“TRYING OR TRUSTING?”
By J. Farrell Fisher, April 2-4, 2017
Have you ever heard someone say about their “Christian relationship with Christ”: “I did my best but fell short!” In God’s Holy Name where does one “trying” appear in the Gospels of Christ in the New Testament or the Old?
In Galatians 2:20 The Holy Word, inspired by the Holy Spirit, speaking through Paul, said: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
I guess it might be important to ask: “Concerning ME and ‘crucified with Christ’, was that just my worst and/or my best included, my earthiness, my worldliness, my religious leanings, my, at times, attempts at good or godly behavior?”
In Galatians 6:14-15 the Apostle Paul tells us: “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation.”
Are you ever confronted, while walking with Christ in the “community of faith”, hearing someone talking about their “sincere attempts to live Christ-like, but their attempts fell short”? Is much of ‘religious Christianity’ today ‘fleshly attempts’ at imitating Christ, yes, apart from His resurrection presence within? Is this why Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 2:9, “For to this end I also wrote, that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things,” BECAUSE some ‘church folk, church pastors’ lean toward what you ‘try’ and not in whom you trust, some even saying and teaching that obedience is salvation by works, when in reality and biblical truth, obedience is the outward evidence of Christ’s indwelling!
Paul went on to encourage the Corinthians, and us, saying in 2 Corinthians 2:14-17, “Now thanks be TO GOD who always leads us in triumph in Christ, [“more than conquerors in and through Christ alone” or “super-human spiritual achievers”?], and through us {Sovereign, Holy, Merciful God!} diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ (not our best efforts!) among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death (if our attempts are ‘best effort trying’), and to the other the aroma of life leading to life. AND WHO IS SUFFICIENT FOR THESE THINGS? For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God; but as of sincerity, but as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ.”
Some ‘religious-minded’ men and women know how to put on a “religious movie” that is fiction and not spiritual reality and Truth! Some are “self-commend-ers” with, they feel, adequate evaluation of their own religious devotion, with Paul challenging us in 2 Corinthians 3:1-6, “Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as some others, epistles of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you? You are our epistles written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, the heart.
And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also MADE US SUFFICIENT as ministers of the NEW COVENANT, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Made sufficient by the grace of God or ‘marred messes of fleshly attempts at “trying” to be Christ-like’?
There is a powerful demonstration of “Trusting” in Mark 1:40-42 that should give “eternal hope” to those WHO KNOW they are “spiritual lepers”, alienated and separated from God by their “sin natures”! It tells us, “Now a leper came to Him, imploring Him, kneeling down to Him and saying to Him, ‘If You are willing, You can make me clean.’
Then Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out His hand and touched Him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’ As soon as He had spoken, immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cleansed. And He strictly warned him and sent him away at once, and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go your way, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing those things which Moses commanded as a testimony to them. “
I would assume that those who have suffered from “leprosy” know their desperate state of life, but in the spiritual frame of reference “all have sinned, all are separated from God”, but many are blinded to their condition, blinded to the seriousness of a godless life, and sadly, blinded to Holy God’s divine intervention in their behalf!
Romans 3:23-26 Paul declares: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom GOD SET FORTH AS A PROPITIATION BY HIS BLOOD, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Christ Jesus.”
HOW DESPERATE DO YOU FIND IT TO LEARN WITHOUT CHRIST YOU LIVE A MAIMED EXISTENCE BUT, IN CHRIST, Matthew 5:48, Jesus speaking, “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect”! It was Oswald Chambers, in his book “My Utmost For His Highest”, (p.111), who said, “But it is better to enter into life maimed and lovely in God’s sight than to be lovely in man’s sight and lame in God’s.”
In the writing, “Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, The Progress of Man,” (l.55), we read: “Man only – rash, refined, presumptuous Man – Starts from his rank, and mars Creation’s plan! Born the free heir of nature’s wide domain, To art’s strict limits bounds his narrowed reign; Resigns his native rights for meaner things, For Faith and Fetters, Laws and Priests and Kings,” but the call of Christ falls on deafened ears, blinded minds, and cold, diseased hearts!
‘Lovely in man’s sight or lame in God’s sight”? Hardened against God or softened to God’s love in the sacrifice of His Son and our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ? Brittle, hardened, alienated from God, comfortable in one’s baseness rather than blessed in God’s grace and mercy and love, suffering in silence because of one’s ‘sin disease’ but vocal in his/her independence from God in fleshly, self-satisfaction, clones of the devil himself and satisfied with that likeness, basking in one’s own ‘star’ but blinded to the True Light in Christ, one foot on earth while the other has stepped into Hell, the godless man lives for himself like Aristotle said: “Man is either a beast or a god”, but void of the reality of God’s Presence within as His earthly Temple without Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior, many being ‘religious without true repentance’, and as Robert Burns wrote in his “Inscribed to the Hon.C.J.Fox, “Good Lord, what is man? For as simple as he looks, Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks! With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil: All in all he’s a problem must puzzle the devil.”
Are you “an anything other than a God- type of man” because you see yourself as your own creator and sustainer, not realizing that without God you ARE a little ‘being’ out to camouflage your spiritually dead self? How blinded not to know that “in Christ” a truly ‘born-again life’ is the crowning wonder of all of God’s creative abilities!
