Bible Studies

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Our enemies lie out of habit even when the truth would serve them better. How can they be so foolish, we may ask. Yet our real enemies are not just the voices we hear, but the ones to which we give our attention out of habit or desire. Even our own memory can be our enemy if we heed those inner voices without considering the consequences.

Only the truth has the power of creating but it takes strength to find that power, and even more strength to use it. We seek the truth, but we must first seek the strength and trust to find and use it. Psalm eleven was about how to act in the face of doubt and twelve understood the power of truth. Now we are shown the feeling of trust.





13. Trust

How much longer must I wait, Lord?
How much farther can I make it on my own?

I don’t have the strength to keep this up forever,
My sorrow and my enemies are wearing me out.

Please hear me, if I don’t get help soon from You,
It will be the end of me and my tormentors will have won.

But hold on,
I have already trusted You.

Glory and mercy, the trust is where my salvation comes from!
I will sing and be glad, the Lord has given me the truth.





Our path through the Psalms has led us to this emotional place of trust. In this third lesson of this cycle we find the emotional loss and sorrow when our trust weakens. We know there is one God, but for many He has always been somewhere "out there" while we are always "in here". Trust is the bridge that connects here and there but just as in lesson six where we found ourselves making the same mistakes and lesson ten where we were feeling abandoned, the bridge is hard to find and the abyss which it spans is deep.

Learning to trust is a lifelong road. Every day we walk out on the ice and wonder if it will hold us up. We would certainly trust God if we could listen to Him every day like Adam in the garden but his voice is hard to hear in all the noise and we have become impatient. We look to others with good reputation for values but the decision of who or what to trust always rests with our own judgement. Trust must begin within ourselves, but we know from experience that we often make mistakes.

We must examine our own selves and see beyond our flaws. We try to convince ourselves that we are open and are still trying to find the REAL TRUTH, but often we're not. Why? Because we don't trust ourselves, and for good reason: we are liars and we know it. We lie all the time to ourselves and to each other. We lie about how we look, about how we feel, about what we think, and most of all we lie all the time about what we believe and what we know. It is our chief feature: we lie out of habit, even when the truth would serve us better.

And how can we begin to trust ourselves? We must get to the heart of the lie that is deep within us and set it straight before anything else can be done. Now this is a killer, but the fact is we lie every time we use the word 'I'. That's right, we don't have the foggiest notion of who or what we are. We don't know what our potential is, we don't know what we are supposed to be doing here, we don't really know where 'here' actually is, we don't know how all the stuff that happens to us influences us, we don't know what is going on in our own bodies, and we don't know what is going on in our heads.

What humans do have is some number of years to accumulate knowledge and the memory of at least ten thousand years of history that has been passed along in myths and stories; in oral, written, sculpted, painted, carved or otherwise handed down form. That is the sum total of who we are. We are everything that has ever happened to anyone, and we are everyone who is doing anything to anyone else right now. It is a great freedom and carries much power for we are Abraham and Christ and Muhammed; but it is also a terrible burden for we are the barbarians and Hitler and Pol Pot, killing and hurting each other all over the globe at this very moment.

All of history is in every one of us right now and our individuality is only a small part of a larger whole. It only matters who we are individually in how it affects what we are going to do next. We want to choose the right path, the right thing to do but we are locked into reacting to what has come before. So far we have mostly found only what cannot be trusted. “I don’t have the strength…” and “If I don’t find help…it will be the end of me…” the lesson says.

We know not to trust in material things (Mk 12:24-25). We would like to trust other people but we are often surrounded by those who would take advantage of our weakness. We would trust the God who is our Creator but we are sometimes not sure what of Him is real and what is only our hope and imagination. We would trust ourselves but honest seeking shows our faults and bad habits. What we need is something larger than ourselves that can guide us. “I have already trusted You,” and “I will sing and be glad,” are the directions we are given in this lesson. We simply do it: we decide to give our trust, then get about the business of performing the action. Trust, like truth is an action we take because we make that choice and run with it.

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