develop trust in someone, as we get to know them better and begin to see them as honourable and responsible. Placing our trust in someone can be a difficult thing to do – the fear of betrayal or ‘breaking our trust’ keeps us wary.

So trust has a lot to do with confidence and responsibility. Why do we do it?

We place our trust in things that are trustworthy. We put our faith in those things that are faithful. How do we decide if something or someone is trustworthy or faithful? From experience and reputation. Supermarkets have a reputation for providing food that is not diseased. We use our experience with someone to determine if it is safe to tell them something personal. Trust and faith also relate to love – the more we come to love someone, the more we trust them and have faith in them.

It is pretty clear here that these things have everything to do with the future. The future is something that we definitely cannot see, so we must be reliant on trust to allow us to look past the present. Every example given above is related to something that could happen, that we trust will, or won’t. It could be that our boyfriend or girlfriend cheats on us, but we trust that they won’t. It could be that the bus driver crashes the bus and we are seriously hurt, but have faith that they won’t. It could be that my house falls down, but I trust that it will stay standing.

Nobody is perfect. Therefore nobody can be completely trustworthy. Trust is broken fairly often – pipes burst, cars crash, food is bad, people cheat. It might be the case occasionally that this is not due to human fault, but that majority of the time it is – and unfortunately we can’t help it. We are a messed up people, continually making mistakes and getting things wrong.

The trust that we place in our plumbers, for example, is different to that trust that is placed in our friends. A busted pipe or broken tap doesn’t bother us in the same way that a secret of ours making its way around our peer group does. There are things that are harder to trust people with – and these tend to be aspects of our lives, the things that make us, us.

I’ve come to realise that the trust that we place in people who we are in relationships with – our boyfriends, girlfriends, wives or husbands – is more that just the faith that they will remain exclusively ours – we have to place more trust in them that the trust that they won’t cheat. We trust them with increasingly more aspects of our lives the longer we are with them – until ultimately, (if we find a husband or wife) we trust those we are married to with the rest of our lives. For example, we trust them to be responsible in raising any children that we might have, or to look after the house we might own. Trusting someone in a relationship requires more than the confidence that they won’t cheat – and like all trust, it is built and developed over time. This deeper sense of trust is not simply switched on.

When someone breaks our trust in these areas, we hurt. We are upset, angry and resentful. There’s no way of changing things back to how they were once someone has dirtied your name to others. This is where we have two options – either we remain angry and resentful towards that person, or we choose forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but at most times, extremely necessary. There isn’t one person on earth who hasn’t struggled to forgive someone at some point.

You knew this was coming… Why should we place our trust and faith in God?

God asks us to trust Him with our lives.  God is the One who can deal with life & death, so He is the only One in whom we can entrust these things. By life I mean more than our time on earth – I’m talking about our eternal fate and destiny. Like it or not, we are eternal beings, and this life is but a speck on the time-line of eternity. There is no-one else available for us to put our trust in with these things.

God is good, and what He promises us in eternity is what Christians refer to as heaven. Heaven most probably isn’t sitting on clouds, or a never-ending harp recital, heaven is simply spending eternity in the presence of God (in the same way, hell simply describes spending eternity without God). And if God is who He says He is, then heaven is a pretty awesome way to spend our time.

But why?! Good question. If God is real and if God is God, then we don’t need too many reasons. By definition, God loves us more than we could imagine, knows what’s best for us in a way that we can’t imagine, and is bigger and more powerful than anything we could ever imagine. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to struggle to much to put my trust in Him, if all that is true! But how do we know that it is true?

You see, this trust in God is different to the trust we use on earth. I mentioned above that experience and reputation are what allow us to make decisions regarding what to place our trust in. But who has experience of death? Very few people. God certainly has a reputation, but we still can’t know from that what happens after we die.

