Who Can You Trust

Who can you trust? I was looking at a survey that was done, actually was done about a year ago, a little less than a year ago, and it was published by AARP. They had hired a company and they had, or I guess they were in conjunction with the company that does different polls, and they put together one of these sample polls for people all over the country and asked them the question, who can you trust a great deal? So, you know, there's people you can, looking at, okay, who can you trust a lot? So, everybody else is either people you don't trust, you know, you can trust a little or you can't trust at all. So, you trust a little or don't trust at all, and then there's who can you trust a lot? And they broke it into two age groups, 18 to 49 and 15 above. And I was surprised at how many categories how close it was between these two age groups. Newspaper reporters, well, I was surprised that those people between 18 and 49 even knew what a newspaper reporter is, because newspapers are just, you know, dying all over the place. Only 6% of people between 18 and 49 in this poll said that they trusted a great deal newspaper reporters. People above 50, it was only 7%. That means, at best, 93% of people don't have a great deal of trust in newspaper reporters. Local TV reporters did a little better. 9% of people between 18 and 49 said they had a great deal of trust. Otherwise, it was just a little trust or no trust at all. 12% of people over 50. Your local mayor, now, I have to admit something. This is embarrassing. I had to ask my wife who our mayor was. I had forgotten, which means I would fall in the category of not a great deal of trust. Only 13% of people 18 to 49 and 21%, so it was almost double of people over 50, trusted their local mayor. Member of Congress, your local member of Congress, 18 to 49, 11%, 15 above 12%. The President, 18 to 49. Remember, this is, I know Mr. Obama is having some crisis of people trusting him now. This was a year ago or so, a little less, maybe. 18 to 49, 31%. 15 above 34%. That means 2 out of 3 people didn't have a great deal of trust in the President. Your lawyer, your lawyer, okay? Not the other guy's lawyer, your lawyer. 18 to 49, only 31% a little better with ages 50 to above, 34%. 2 out of 3 people don't have a great deal of trust in their own lawyer. Your doctor was a little better. In fact, people 50 to above had a 68% of great deal of trust in a doctor. Judges, now this is a frightening thing. This number was the most telling, I think, in the group because it tells that we don't believe in justice anymore. 22% of people 18 to 49 said that they have a great deal of trust in judges. Only 20%, only 1 out of 5 people over 50, believe that they have a great deal of trust in judges. Bankers were a little better, not much. Religious leaders were a little better, but still over 50% of the people, there's only 49% of the people 18 to 49 said that they trusted their religious leader. That means about 50% of people 18 to 49 don't even trust the religious leaders at their church. Corporate CEOs did really bad. There was only one category that did worse than corporate CEOs. People ages 18 to 49, only 3% trusted corporate CEOs. 50 to above was only 5%. The only area that did worse was total strangers.

2% of people said they have a great deal of trust in total strangers. 98% said, yeah, we have a limited trust in total strangers.

Your spouse was number one, and I found that actually encouraging. 89% of people 18 to 49 said they had a great deal of trust in their spouse, and 92% of people 15 to above. We won't go through the mother-in-law, we'll just skip that one.

As people, we tend to sort of deviate between two extremes when it comes to trust. One is sort of the gullible, I trust everybody, and those people get taken advantage of constantly. The other extreme is that I don't trust anybody. I live this life trusting only me. Number one, I look out for myself because I know other people are going to hurt me, nobody's going to measure up, so I just don't trust anybody. Trust is very important in life. You cannot have a healthy relationship with somebody without a great deal of trust. It is impossible to have a healthy, loving relationship with somebody without a great deal of trust. So we have two issues that I want to talk about, and we're just going to touch on these issues. There's only so much detail you can go into when you deal with two issues in one sermon. But I want to talk about trusting God and then trusting each other.

Trusting God and trusting each other. We're going to talk a little bit, sort of pick up in the second part when we talk about trusting each other, a little bit of what was covered in the sermonette. That was a good introduction of what we're going to talk about. Trust simply means that you believe in the honesty and reliability of some person. That's Webster's dictionary definition. You believe in the honesty and reliability of another person. Stephen Covey's son, Stephen Covey, his son has the same name, has wrote an interesting book. I'm going to quote from it a little bit, but it's called The Speed of Trust. It was written to help people, whether they're leaders in the corporate world, in a church setting, or whatever, be able to understand how easy it is to destroy trust and how hard it is to build it. Yet, no relationship, the foundation of every relationship, is trust. Here's how he describes trust. Simply put, trust means confidence. You have confidence.

The opposite of trust, distrust, is suspicion. So, it just makes sense. The more you have confidence in another person's behavior, that what they're going to do is consistent, consistently good, the more confidence you have, the more trust. If a person's behavior is inconsistent all the time, or consistently bad, you have less trust. Now, in a perfect world, that's how we would see other human beings, but it gets a lot more complicated than that. It gets a lot more complicated than that. You know, as healthy people, we know who to trust and who not to trust. If we're emotionally spiritually healthy, but none of us are completely emotionally spiritually healthy. So, trust issues are real in those people's lives all the time. We're talking about trusting with God, but also trust. The second part of trust is going to have to do with family, and especially members of the church, and other close friends you may have, whose relationships you want to have, and how to have trust in meaningful relationships. No relationship can be healthy if both people are suspicious.

