This blog has been fun for me to write. I usually try to stick to things pertaining to Chinese, but I will admit that some things aren't. This post is one of those times. I had to give a talk at Church yesterday, and I figured since I spent all this time preparing, I may as well post it up. Hope you enjoy.
Charles Blondin, the famous 19th century tight-rope walker and acrobat, owed his celebrity and fortune to his idea of crossing Niagara Falls on a tight-rope, 1100 ft. long, 160 ft. above the water. This he accomplished, first in 1859, a number of times, always with different theatric variations: blindfold, in a sack, trundling a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying a man on his back, sitting down midway while he made and ate an omelette.
In 1860 a Royal party from Britain saw Blondin cross the tightrope on stilts, and again blindfolded. After that he stopped halfway and cooked and ate an omelette. Next he wheeled a wheelbarrow from one side to the other, and returned with a sack of potatoes in it.
Then Blondin approached the Royal party. He asked the Duke of Newcastle, "do you believe I could take a man across the tightrope in this wheelbarrow?"
"Yes, I do", said the Duke.
"Hop in, then", replied Blondin.
Well, the Duke declined Blondin's challenge. He might have believed Blondin could do it, but he wasn't about to trust him with his life.
When it comes to God, this kind of belief is not much good to him. God is looking for followers who will trust him with their lives.
Proverbs 3 verses 5 and 6.: trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him; and he will make your paths straight.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
The Christian call is to have the sort of trust that makes us prepared to put our entire lives into God's hands. Simply believing in God is not good enough. We are to have trust, after all as David O Mckay said “To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved” Faith in God sometimes seems like an abstract concept, doesn't it? It's hard to pin down exactly what it means; it's hard to know whether we really have "faith".
Trust on the other hand is something we are all familiar with. We find ourselves having to trust people everyday. We trust whoever built our house that it's not going to fall in on our heads. We trust the bank with our money. We trust whoever designed our video recorder that when we set the timer it will record the program we wanted. We exercise trust all the time, quite unthinkingly. We know what it means.
Faith is believing the specific promises that God makes to you.. Trust is knowing that "God has got you covered." The scriptures say in Alma“And now, behold, is your knowledge not perfect? Yea, your knowledge is perfect in that thing, and your faith is dormant. I would submit to you that when our faith becomes dormant as a result of a perfect knowledge, our faith has become trust.
But we often forget the role that trust has in our faith. And we forget how to apply that trust in our spiritual lives. Why is trust greater than love? Let me rephrase one scripture in the bible. “If you trust me, keep my commandments” We all know that faith without works is dead, have we ever considered “love without trust is empty” Once again I quote David O. Mckay, “To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved”
When we trust God we show that our faith in Him and love for him is real.
The call here is a complete trust in God: trusting him with our whole lives. We are not to pick and choose—OK, Lord, I will trust you with my marriage, but not with my career—, we are to trust him with our whole hearts and put our whole lives in his hands.
Real quickly, what is the difference between trust and confidence? As I was preparing for this talk, I looked up trust in the topical guide and came across the word confidence several times. In its most basic form, I don’t think there is that much of difference between trust and confidence- they are so similar that there is only a little difference. That difference is that people who trust are still aware of circumstance risks and alternatives, whereas confidence refers to an attitude that familiar things will remain stable. The (perceived) total absence of threats to personal freedom could thus be defined as confidence.
The person who has put his or her trust in God has to get into that wheelbarrow when God challenges us, no questions asked, and perhaps more significant is the fact that this person is aware of the “worldly risks” that he is taking. We are to trust in the Lord with all our hearts.
Do we have to abandon trust in other things to have trust in the Lord? I think that the answer in many cases would be yes. For example, the scriptures tell us not to put our trust in riches, in man and in ourselves. There is nobody here today who doesn't have common sense, but I am sure that many of us, if not all have at one time or another planned to do something, or act a certain way, but the spirit tells us otherwise, and what the spirit is telling us to do doesn't make any sense to us- that's when we have to put our trust in the Lord.
A good example of this is Nephi. He knew the commandment “thou shalt not kill”, but the Lord told him to kill Laban. Imagine what must have been going on through his mind. “And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him. And the spirit said unto me again: Behold, the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the lord, and he also had taken away our property” You can see that he is trying to put his trust in the lord. He is making himself aware of what the real situation is. “And the spirit said unto me again, Behold, the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” “inasmuch as you keep my commandments you shall prosper in the land.” I find it interesting that when Nephi recalls the words and promises of the Lord, he was able to muster enough courage to put his trust in the Lord. He knew that he couldn’t understand all the ways of the Lord, but he knew that he would always have the Lord on his side if he kept his commandments.
Lean not on your own understanding.
One problem is that at some point in our lives we have thought we know better than God. We think we know better than God, but the reality is that, like Adam and Eve in the beginning, our wisdom and understanding is weak. Nonetheless, we persist in trying to do things our own way, believing somehow that our ways are better than God's ways. Imagine how different things could have been had Nephi not had done as the Lord commanded him to do because He didn’t understand why he was doing it.
To illustrate how naïve this is lets go back to Blondin and his invitation to take the Duke across Niagra in a wheel barrow.
Blondin asks "do you believe I could take a man across the tightrope in this wheelbarrow?"
"Yes, I do", said the Duke.
"Hop in, then", replied Blondin.
“Sure!” The Duke hops on in the wheel barrow and makes himself comfortable
Half way across the tight rope the Duke starts panicking and yells “You don't want to do it like that" He then proceeds to jump out of the wheel barrow and starts pushing across the tight rope himself, 160 feet above a raging waterfall. He only makes it a few inches before he falls.
That's what we try to do all the time. We believe we know better how to run our lives than God; we try to lean on our own understanding. The lesson to be learned here is that we can trust in God, but our trust cannot be limited by outside influences. Is trust really trust when it wavers?
If we persist in leaning on our own understanding rather than trusting in God with all our hearts then our lives will end in ruin.
What is the alternative to leaning on our own understanding? It is to lean instead on God. God's ways are not our ways, so we need to learn Gods ways
.
Lean not on your own understanding. Lean instead on the wisdom of God's word. As we read daily and understand his word we will be learning to think like Him. And that will help us as we seek to trust in him with all our hearts.