Jesus has had experience of death. For He died by crucifixion, but on the third day rose again to life, and He’s still alive today. Jesus didn’t say after His resurrection, ‘hold on, all that stuff I said about heaven and God before I died was all wrong, I’ve just seen what death is really like and it’s completely different.’ He continued to teach what He had taught before He died – and that is where we can gain experience of what God is like. That is where we can see that God is trustworthy. It’s written down in something called the Bible, an amazing collection of 66 books from many different authors, spanning centuries. The words of Jesus are shown from four independent sources, each saying more or less the exact same thing as the others. That evidence shows us that we should trust that it tells the truth. (There is plenty more evidence, scientific/archaeological, but I won’t go into all of it here.)

Once we have made the step of placing our trust in God for our eternities, it becomes a little easier and lot more sensible to trust God with the smaller things, such as our money, or our future on earth. If we have entrusted our eternal selves to God, then it makes a lot of sense to give to Him the time we have here.

I’ve struggled a lot recently with the word belief. Having written this, it’s become a lot more clear to me what it’s all about. Belief has very little to do with God’s existence. God’s existence is not subjective to our belief in Him – He doesn’t exist just because we believe it. Whether we believe that He exists or not is irrelevant to whether or not it is true. Belief is almost synonymous with faith and trust – belief is all about the future. Belief is more about what God will do than what God is! In the same way, it’s less important to believe ‘in Jesus’, that He existed, than it is to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Bible says this:

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. – Hebrews 11:1 (NLT).

What ‘we cannot see’ is the future. It does not refer to what I can’t see on the other side of the opaque wall of my room.

We must trust that God is powerful enough, strong enough, and loving enough to give us the best future possible. As we begin to see that future come alive, our faith in God gets stronger. Faith in God isn’t switched on to its maximum immediately, we learn to trust Him with all that we have as we get older, wiser, and as we come to love Him more.

God is faithful, and God is trustworthy, because God is perfect, and there is no-one in whom we should place our trust more.

Why? It’s simple: He loves us.

Where can we find truth?

I watched Glee tonight.

I was persuaded to start watching the show last year after being initially critical of it… I’m glad I do, because it’s a great show. It doesn’t feature the best plots, or depth of character, but there’s something about it that makes it a good watch. I think, for the most part it’s the music that’s just too perfect, the characters that are just too fake… It’s all a total load of rubbish…but such fun.

Well tonight’s episode, entitled ‘Grilled Cheesus’ is probably my least favourite episode so far. Aside from the music being a little below it’s usual standard, the story and content left me quite irritated. The episode had a ‘spiritual’ theme, but the massive range of ideas about God, faith and religion was genuinely overwhelming. It was impossible to really know what to think… Such important issues should never be dealt with in such a shallow way, in my opinion.

It got me thinking… In a world where there are so many different things that people believe about God, about life – its purpose and direction – and death – what happens next – how can we tell what is the truth? My view is just as valid as the next person’s…so what right do I have to claim that what I believe is the truth? I don’t.

The thing with truth is that it isn’t dependent upon what people believe. If something is true, it makes no difference what people believe about it. It remains true whatever. If God is real, that isn’t because someone on earth believes in Him. If no-one on earth believed that God was real, He still would be…

So we have established that everyone has different views. And we have established that whatever these views are, the truth will remain true. This applies to everything – for example people have different views on whether the earth is spherical or flat, (I know this sounds ridiculous, but try arguing with a flat-earther…it’s harder than you might think!) but whatever the earth truly is, it will remain, regardless of what people think about it.

If we gently bring this back to God…people often have different views about Him, but they don’t make a difference to His existence. The big difference between the shape of the earth and the existence of God is the small matter of proof…although I would argue that the evidence for God is quite compelling. But I won’t get into it. Back to truth…

The Christian faith has something rather special by way of truth – it’s called the Bible. I won’t be patronising by explaining what it is… What many people don’t understand about the Bible is that it is relevant to us today, not just its writers from 2000 years (or longer) ago. Often it can be pretty hard to understand, but there are so many resources available to us to help with that. (One thing I highly recommend is Soul Survivor’s ‘Bible-in-one-year’ scheme, check the Links page).