If both people are constantly questioning the other person's behavior, or intent. The more suspicious you are of a person, the more you discount their actions, and the more you doubt their motives. I mean, if someone walked up to you every day, you walked into your office, and his coworker walked up to you every day, and slapped you in the face. And then 15 minutes later said, I'm sorry. You might put up with that for two, three, or five days. If you're a really patient person, you might put up with that for a couple of weeks. How long before you turn that person in to the HR department? How long before you go to the boss and say, you know, every day for two weeks, this person slaps me and says they're sorry. So there has to be a certain consistency between behavior and intent. When we get into people, we have a problem, though. No human being, no human being except Jesus Christ has 100% consistency between behavior and intent. Nobody!

Let's first talk about God, trusting in God. To trust God, we believe in God. You can even have a certain amount of faith in God. You know that God's going to do what He says, you know, in a bigger sense. Yes, God is going to send Jesus Christ back. Yes, Christ is going to set up God's kingdom on the earth. Yes, God is going to do the things He says He's going to do, but you don't believe that on a core personal level, because you don't trust God at the core of who you are. And that's where we have trouble. It's not the bigger issues of faith many times. It's the core issue of the daily issue, can I trust God? And do I trust God on these daily issues? And really, the question we're asking, we have to be very honest about this. The question we're asking ourselves is, can I trust God's honesty, God's reliability, God's integrity, and God's goodness? Do I, on a personal level, in my life? Now, this gets sort of complicated, because the one person you really know is imperfect is yourself.

And so what we tend to do is impose ourselves on God. I'm not reliable, so I know you won't be reliable to me. But trusting God is a dependency. It's a belief, but it's a dependency and a confidence. Because remember, trust is confidence. I feel confident in what you're going to do. It is a confidence in God's honesty, his reliability, his integrity, and his goodness. We're going to look at some passages here in Psalms where David had to deal with this. You see David constantly dealing with, can I trust God? And what he did, which is very interesting, is he's constantly saying, ah, instead of trusting God, we as human beings substitute this. He gives substitutions. Here's what we substitute for trusting God. Let's look at some of the substitutions that David came up with. Let's start in Psalm 20, verse 7.

Because it is very possible to have faith in God on these great issues of life. But, Jeff, you don't trust on these very, you know, the daily issues. If he, that he really loves me.

How do I know what he's really going to do? And I know about you, but there's many times in my life I've prayed things and gone to God and said, well, that wasn't exactly the answer I wanted. I'd then have them a lot. But that's not what I thought should happen here. And this isn't what I thought was good. So, what are some of the substitutes we do? Psalm 20, verse 7. Psalm 20, verse 7. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God. They have bowed down and fallen, but we have risen and stand upright. Here David said, you know, as king, he can have a lot of pride in his power and his authority and his army and his abilities and everything else. And you see where David did fall prey to that once when he numbered Israel that God punished him for. But you see him over and over saying, I can't trust in horses and chariots and swords like other people do, because that isn't the future of his kingdom. The future of his kingdom relied entirely on trusting God. You and I can do the same thing. We trust in human power and human control because we feel helpless. How much money can you save to have enough for retirement? We become obsessed with that. We become obsessed with the things or the resources or the power that we have, and that will finally give the security. It's amazing what human beings will do for security because why? Because deep inside we're all insecure. There's a sense of helplessness. Life does things we don't plan. We never planned on the guy that loses control of the truck and hits our car. We don't plan on that. We don't plan on having the doctor say, well, you know, that spot doesn't look so good. We don't plan on that. You don't get up one day and say, you know what? Go on to work today. Don't worry. I'm going to get fired, but it's okay. We don't plan on it. So we feel helpless because all these things happen to us. And what we try to do, now it's out wrong to plan for the future. It's out wrong to save money. Those are good things. What he's talking about here is that that's where our trust is. And our trust becomes so obsessed, or we become so obsessed with those things and trusting them, that we forget, I don't care what you have. It can be gone tomorrow. Your resources, your power, your job, your health. So eventually, our dependency has to be, and our trust has to be in God. So there was a substitute. Horses, chariots, power, resources, money, control. Psalm 31.

He lists some other substitutes. Psalm 31 verse 14.

David says, But as for me, I trusted you, O Lord. I say, You are my God. My times are in Your hands. That's a fascinating statement right there. Trust is my time. We all only have so much time here. My time is in Your hands. Now, God expects us to think through and use our time in the way that He tells us. We have a whole book here that tells us how to use our time. But my time is in Your hands. That is an approach to life that you and I must develop. It's part of trust. It means you have to go to God and say, My time, this life I have, is in Your hands. You show me what You want me to do. You show me the direction. You guide my steps, as both He and Solomon said in Proverbs. He says, Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, from those who persecute me. Make your face shine on your servant. Save me for your mercy's sake. Do not let me be ashamed, O Lord, for I have called upon you. Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave. Let the lying lips be put to silence, which speak insolent things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous. O how great is your goodness, which you have laid up for those who fear you, which you have prepared for those who trusted you in the presence of the sons of men. What has God prepared for those who trust Him, His goodness?

