Trust

I came back at bout 1am after a meeting last night and saw an online message from an old friend… so I replied it…. and we had a short chat online.. and when I told her that I just came back from music practice and a meeting… she said something that started me thinking a lot… she said that it seems that I cant run away from Christianity…. And that somehow I kept sticking to it…. haha!

I think somehow what she said actually made a little sense…. Despite trying to run away from God for the past few years…. Something inside me was still holding on to Him(God)… During those years, I still attended church… still served in church but just trying to avoid close contact with God… It’s just like staying in the same house as your parents but avoiding sitting in the same room together or even having a meal together…

As Pascal sees it, we see “too much too deny and too little to be sure….” It seems that God does not twist arms and never forces us into a corner with faith in Him as the only exit. He gives us what we call human freedom and allows us to choose…. to believe in Him or not to. In Philip Yancey’s words..
“God's terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit in his face, to crucify him.”

Which leads us to another question…. Why did God allow this? Allowing us to live as though He did not exist. In the book The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, he writes…

“Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us. "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus said (John 12:32). In case we miss the point John adds, "He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die." God's nature is self-giving; he bases his appeal on sacrificial love.”

I have realized lately that I can’t have the answers to all my questions in life. Sometimes in life we tend to ask a lot of things. Why did this happen to me? Why did that happen? We try to search and search and we sometimes look back to find an explanation for it… I think it’s just natural for us as humans to ask why… there seems to be a need inside us to understand why things happen…
I heard the song Better than I again last night during the NOC music team meeting and I finally understood what David Campbell was thinking when he wrote the song. I think reading the book Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey has allowed me to see things more clearly…


Better than I – David Campbell

I thought I did what’s right
I thought I had the answers
I thought I chose the surest road
But that road brought me here

So I put up a fight
And told you how to help me
Now just when I have given up
The truth is coming clear

Chorus:
You know better than I
You know the way
I’ve let go the need to know why
For you know better than I

If this has been a test
I cannot see the reason
But maybe knowing I don’t know
Is part of getting through

I try to do what’s best
And faith has made it easy
To see the best thing I can do
Is put my trust in you

(Chorus)

I saw one cloud and thought it was a sky
I saw a bird and thought that I could follow
But it was you who taught that bird to fly
If I let you reach me will you teach me

For You know better than I
You know the way
I’ve let go the need to know why
I’ll take what answers you supply
You know better than I


You know better than I…You know the way, so I’ve let go the need to know why… for You know better than I… so true yeah!!
I think in our actions we should always learn from the example that Jesus has left behind for us…When he was asked in John 9, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" His reply was “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” It seems that instead of looking back and asking why things happen that way, Jesus looked forward for a redemptive result. As Philip Yancey writes in his book Reaching for the Invisible God

“Things happen, some of them good, some of them bad, many of them beyond our control. In all these things, I have felt the reliable constant of a God willing to work with me and through me to produce something good.”

Imagine what people like Abraham was thinking when God tested him by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac whom he loved at Moriah in Genesis 22. Although in the end, we all know that God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son but think bout what would have been going through Abraham’s mind as he traveled to Moriah with his beloved son not knowing that God was just testing him. What would he had thought about what God has just commanded him to do and yet....... despite all that, he obeyed God. I think it is at times like these that we see a crisis occurring in our relationship with God. We wonder where is God? Why does it appear as if He has abandoned us? Why did things happen that way?...... At such a moment, we want clarity, God wants our trust…


Faith - trusting God's goodness despite any apparent evidence against it…. Philip Yancey