“Do You Trust Me?” ((DTFD, June 11))

(from “Daily Thoughts for Disciples” by Oswald Chambers, June 11th entry)

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“Jesus said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” — John 8:58 (see also Matthew 18:3-5)

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Spiritually we never grow old; through the passing of the years we grow so many years young.

The characteristic of the spiritual life is its unaging youth, exactly the opposite of the natural life. “I am the First and the Last.” The Ancient of Days represents the eternal childhood. God Almighty became the weakest thing in His own creation, a baby.

When He comes into us in new birth we can easily kill His life in us, or else we can see to it that His life is nourished according to the dictates of the Spirit of God so that we grow “unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

The mature saint is just like a little child, absolutely simple and joyful and happy. Go on living the life that God would have you to live and you will grow younger instead of older. There is a marvelous rejuvenescence when you let God have His way. If you are feeling very old, then get born again and go to it.

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Taken from Daily Thoughts for Disciples, © 1976, 1994 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd., and used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.

[[Some words Chambers uses are not used often today — click [here] to look up difficult words.]]

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Brief commentary:
It’s funny how we assess ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as “maturing” the more we think and worry and postulate and plan about the various things going on in our world and in our lives. A job offer isn’t just a job offer, it becomes a “career decision assessment process”; a request from a friend to come along on some spontaneous adventure becomes an effort-laden quest through the cell phone calendar, the home calendar, the wife’s calendar, the kids’ calendars, the office calendar and the church calendar.

There’s nothing wrong with having a life that is more complex as it goes along; things only get screwy when we begin to mistake our extra worrying and postulating for maturity.

Jesus instructed His disciples that the kingdom of Heaven is filled with “child-like” believers; not “childish”, but “child-like”. He has no desire for disciples who color on the walls with crayon or sit in the back of the room eating paste. He does however desire that we approach our lives, our relationships, and our walks with Him with a child-like simplicity that — sadly — we too often lack.

Being a dad is helping me to see more and more each day through the eyes of my kids. In my own journey through life, there were lessons that were easy to figure out (i.e. “don’t touch that, it’s hot!”) and lessons that took a lot of struggle and suffering to work through. The ones that were so difficult, once I finally ended up and the “aha!” moment of figuring them out, I naturally wanted to embed them deep “in the grid” of my mind so that they’d be easy to remember and act upon. After all, no sense going through all the effort and frustration of discovering the cure for AIDS or cancer only to have written the notes with a stick in the sand at low tide.

It takes effort for me to remember that a lot of these things I’ve learned, my kids haven’t yet. Hopefully, the conviction I express as I attempt to relate these lessons to my kids will impress them in such a way that they accept them as true for themselves as well, though I know that will be short-lived as the dreaded teenage years are but a half-decade away for my eldest. (I’d never thought about the math of it before…oye, I think I’m going to go get a cup of chamomile now. Be right back.)

Often these days we hear about people approaching or just arriving at retirement age who are in the swing of the “simplifying” routine — downsizing the house; getting rid of the fancy cars in favor of the cheaper, more reliable ones; adopting some sort of new healthy and easy nutrition regimen; removing as many unnecessary stressors as one can; etc. That’s not quite the type of “simple” that Scripture’s referring to.

When Scripture refers to “simple” here, we need to keep in mind the viewpoint Jesus was referring to: child-like. And the most awesome thing that children display (unless they’ve been deeply wounded, betrayed, or abandoned by someone in their immediate family) is trust. Once a child gets through the awkward developmental stage of learning the language and understanding the concepts the language is conveying, it takes quite a bit for the child to no longer trust the parent. As long as the parent is putting forth even a basic effort to meet their child’s needs, the kids will let a lot of stuff slide before their trust starts being affected.

My babies, bless their hearts, had to endure more from their birth parents before the age of 5 than my wife and I have ever had to endure from our parents. As a result both of that and of some suspect methodologies of their long-term foster parents, they’re still warming to the concept of trusting those in the place of parental authority. It’s been almost two years of them being with us now, and still you can sense hesitation sometimes and in certain situations. Thankfully, when the stuff hits the fan in a situation, they’ve accepted us as mom and dad and come to us without hesitation, but when everything is smooth sailing, you can tell it’s still there in their minds.

God wants us to trust Him.

He’s always taken care of us, always continued to give us sunrises and sunsets, air in our lungs, food in our bellies, clothes on our backs, a roof over our heads. There are times when I look my babies in the eyes and ask them “Do you trust me?”, and they know that when I ask that something unpleasant (like a shot at the doctor’s office or me asking one of them to let one of her sisters borrow a favorite toy) is probably coming, but in the end they’ll be better off than they were beforehand.

God recalls for us His track record: He was there for Adam, He was there for Joshua, He was there for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He was there for David, He was there for the disciples, and He’s been there for us. We were the ones who signed up to follow Him, saying that we want to be workers in His vineyard; He only asks that we be willing to put up with a few scrapes and blisters along the way as we work.