What we do many times is that we try in purpose, in goals, in accomplishments of life, which we're all supposed to do. And you're supposed to have personal goals in life. God wants you to accomplish things in your life based on your personality and who you are. But it always has to be under His direction. Your times, my times, belong to Him. Because David saw that, he trusted in Him, because he trusted in God's goodness. Many times we don't trust God, because in reality, we have to face this. We'll never really be able to trust God until we face these things, the reality of how we think and how we feel. We do not believe God has our best interest in heart. We're just some kind of pawn on this game that God plays, where He's not really interested in me, in my job, in my life. And so, we feel like we have to do it alone. I call it the orphan spirit. We're orphans. Remember the musical little orphan Annie? Or the comic strip. I used to read the comic strip, a little orphan Annie when I was a kid. She always was doing it alone. Of course, she really wasn't, because Daddy Warbox had all kinds of men that would go around behind her and save her. It was Punjab, the great big Indian guy that had a huge sword. All these guys would protect her, but she didn't know that. She was out doing it on her own. Little orphan Annie and her dog. I can't remember her dog's name. Well, was it Sandy? That's right. But she had weird eyes. She never blinked. It was a really weird cartoon. She didn't have eyeballs, which was really strange. But we had this orphan spirit. We don't know who our father is. We're orphans on there. We think we're orphans out here. David said, no, you've got to trust in his goodness. It's not always easy to do. Psalm 37. Psalm 37. Verse 1, But do not fret because in evildoers there will be envious of the workers of iniquity. Sometimes we don't trust God because we see what other people have. We see the blessings other people have. Well, how come that person gets to do all these things and I don't? I won't ask a show of your hand, but sometime in life we've all done that. How come this person gets more money? How come this person gets more privileges? How come this person, how come I have to work 60 hours a week and this person works 20 hours a week, makes more money than I do? Or how come that you know how come, how come, why, why, why does this person have more, this person have more, and this is a bad person?

And we fret. We're anxious. We have anxiety and we're envious because of other people. For they soon shall be cut down like the grass, David says in verse 2, and wither is the green herb. Trust in the Lord. That is very interesting. Trust God. Have confidence in God in your life. And then he said something else. If you're going to really trust in God, you have to do good. Trusting in God results in behavior. And as we go through trust, trust is tied together with intentions and behavior. God always states his intentions. And we see God's behavior. The problem is that between God's intentions and God's behavior is what? Satan and the rest of us. Plus, yourself is in there. And we're all this. So here's God's intentions, here's God's behavior, and between those two points is confusion. And the confusion is created because of Satan, the world, and me. And I just don't need me personally. I mean, put me in there for all of you. Okay, put your name in there. I may be causing some of your confusion, but I'm not the cause of all of it, okay?

So it's Satan, us, and then you personally. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and feed. Feed on what? Feed on his faithfulness, his intentions and his behavior. Feed off of that. Eat it. There's no way to feed off of God's faithfulness unless you're in this Bible every day, unless you're praying every day, unless you're meditating on the Word of God every day, and unless you're fasting on a regular basis. You eat it. You feed on this. It's the center of your life, the Word of God, praying and being in the presence of God. That sounds so simple, but if we don't do that, how do you feed on his faithfulness? His faithfulness, you can trust Him because He's trustworthy. We all know human beings that are absolutely untrustworthy. You wouldn't trust Him to do anything. God is trustworthy, but we must believe that. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Our problem is that sometimes we don't know what desires we should have.

God is a whole lot more interested in giving you happiness than He is giving you a new boat.

God is a whole lot more interested in helping you build healthy relationships than having you do what you think or what I think sometimes will make our lives good. Because in the end, those are the actual desires that are in it. He knows our desires more than we do. Much of the time in life, we don't really trust God. We're running around doing against what God wants us to do, and the reason why? We think we know our own desires, and what we have is an orphan spirit. It's me, and I have to do it my way. I'm the only one I can trust. But God says this, yeah, but that doesn't apply to me. Why does it apply to you? Because I know what's good for me. It's an orphan spirit. I am an orphan here. I am little orphan Annie, and it's me and Sandy. Well, no, I don't even have Sandy. I'm just alone. And I determine what works. I figure it out. We all do that. But here David says, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, step back and understand he knows what your desires are. He knows how those work, and what we do many times in order to fulfill our desires, go directly against God and make our situations worse. To go against God, we make them worse. And then we blame him for it. We say, well, you can't trust God. Look what happened to me.

Verse 5, that's why he says in verse 5, commit your way to the Lord. Do it His way. But I don't want to do it His way. If I do it His way, I don't get the desires of my heart. And he's saying the exact opposite here. If you do it His way, you will discover what the real desires of your heart are. Well, see, I'm never going to trust anybody because I just get hurt.

And God says, well, have loving relationships with other people. No, no. I'm literally, if you say, I'm never going to have a loving relationship with anybody until the Kingdom comes. Because I'm not going to trust anybody. Well, we don't have that option. So commit your ways to the Lord. But if I commit my ways to the Lord, I got to trust people. Yeah. If I commit my ways to the Lord, I got to make decisions that go against my human nature.

