Trust vs. Faith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ILPl5FQaM

Trust is hard.
Just ask Mowgi.

In preparation for my sermon this week, I've been spending some time this week thinking about the relationship between faith and trust. It's hard to have trust if you don't have faith. Likewise, I don't think you can have faith unless you first have a sense of trust. If we trust in someone, we have faith in him. If we have faith in someone, we trust them. Seems like the words are interchangeable.

Mostly.

But not entirely.

Take Luke 16, for example. A business owner tells his accountant that he's bad at his job and going to lose said job. The accountant works out a plan to get himself on people "Good Guy" list by cutting their debt that they owe the master. The idea is that when the master gets him out of the job, the accountant will have made friends. In other words, he figures out a way to "take care of himself" in a way that the business owner actually praises him.

And then Luke says this: ¹⁰ “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. ¹¹ So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? ¹² And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?"

Trust is a process. Trust is something you earn. Trust is something you work up to. Trust is something easily broken.

Faith, to me, involves a process, but the kind of faith that Christ talks about isn't a process in and of itself. Faith is, according to Hebrews, confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see. Faith doesn't need to prove itself. Faith is what we have inherently. It takes cultivation to deepen our faith (I like the word deepen rather than strengthen, by the way), but God doesn't earn our faith and we don't earn God's faith. We trust in God because we have faith in who God is; we don't have faith in God because we trust Him.

Trust is hard. Most of us can point to experiences in our lives that have involved a burning of some sort. I have several that come to the top of my head almost immediately. Trust is tough. And once trust between two people has been broken, it's often very difficult to rebuild that trust. Trust is a process.

Faith isn't really easier, even though it's inherent. I remember people telling me that faith makes things possible, not easy. I have those times when this seems silly: why can't faith make things easy, too? Why stop at simply possible?

To quote Tom Hanks in "League of their Own": "It's supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone could do it."

I think God wants everyone to have faith. I think God wants everyone to be able to, without reservation, put our hope and trust in our Creator. God says in Ezekiel 18, "Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?" So why is it so hard to have faith? Why is it so hard to have trust? Why, when we step out of the boat and onto the water, do we take a few steps and then sink? (Matthew 14).

Simply put: we sink because we're human. Seriously. I'm not just being coy. We sink because we're human. We sink because we have doubts. We sink because even those with what we might call the "deepest" faith struggle with their identities in God. The important part, though, is that we keep getting out of the boat. My favorite part of the story of Peter walking on the water in the storm with Christ is that at least Peter got out of the boat. What about those other disciples watching who just sat in the boat? What do you think they were thinking when they saw Peter take those steps? Do you think they even noticed, or were they so focused on the fact that the storm was battering their boat so badly that they were in danger of sinking?

Jesus rebukes Peter for not having enough faith to stay on the waves, but I don't think Jesus means it in anger or in disappointment. I think he means it to be a teaching moment. Our faith is what gives us the ability to walk on the water. Our fear -- our human nature -- is what makes us sink.

I've been listening to a lot of music by the band "Brand New" this week, and I discovered from their album, "God and the Devil Raging Inside of Me" the song "Jesus Christ." The song is, for lack of a better word, a prayer. At one point in the song, the singer says, "At the gates does Thomas ask to see my hands" and another line that I like is, "I'm scared that I'll get scared and I swear I'll try and nail you back up." We all doubt. We all have reservations, even when we think our faith is deeper than it's ever been. It's okay to be honest with ourselves (and with God) that we've had thoughts of turning and running instead of trust in God. I think God expects that. I think God understands that. I also think that God waits for us with his open arms, waiting to welcome back all of us prodigals into His embrace.

Faith and trust are hard. Trust is something we earn and learn to do. Faith is something we already have that we learn to acknowledge and see God working through. One is a process itself. The other calls for a process.

Getting out of the boat isn't easy. It's scary. Maybe even terrifying. But you get out of the boat to get on the water because it's on the water that we encounter Jesus. And Jesus waits for us on those waves in the midst of the storm. We can take those steps; we can walk on the water with Jesus, but only if we get out of the boat first. My hope and prayer for you this week is that you are able to discern how God is calling you through the storms in your lives, whatever your storm might be. I hope you are able to trust God, recognizing that faith makes trust possible.

Not easy. Possible.

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Becki

PS: incidentally, if you're looking for a great read on Matthew 14, I recommend John Ortbergs, "If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat." It's a great book for an adult study and an easy read on how we identify what our boat is and how we learn to step out of it to the water where Jesus is.