It is so important for Christians to constantly read the Bible and see what God says. You might have noticed from other posts on this blog that they often contain a few Bible references – it’s so full of wisdom. More importantly, it’s full of truth. It’s a strange book in a sense – like no other book I’ve ever read. It has the unique ability of quite literally being alive. It is often described as the living word of God. God often speaks to us through the words in the Bible – and the more we read it, the more meaning we can unpack from it, even passages we’ve read over and over in the past. It’s amazing.

Here’s what the Bible has to say about itself:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16-17, NLT.

You might be thinking…that’s rich!! How arrogant for the writer of 2 Timothy (Paul) to say that about the book that he’s contributed so much to! I’d completely understand – that’s the sort of thing I was thinking when I first read that bit.

What I will leave you with is this: there is not a single document throughout the whole of history that is more reliable than the Bible. It stands up to every single conceivable test for such thing, and fits perfectly with archaeological evidence, other writings from its time, known human history…

It remains a perfect history, geography and life book. And this makes sense…it’s God’s book. He doesn’t settle for anything less that perfect.

I was going to leave this post there. But I’ve just realised I’ve left out the most important thing – Jesus Christ. Jesus had a lot to say about truth. I’m not sure how many times He used the phrase, ‘I tell you the truth:’ because He said that quite a lot. But Jesus also went one step further… In one of His most famous statements:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” - John 14:6, NIV.

Jesus said that He was the truth. Again, that’s a pretty massive claim, and if He was the only one to say it, it’s pretty difficult for many people to distinguish it from hot-headedness.

If I may, I want to look at something that C.S. Lewis came up with. It’s often referred to as Bad, Mad or God, or maybe Liar, Lunatic or Lord. It refers to the three possible explanations for Jesus and His life – there can be no other explanation for Him having said the things He did. Either He was a ‘bad’ man, a ‘liar’, who had no good purpose on earth and sought to spread seeds of deceit amongst the people of the time. Everything He did was for His own personal gain, and He lied about who He said He was – the Son of God. Or, He was mad, a complete lunatic. He didn’t even know what He was saying. Or, He was (and is) truly the Son of God, as He said He is.

I find it hard to believe that Jesus was bad – even by reading a tiny part of the accounts of His life it is impossible to reach this conclusion. He healed people, raised them to life… He called for justice and mercy for the poor. He loved children and welcomed them openly. A bad man would never do any of these things if He was only out for himself. Jesus can’t have been bad – it doesn’t add up.

I also find it pretty hard to believe that Jesus was mad – we read of many accounts of men who are ‘wild’ or ‘possessed’ – the people of the time were pretty good at recognising when someone was a lunatic, and Jesus wouldn’t have been any different. He can’t have been mad. Why would they have believed Him?

All this leaves is that Jesus must have been the Son of God. Even that short logical analysis helps us to understand that that is the only possibility. It may be helpful to look at how long Christianity has existed and been believed, against huge opposition. It went against the entire Roman Empire and won. Something about Christianity must be true… Or how about we consider the resurrection of Christ? The Chief Jewish Priests and the Roman Governor all wanted to see Jesus dead, and remain that way for a very long time. Yet they could find no way of disputing His disciples’ claims that He was alive again. If they’d wanted to disprove the resurrection, they could have quite easily produced the body, and Christianity would never have existed. Jesus would have been forgotten.

It is impossible to ignore Jesus Christ – He is indisputably the most important and significant character throughout the whole of history. What He said must be true.

Of course, that might all be wrong. And if Christianity is all wrong, then Jesus is of no importance to anyone.

As C.S. Lewis also famously said:

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

We cannot rationally ignore Christianity when we search for the truth. Everyone on the earth has this responsibility to choose for themselves what they should believe, and anyone who does not look at Christianity and ask what it’s really all about is shirking that responsibility.

Jesus said, “…the truth will set you free.” - John 8:31-32, NIV.