Yes. If I commit my ways to the Lord, I'm going to lose jobs. If I commit my ways to the Lord, I'm not going to make as much money as my neighbor. If I commit my ways to the Lord, I'm going to have to work out this relationship. You know, there's this person that sits in the church or the other side of the church I haven't talked to for 15 years because we had an argument once. And you mean I have to go talk to that person now? Yep. But my desire is not to do that. See, he's not going to fulfill our wrong desires.

He's only going to fulfill the right desires. So he will give you the desires of your hearts, but the next day, he says, so commit your way to the Lord. Trust in Him. But what we say is that won't work. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I see what God's saying, but that won't work. Trust says, I trust in God's honesty and reliability.

I trust in God's integrity. I trust in God's goodness. So I will do it because I trust in Him. If we don't have the trust in Him, we will do it. If we don't have that trust in Him, we won't do it because our wrong desires will tell us not to do that. Our wrong desires will tell us not to do it. We have to trust in God enough to override our own wrong desires. We have to trust in God enough to go against sometimes our own human reason to do what He says.

Verse 6 says, and He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the new day. Rest in the Lord. It's interesting. If you go through, He starts with don't fret, don't be anxious, don't be upset. Trust in the Lord. Do good. He'll give you delight in God. Love God's way, and He'll give you your desires. But you have to convince to doing His ways. And then stop it. Learn to rest in God. Learn to rest in the Lord. But wait, wait, wait, that I'll lose control.

Yes, and then you'll have rest. But it won't be done my way. Yes, and then you'll have rest. But this person will get away with, okay, but you'll have rest. But this problem won't be solved. Maybe not, but you'll have rest. Rest in the Lord. That only comes through trust. You will never find, I will never have, rest in the Lord until we trust Him. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Do not fret because of Him who prospers in His way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.

Feast from anger and forsake wrath. Do not fret. It only causes harm. It only hurts. Anxiety only hurts. Fear only hurts. Anger only hurts. The last psalm I'm going to look at is Psalm 40. Psalm 40 verse 1. David says, I waited patiently for the Lord, and He inclined me and heard my cry. He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of a miry clay and set my feet on a rock and established my steps.

He says, I tell you what I felt like. He says, I felt like I was in a pit. Up to my knees in clay. You know, I couldn't get out of it. I was going to die there. He says, that's emotionally, that's how He's describing where He was emotionally. He says, He has put a new song in my mouth, praise to our God, that He will see it in fear and trust in the Lord.

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord His trust and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies. Another substitute we have is where we don't, we feel like we've lost control. We don't trust God. We will simply find another person and put total trust in that person. Proud people. What are politicians? Unfortunately, many politicians are proud people who will lie to people, and people put their trust in them to fulfill what they need.

Not all politicians are that way. I don't want to make some blanket statement, but too many of them are. They're proud people who will lie. And you say, well, you know, that's the way that party is, and that's the way they are down there, that's the way most politicians are. Proud people who lie. And people trust them. Why? Because they want somebody to give them security, to take away their insecurity. And that's why many, many people, and almost all democracies, well, every democracy so far in history, eventually ends up giving themselves over to a dictator, because it becomes too insecure to live without somebody telling them what to do or helping them what to do or taking care of them.

So you and I have to be honest. Every time you and I disobey God, or live by the wrong values of society so it can fit in, or we're just filled and overcome and overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. I mean, we all feel anxiety and fear, but I mean, just being overwhelmed by it and controlled by it. Or fight for power and control. What we're doing is we're telling God, I don't trust you.

So I can't tell God that, but yeah, what we already are. Every time you and I do that, that's what we're doing. So let's at least be honest about it. I don't trust you. I'm having difficulty trusting you. The difference between your intentions and your behavior is sandwiched in between the rest of the world and me, and I'm not God, I'm weak. And so I struggle with who God is. We all have to come to that admitting of that.

Which means that we don't have total trust. We don't have faith in God. We believe in God, but we don't have total trust in His honesty and reliability and integrity and goodness. Why would you do it this way? Maybe you're not like this. I've asked God that question a hundred times. I don't understand. Why are you doing this this way? Or why are you doing that that way? Or why didn't you heal this person? I don't understand.

And the thing I have to wrestle with every time I ask that question is the same thing I get back. Do you trust me? I keep waiting for a different answer, but I seem to get the same answer. Yeah. It's a question. Do you trust me?

Do we trust God? I can't help think of that parable of the talents. You know the parable of the talents? God says that He gives you know ten and five and one talents, which was a measure of money. But the point is, we all know what the point is, God gives each of us abilities, opportunities in life, and then He expects us to do something with them. And it's not always equal. Some people have more opportunities than others. Some people have more abilities than others. Some people have more assets than others. That's just the way it is. And God says He did that. The question is, what do you do with what you have?

We can't use lack of ability or poverty as an excuse to not work. We can't use lack of opportunity as an excuse for unchristian behavior. Everybody receives what they need. And how too much is given, which is required. The more each of us have, the more God requires of us. But we always see what we need to be developed by God, to be His child forever.

And remember, the one who received the one talent hid His talent. And what's very interesting is when God finally approached Him, He said, here's your talent back, because I feared you because I knew you would be unfair. I didn't trust you. Besides, you gave everybody else more than me. Now, don't you think about this? Because in our society, this is the mindset. If I don't have as much as everybody else, then my behavior is by a different code. My behavior is by a different set of rules. That's not what God said. And God says to this person who He gave last to, He said, but I gave you what you needed. No, you were unfair. That's what He accuses God of. You're unfair, and I feared you, so I couldn't trust you a bit. So here's your talent back. And God said, you're unfit for my kingdom.