God spoke to Isaiah with Isaiah 1:8 saying, “…For I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord,” but the ungodly, unreconciled, unbelieving cry out: “Deliver me from what,” sadly blinded, deafened, and stiff-necked before the awesome love of God at Calvary’s Cross, knowing nothing, even refusing to know, about personal deliverance from the bondage of one’s sin-nature, from the powerful influences of the worldly, from the claws of the devil like a wild animal after its prey – God longs to grace you, grant you, glorify you in and through Christ with Resurrection Life, Resurrection Power, and Resurrection Hope, as in Paul’s Ephesian epistle, Ephesians 3:14-19, he wrote: “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, THAT HE WOULD GRANT YOU, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell (feel at home) in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height – to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
“Trying Or Trusting?” Can a ‘wise man’ be made aware of the foolishness of his fleshly wisdom without God but made wiser by Christ’s “I AM the way, the truth, and the life”, or a ‘strong man’ weakened and made aware of his need of surrender to the True Lord of life, or a rich man ‘bankrupted’ to learn of His need of the Lord and Savior as “the True Riches”? Peter highlighted in 1 Peter 3:7, speaking of husbands dwelling with their wives with understanding, giving honor to the wives, then stating, “and as being heirs together of the grace of life,” living a graced life “so that your prayers may not be hindered”!
“Trying Or Trusting?” I’m convinced that men are aware of “something” or “Someone” outside themselves who or what will make the difference between ‘meaning of life’ or the ‘meaninglessness of their existence’! There are times when every man is confronted with the awareness that he is earthly, but there must be something or Someone more for his life’s meaning and blessing! The sad state of men’s affairs is when they determine they are the ‘star’ to light their earthly, fleshly existence, but only sense awareness of the finite but ‘dumb’ concerning the infinite, eternal, after-life destiny! Fallen men do not see their very earthly existence as the act, the intent, the purpose of God, for His “tabernacle”!
It was George Gordon and Lord Byron, in “Lara”, (Canto1,st.2) who wrote: “Lord of himself; that heritage of woe!” And in John Bunyan’s “A Book For Boys and Girls”, he wrote: “From God he’s (man) a backslider; Of ways, he loves the wider; With wickedness a sider; More venom than a spider; In sin he’s a confider; A make-bate and divider; Blind reason is his guider; The Devil his rider.” It was Thomas Carlyle who once wrote: “The older I grow, and I now stand on the brink of eternity – the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: ‘What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
And yet many ‘live’ as “little souls” trying their best to be someone beyond a “living corpse”! [That’s Epictetus in his “Fragments”!]. In 2 Peter 2:9-10 Peter, anointed in the Holy Spirit, wrote: “…the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority. They are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries…”
Do you remember the Lord Jesus describing the “scribes and Pharisees” in Matthew 23? These were the ‘religious elite of Judaism’ in Jesus’ day! They WERE the “great men of Judaism”, ‘self-appointed’, with no awareness of the heart, purpose, or plan of God through the Promised Messiah – in fact, they crucified Jesus! My Holman Study Bible introduces Matthew 23 with “Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees”! Seven times in Matthew 23 Jesus said to them: “Woe to you,” with their ‘name-identity’, by Jesus, as “hypocrites”! In Verses 27-28 the Lord Jesus said of them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” And you wonder how Jesus the True Lord and Savior views “American Christians”?
I don’t know if you are a student disciplined in the Word of God or not, but as you read Matthew 24 and Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple, I know it was a warning also for any believer, any church, any nation, anytime, because “All Scripture is divinely inspired and is profitable anytime, anywhere, for anyone!” Consider: “Perilous Times,” which are times of great deception, great conflicts, great sufferings, great, open sin, great opportunities, and either great joy or great sorrow! What’s YOUR choosing?
But, YOUR LIFE can be, in Christ, a demonstration, a celebration, a Hallelujah Chorus of Victory in Jesus! But, without Christ? Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, “Truly, this only I have found: That God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” It’s so interesting, convicting, and awakening to hear Jesus say in Matthew 16:24, “If ANYONE desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me,” followed by Verse 25, For whoever desires to save his life (for himself) will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
“Trying Or Trusting?” I have no hesitation in saying that the “triers” have never rested in “trusting” God’s Holy Word! In Galatians 2:20 Paul clearly stated, “I HAVE BEEN CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh (physical body) I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” which he clearly understood that his old man ( disobedient to God, lord over his own life, filled with sin and the sin nature) DESERVED TO BE CRUCIFIED! AND CHRIST TOOK US WITH HIM TO CALVARY!! And YOU are either living in ‘flesh’s best effort’ or thankful your old sin nature “died with Christ, crucified with Christ”, and you’ve also been raised up in the blessing of Christ’s resurrected life, presence, power, and promises! He said: “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you.” Glory!
“In Christ” we’re not hopeless but hope-filled! “In Christ” we’re no longer alienated and separated from God but made one in Him! “In Christ” we’re no longer condemned with the hideous nature of sin and Satan and the fallen world, but made one with Christ in His fullness and blessing and guaranteed promises – “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you!” “My grace frees you from your bondage of sin and frees you to an awareness you can go and sin no more!” “My grace transforms the sin nature into the gift of the divine nature!” “My grace obliterates the old man and blesses us with the “new man”, born again by the Spirit of God!”
Holy God shows mercy! Holy God births a “new creation”! Holy God indwells a man with Christ’s resurrection presence! Holy God “fills” repentant hearts with the fullness of His Holy Spirit! Holy God “stamps” us with His designation of ownership – “You are Mine!” And He will take care of us! He does so because He says: “You hold fast My name, and you have not denied My faith.”
It’s time now for YOUR “Hallelujah Chorus”! Sing it out! Live it out! Share it out! Proclaim it out! “I’m not a ‘trier’ – I’m a truster! I lean not to my own understanding, but In Christ I yield to His Holy Way!” Is that true of you?