He didn't trust God. Now, the opposite happens. There's people who are given lots of opportunities. You know, that parable just brings one point. You'll see other parables where God talks about people who receive lots of opportunities and wealth and everything else, and God says to them, you didn't trust Me. You're unfit because you trusted your wealth. There's people who trust their own abilities and their wealth so much they don't need God.

This brings us to that human dilemma, the orphaned spirit. If I don't trust God, who do I really trust? We have to be honest. I trust myself. I trust my decisions. I trust my answers. I trust my ways. I have the solutions to this problem, and therefore everybody else must fit that solution. I have the answer. I'll run away. I have the answer to this, and I won't do what God says, because I'm trusting myself more. That's the reality you and I have to face every time we make a decision against what the Bible says to do. We're trusting ourselves more than God. And we have this orphaned spirit. We don't believe that God loves us so much, and what He tells us will work to the end. We just don't believe it. We say that's too much work, that's too much effort, that's too hard to do. That's why we don't do it, and nothing gets better. We just trade one set of problems for another. That's all we do most of the time in life. Trade one set of problems for another set.

John 14. Jesus talks about this orphaned spirit. John 14. Verse 12.

Jesus says, Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do he will also do, and greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father. Jesus told His disciples, He said, What God's going to do is beyond your imagination. Some of you are going to do more things than I have. They had no idea that they were going to go out and take the gospel to the world. They had no idea some of the things they were going to do. And He says, But this is going to happen because I go back to the Father. And it's real important here that He stresses the word Father, because orphans don't know who their parents are. He says, And whatever you ask in my name I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name I will do it. If you love me keep my commandments. This is back to what we just read in Psalms. It's the same principle. Trust and do. If you can't do it's because you don't trust. So sometimes you have to do it anyways. Sometimes the only way to build trust is you go do it anyways. You do the behavior. You do the behavior of trust. I read something that was very interesting about a... I'm trying to remember what it was, the woman. A woman who... I think it was the woman. My husband is a complete jerk. And I just can't stand him anymore. And it was a pastor she went to and he said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to spend the next eight weeks treating him every moment of every day like he is the greatest man and a gift from God. Two months later she came back and said, I don't know what happened. My husband is a totally different person. Well, maybe he wasn't. Or maybe she helped him. And you could reverse that. You know? The husband's saying, okay, I'm going to treat her like she's God's gift to me. Even though you don't feel that way. And he said, well, I can't do that. That's not my desire. Our desires are wrong. God says, I'll give you your real desire, but you have to commit your ways to me and we won't do it. Now, that means I have to admit or I have to do things I don't want to do. He says here, keep my commandments. Verse 16, and I will pray the Father, and He will give you another helper, and He may abide with you forever. The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it either sees Him or knows Him, but you know Him, read, dwells with you and will be in you. Now, before baptism, you are brought to baptism because God's Spirit is with you. None of us would even come to baptism if God didn't, wasn't with us. His Spirit has to guide us and direct us and teach us, but there reaches a point, well, that's not enough. Your relationship with God, it reaches a point where you still can't have eternal salvation, even though God's with you. God has to be in us. But verse 18 is very interesting. I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you. Now, He's talking about the Father, but Christ also talks about Himself. It's in Hebrews where He says He's not ashamed to call us brethren. We are His brothers and sisters. We know who our Father is and we know who our brother is. We're not orphans, but that's how we feel much of the time. We're lost alone down here, doing this on our own, like we're not part of the family.

We're not orphans. We have been given the Spirit of God.

And so trusting God is giving up the orphan spirit, and that takes prayer. It takes studying this Bible, it takes thinking about these things. It takes doing. You have to do, even if you don't understand, you have to do if it's clearly in the Bible, and if you understand the context, you have to do it even if you don't want to do it. Because you have to analyze, what am I substituting for trusting God? Am I trusting my feelings? Am I trusting money? What am I trusting more than God? Now, as we begin to build this trust with God, we begin to believe in His honesty and His reliability, His integrity and His goodness, we end up with another problem. Because it's like, okay, if I get right with God, I can go live out in a cave someplace, and I won't have to interact with any other people. My life will be perfect. And the moment you get right with God, He says, now here's how you have to have relationships with other people. Oh, no, I didn't know I had to do that. I didn't know I had to get along with all these other people. I don't trust anybody. And of course, we don't trust. And if you come from a background where you were greatly abused, you know, some people, it's amazing how you talk to somebody who went to school, and early on in grade school, kids made fun of them. I can remember this in school where I saw kids that were made fun of in first or second grade for silly things, you know, kids are. But you're now up in the high school, and they're still ostracized by everybody, because nobody knows why. They just started making fun of them ten years ago, and they still make fun of them.

And those people create a, you know, I don't trust anybody. Maybe your parents broke up. Who do you trust if you can't trust your parents? Right? So many of us have had traumatic events in our lives that leave us not trusting. Then there's the second level. The people who haven't abused us, but the people who have hurt us in one way or another. And here's the problem. I mentioned it earlier. Even the best of us isn't, our behavior isn't 100% consistent. You know, if you know somebody who's consistent nine out of ten times, wow, that's a special person. When I'm talking about consistency, you have intent and behavior. That's a special person. A person who's consistent a lot. We trust people on their consistency. That we know their intentions and we know that they're consistent with that. You say, well, wait a minute, okay, that means if I trust anybody, anybody, I'm going to get hurt sometimes. And the answer is, yes. I want you to think about it. Any person who chooses to trust you is going to get hurt sometimes. By you. Unless you're 100% consistent, which nobody is, everybody who trusts somebody is going to get hurt sometimes. Trust at this human level is a choice. And to truly have healthy, loving relationships. We choose to trust when it's warranted. Now, there are untrustworthy people. I'm not saying you trust, you know, that neighbor who keeps stealing. We don't just let them keep stealing. They're untrustworthy people. But in order to have relationships in our families where we work in a congregation, there has to be a certain amount of trust. Now, we have to choose carefully who we trust. But whoever you trust, I mean, the best of marriages, the husband and wife still occasionally will hurt each other. In the best of marriages.

Because nobody's behavior as a human being is 100% consistent. That doesn't even intend to hurt you. Maybe they just don't understand. There's going to be a lot of reasons why we hurt each other. I mentioned earlier Stephen Covey's book, The Speed of Trust. He makes a fascinating point in this book that I want to mention briefly here. And that is this gulf between intent and behavior. You know, people you really don't trust is people you don't know who their intentions are. I mean, why don't you trust a stranger? None of us have a lot of trust in strangers. None of us. Why? Well, you don't even know what their behavior is. Because we don't know what their intentions are.

I mean, the bottom line is, now I've made myself do this before just to fight this tendency. You know, if I go up to the gas station and I'm going to go in the gas station, and there's six bikers there. You notice that bikers aren't usually young people. You can tell they're all hippies, ex-hippies, that are going back and trying to relive easy rider. Now, some of you know what easy rider is. It's okay. So, there's all these 50-year-old guys, you know, they have the leather jacket on and tattoos, and they just look tough. And they're outside the Canadian store. And what do most people do? Walk way around them, you know. I started just walking through the middle and saying, great jacket.

I'm like gritted. Good.

We don't know what their intentions are, so we don't. And we should know. I'm not saying everybody should do that. I do not believe women should walk through the midst of a bunch of bikers and say, great jacket, okay? Don't do that. What I'm saying is, is that why do we fear them? Because we don't know what their intentions are. And we have to be careful of strangers' intentions. The only way you can have a relationship with someone is you have to know their intentions, and their behavior has to be at least somewhat consistent with their intentions. The more consistent, the more obvious the intentions are, and the more consistent the behavior, the more trust you can have. That's why if you don't trust somebody, sometimes you have to sit down and say, I don't trust you because I don't understand the connection between your intentions and your behavior. Or if you want people to trust you, you have to try to connect that as much as possible, knowing that it's not going to always be that way, which means you have to state an intention. When my behavior and intentions don't match, I'll try to come tell you I'm sorry. You're going to have another state of intention, and now you have to do the behavior. That's the only way we trust each other.

We know intentions, and the behavior matches it as close as possible. We accept that nobody's behavior and intentions are going to be 100% compatible because we're human beings. Only God has intentions and behaviors 100% compatible. The rest of us muddle through this, and we trust anyways.

There's different levels of trust. You trust some people more than others, and that's right. Rightly so. We're just talking about trust as a principle. Here's some points that Stephen Covey makes about intent and trust, and I just want to spend our last 15 minutes talking about this. One, intent matters. Behavior matters, but intent matters too. You know, you especially find that out with boys, little boys. I used to tell my wife, you have to understand. Poor Chris, I pick on him all the time. When he was a little guy, and she'd say, why did you do that? And he would say, I don't know. And she'd be so frustrated, and I'd say, you have to understand, Kim. He doesn't know. He didn't have a bad intent. It seemed like a good idea at the time. This is how boys live their lives. I really do think I could jump off. If I get a big enough piece of the cardboard, I can jump off the roof of the garage, and I can fly. I've seen birds do this. It seemed like a good idea. I remember my mom asking me, I knocked myself out. I must have been six or seven years old. I was in my dad's workshop, and he had an electric light bulb hanging down. You know, light hanging down. He'd taken out the light bulb. I knew there was electricity in there, and I wondered what exactly is electricity. So I put my finger in the light bulb. It blew me. I had to get up on a table to do it. It blew me clear across the room. I slammed into the wall on the other side. I went down and told my mom, she said, why'd you do that? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I wanted to see what electricity was. My intention wasn't to blow myself across the room. Okay, that wasn't what I was. I was really surprised at that. We have to see. Intentions are important. Now, if you have good intentions, but your behavior is bad all the time, you actually have bad intentions. You're pretending to have good intentions. So intentions do matter. Intentions grow out of character, his second point. His third point is, while we tend to judge ourselves by our intent, we tend to judge others by their behavior.

We judge ourselves by an intent. Well, he had good intentions. It just didn't work out. But we judge everybody else strictly by their behavior, without even knowing what their intentions were. Four, we also tend to judge others' intent based on our own paradigms and experience. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Five, our perception of intent has a huge impact on trust. We don't trust God's intent at times. We do it on a bigger scale, but not on the personal scale. Or we don't trust our own intentions. We don't trust other people's intentions. Sex people often distrust because of the conclusions they draw by what we do. Of course we do. We all do that. We have to judge people's behavior. You know, if a person's behavior is immoral, you know, you're not going to hang around the person at work whose behavior is immoral all the time. It's just, you know, he's trying to pick up girls. He's trying to pick up women. That's all he does. Pretty soon you're going to shy away from that person whether you're a man or a woman, if you're following God. But we have to be careful because sometimes the person's intention is right. See, we're not talking about sin here. But their behavior isn't consistent because of emotions, or they don't feel good, or they're just not thinking things out, or whatever reason. And then last point, it's important for us to actively influence the conclusions others draw by declaring our intentions. I never forget one time a guy came over to see my sister, and he was sitting there at the kitchen table, talking to her, and dining at the table. My dad walked in, sat down, didn't say a word. He had a shotgun. Took it apart, cleaned it up, oiled it, snapped it shut. It was all this old snapshot. He looked at it and said, by the way, what are your intentions with my daughter? That's hilarious. That boy wasn't sure. Of course, he didn't hit it. It wasn't loaded, but it didn't matter. You know, just the sound of it scared the kid to death. What are your intentions? You know, with children all the time, what was it you were trying to do here? It made sense. I built something on my clothes, and I knew you would have to wash them. You see these little kids? So they go in, and they put soap in the sink, and they washed their clothes, which they now ruined the piece of clothing. And they hang it up so that you won't see it, because they think, oh good, Mommy will be upset because I washed the clothes. What were their intentions? And what we do a lot of times is, well, you were bad, only to find out their behavior was from an intention that wasn't bad.

When you discuss intentions, you change behavior. And sometimes you find out, the behavior actually wasn't bad, it was just stupid. Or it was unknowing. The child just didn't know. Well, we have to learn to do that with children. You know, we have to learn to do that with each other. There's two points here I want to just briefly touch on. The first one is, while we tend to judge ourselves by our intent, we tend to judge others by behavior. Let me show you how this works. You're a dad, and you tell your children you love them. And it's very, very important that we have dinner together. Dinner together is important. And so I'm going to try to be home every night for dinner, Monday through Friday, we're going to have dinner together. And you do it for a week. And then the next week, something comes up and you only do it four times. And you tell them something came up and they understood. But the next time, next week, it's only twice. Pretty soon you're not coming home for dinner at all. And you keep telling them, don't worry about it, you know, tomorrow I'll be home for dinner. But you come home and it's halfway through dinner. And what happens is, after a while, your behavior and your intentions are so far apart, they do not trust you. So when you say, I'll come to your littling game, they don't believe you. And then you say, well, I have a rebellious little boy. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Your intentions and behavior are so far apart, he can't trust you. How can he trust you?

Because they don't match. Now, if you say, dinners are important, I'm going to be there at 6.30 every night, and you're there on a consistent basis. When you're not there, you sit down and say, I wasn't at dinner. I won't be at dinner tonight because I do have to work late, but I'll be there tomorrow. They will understand. Oh, he must have something important to do. They will actually reason out and understand it because you have stated your intention, and your behavior actually matches it. One day you get busy after work, because a bunch of you go over to a little restaurant, you get something to eat, or you're talking, you have some hors d'oeuvres or whatever, and you look at it at 7 o'clock, and you realize, I missed dinner with the kids. And you come home, and you say, come here. You sit down and you say, I got involved with some of my people from work, and we got to doing, you know, sort of talking, and I lost track of time, and I'm sorry. You know what they'll do? Because your intentions of behavior are so consistent, they'll say, it's okay, Daddy. They will forgive you. They will forgive you because the more consistent those two things are, the more apt we are as human beings and say, well, nobody's perfect, and they will forgive. Children show us something about how we're supposed to be as adults. You and I have to state our intentions. Our behavior has to be as close as possible, and when we don't meet those intentions, we have to admit it, because nobody meets them all the time, and people will be more apt to forgive. So, while we tend to judge ourselves by our intent, we tend to judge others by their behavior. And what happens is we don't give them a chance to give us their intentions. Sometimes we just have to go ask people, what in the world are you trying to do here? What is your intent? What are you trying to accomplish? Why are you doing this? Just like we do with children, we have to give ourselves as adults. That same privilege. What was that reason? And you know what, women? Sometimes a man's going to look at you and say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And that's not because there's something wrong with him. It's because he reasoned out when he thought it was a solution at the moment, and it wasn't. It failed. And he's trying to work through, why did it fail? The second point I want to talk about is his point where he says, we also tend to judge others' intent based on our own paradigms and experience.

It goes back to Proverbs 18 verse 13, where Solomon says, He who answers a matter before he hears it, is folly and shame to him. What we do is we superimpose our own experiences, our own experiences, onto another experience. I was listening to the radio yesterday, and there was a psychologist. She's written six or eight books on the difference between the way men and women process things. And it's very interesting because she was talking about, as human beings, we have this proclivity, and women actually have this much more intense proclivity, and that if we have empathy, when someone is telling or sharing with us a tragic story, we tend to become emotionally evolved.

And as we become emotionally evolved, we tend to store that as if the memory happened to us. And then we tend to superimpose that on somebody else. I'll give you a perfect example. And I've actually known where something like this has happened.

A girl was told by her mother, I just think beards on men look terrible. And so all she does is complain about beards on men. It's just a personal taste. And then she says one day, you know what? I wonder what they're trying to cover. I bet you you can't trust men with beards. It's said long enough to the impressionable child that the impressionable child now believes you can't trust men with beards. So she grows up, and every time she sees a man with a beard, her automatic feeling is, you better stay away from him. That's what she was told.

That's what got set in her mind. Had she ever been hurt by a man with a beard? No. Maybe her mother had. Maybe her mother tells her a story one time where they had a neighbor man who was a beard that was really weird, and he was always bothering them when they were children, and finally the police came and took him away. So she had a bad experience with a man with a beard. So now the daughter believes she had a bad experience with a man with a beard because she's been told it over and over again. Well, the truth is she's never had a bad experience with a man with a beard. But she never dates a man with a beard.

Now, you see, well, that's ridiculous. Yeah, I made that up by putting a couple stories together that were absolutely true. It's what we do with a lot of things. We superimpose on others what we've already made up in our minds. So therefore, we automatically distrust people. Bill was a hillbilly, okay? Never been in town. This isn't a true story. Never been to town. One day, Bill said, you know, I'm going to go down to town. He told his wife, Lizzie, I'm going to go down to town and see how those town people live. They walked 15 miles. He got to town, and there was a general store there. Oh, Bill goes into the general store, and he's looking around at all these amazing things. He'd never seen a mirror. He picks up a mirror. He looks at it and he says, that looks just like my pappy. They have a picture of my pappy right here in this store. There he goes, and he buys it. On the way home, though, he starts thinking about, you know, Lizzie never liked my Paul. I better not let her see this picture of pappy. He hangs it up in the barn, okay? And whatever he's troubled, he goes out in the barn, he's working out there, and he looks at the picture of his pappy. He looks at the mirror and he says, there he is, looking at me. And he just spends more and more time out in the barn. Finally, Lizzie starts to get suspicious. Lizzie says, that guy, there's something going on here. He's spending all this time out there in the barn. Something's wrong. She suspiciously thinks about it all the time. She gets to the place where, you know, I don't really trust him. Now, one day he goes off out into the field, and she speaks into the barn. Now, she's never seen a mirror either. She walks over, she looks at that mirror, she looks at it, she says, ah! There's that picture of that ugly so-and-so he's been messing around with. Sometimes, when we impose an intention on another person, we're imposing our intentions. We're imposing onto them how we think, how we feel, or some experience that we've had in the past. That's why, when a person's behavior doesn't seem to match, ask them what they were trying to do, just like you do with child. What was your purpose here? What was your intention? You may find that it was wrong, it was evil, and now there's a trust issue. You may find that their intention of behavior didn't match because they didn't understand the correlation between them. Sometimes you may find that you are imposing on that person something that's actually how you think. If you have a distrusting personality, you're always going to impose on other people a distrustful motive, a distrustful motivation. There's a place in the Bible we won't go there where Peter, this is in Acts 11, Peter is told to go to Cornelius. You know this story. And when he comes back to Jerusalem, he is criticized by all the leaders of the church. Peter is being criticized. Here this is, this great apostle of God is being criticized by all the leaders of the church. And the reason why? He didn't fit their experience. They said to him, you went to Gentiles into their house and ate with them. The oral law does allow us to do that. We're Jews. We can't go above the pagans and go into their houses. There's idols in there. They eat pork. What are you doing, Peter? Peter tells of the story about how God had given him a vision and how God had sent an angel to Cornelius. And how when he went there, God gave his spirit to those people because they had repented, and they were true followers of God. At the end, all the leaders of the church says that they all praised God. They imposed upon Peter and had judged Peter by their experiences and their paradigms. But when they found out the truth, they praised Peter.

They found out their past viewpoint didn't fit this new situation. And God was actually doing something. Behavior is important. And if a person's behavior and intentions don't match, consistently don't match, then we have a problem with trust. We can't trust those people. Remember, state your intentions. Find the other person's intentions. Then you will find where the behavior, many times, is more consistent than we realize. Or there's a simple solution, a lack of understanding, and then trust can be built. You will never, I will never, find peace until we deal and replace our orphaned spirit with trust and confidence with God. And you and I will never experience healthy, loving relationships until we're willing to pay the price of trust. Trust has a price. You can hurt. The option is being a loaded bidder the rest of your life. And I guarantee you, the hurt that happens between friends is worth being bitter of the loan the rest of your life. It's a better price to pay.

They're trying to live like little orphaned eating. You and I have not been called to live lonely, bitter lives. We have been called to be the child of God, not an orphan. And we have been called to have relationships with other people. Other incomplete, other wrong people who have wrong human nature, just like you and I have. Because you and I have been called to do something very simple. We're back to the simplest concept of the Bible. They asked Jesus Christ, what is it all about? And He said two things. Love God. You have to trust God if you're going to love Him. Love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. But love your neighbor as yourself.