Trusting God

Please turn with me in your Bible to Psalm 40, page 468 in the P Bible. We get a series called Trusting God. What does it mean to trust God? It's trust the Lord. We use that phrase a lot. So that's what we're going to be focusing on the next five weeks or so. We're going to look at all the various Psalms in this word trust and how it's used. And because really the Christian life could be summed up as a life of trust in God. And so look with me at Psalm 40. It's the Psalm of David, verse 1, beginning in verse 1, I waited patiently for the Lord. He inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up out from the pit of destruction, out of the myriad bog, and set my feet upon a rock making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see in fear and put their trust in the Lord. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud to those who go astray after a lie. You have multiplied, oh Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us. None can compare with you. I will proclaim and tell of them yet they are more than can be told. In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear, burnt offering, and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, behold, I have come in the scroll of the book, it is written of me. I delight to do your will, oh my God, your law is within my heart. I have told the glad news of deliverance and the great congregation. Behold, I have not restrained my lips as you know, oh Lord. I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart. I have spoken of your faithfulness and of your salvation. I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation. As for you, oh Lord, you will not restrain your mercy from me. Your steadfast love and your faithfulness will ever preserve me. For evils have encompassed me beyond number. My iniquities have overtaken me, I cannot see. They are more than the hairs of my head, my heart fails me. Be pleased, oh Lord, to deliver me, or Lord make haste to help me. Let those be put to shame and disappointed all together who seek to snatch away my life. Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who delight in my hurt. Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, aha, aha. But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. May those who love your salvation say continually, great is the Lord. As for me, I implore in needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer. Do not delay, oh my God, let's pray. Lord Jesus, we come to you once again and we sit at your feet as a student to a master, to a teacher. And Father, you alone know exactly what needs to be said to those who hear today, exactly what I need to hear. And so, Holy Spirit would you take these words and take the words of this song that were written so many years ago, and would you make them real and relevant to where people are right now? That in this room there is great confusion and disappointment. In this room there are times, there are people who are in good place who are enjoying good times, and there are people who are in the valley of the shadow of death in very dark places. And so Lord, I ask that you would feed us. I ask that you would give us the gift of faith to believe in you, and to believe your word, and that you would bring light into our darkness. So I humbly ask that you would do that now. And the matchless name of Jesus we ask, Amen. So, trusting God is the sermon series and this is the first sermon. The word trust in Hebrew literally means to lean on someone or to lean on something. Hebrew is a really interesting language, it's different than Greek. Hebrew is a very physical, earthy kind of language, it's descriptive. For example, the word for anger in Hebrew is the same word for flared nostrils. Is that interesting? That's what Hebrew is like. Hebrew is a poetic language, it was a spoken language, they wanted to give you a picture of something. And so the word to trust where in the New Testament it's the word faith, or you get the word faith, the word to trust means to lean into. Abraham leaned upon God in his promise. David leaned his soul on the Lord. So the idea that trust or faith is just an intellectual concept is totally formed about the Old Testament and the New Testament. Faith or trust is not just an idea that you grasp. You think of the gospel as an idea that you may have intellectual ascent to that you understand it, that's not leaning. You lean on a person in the gospel. You lean on Jesus. That to trust means to not only understand the content of the gospel, it's essential, but it means to have a faithful leaning or trust upon God. I don't want you to think about this, the way you know if you lean on the Lord, when you're praying, do you think you're praying to someone? Have you ever prayed? I know I've been there before. You feel like you're praying and your prayers just seem to bounce off the walls. Who am I talking to? Am I just speaking out into the air? Well, that's not the way that the Psalmist, King David, understood God to be. When he was crying out to the Lord, he believed that the Lord heard him. That's what it means to lean on him. So we're going to look the next five weeks or so at what it means to lean on the Lord, what it means to trust God. Some of you may find that you don't trust God. You need to say that you don't trust God and you need to ask the Lord to give you trust in him. Some of you need to be strengthened in your trust to lean upon the Lord. He is not an idea. It is God, three in one, three persons, one God. So what does it mean today when our opening sermon to trust God? To trust God, there are always three things. You find this theme, this pattern throughout the Psalm and even throughout Scripture. Following God or seeking to trust God, something is always overwhelming. It's always overwhelming. It's the first thing. The second, something is always destroyed when you're trusting God. And three, something is always created. Something is always overwhelming, that's the first word, overwhelming. Something is always destroyed and something is always created. And as I've studied these Psalms over the past several years, I see this pattern all throughout the Psalms of this overwhelming of this destruction of something and of this creation of something else. So let's look at this passage today's beginning in our first point. It's something always overwhelming, something's always too much. So following Jesus, trusting Jesus, impossibility is your new normal. Impossibility is always there. We are constantly being confronted with things that are way beyond our ability. We're trying to figure them out. We're trying to get our hands around them. We're trying, but to follow God, there's this pattern is you're going to be overwhelmed. It's not just their moments of things that you kind of understand and then you move on. You're always, you're always being thrown into the deep end. When I learned how to swim, we had a man named Coach Rusty. I'll never have been as made. My mom thinks that like I'm torturing her now for sending me to Coach Rusty. But Coach Rusty threw us in the deep end. The limping size swimming pool, here's how you're going to swim. Just throw me and I was like, okay, so you're going to kill me? This is how I learned how to swim. You're going to die first and then you learn how to swim. But I remember feeling this like so overwhelmed eventually I learned how to swim so I guess it was effective. But that's exactly what's happening when you seek to follow God. The reason I say this is we need to just sort of pause and let this sink in for a second. Do you think something's happening to you if you're seeking to fall? Do you think that everyone else is sort of, maybe you think, everyone else is sort of figuring this out? Why is my life so hard? And that's what it feels like to follow God. It goes all the way back to Noah. You just start anywhere in the Old Testament. You go back to Noah. Noah is told to build a boat for like a hundred years. And there's no rain and there's going to be a flooding is to get two of every animal. God, in other words, starts out at the beginning of the Bible by giving us the greatest picture of impossibility. That's an absolute and utter impossibility. God's saying, this is the way I work. I work through impossibility. And then you go to Abraham? Let's think about this. What does God telling us? He goes to Abraham and he says, Abraham and Sarah, who are old well-beyond childbearing age and they're both and Sarah is barren. He says, I'm going to make your descendants as many as the grains of the sand on the seashore. That's how many. I'm going to make your descendants as many as the stars in the sky. You almost think that's hilarious. God's showing His pattern of impossibility. It's always overwhelming to follow God. Humanly speaking, always. You go to the story about Moses. Here's Moses, the one who's going to lead his people, his enslaved people out of the most fierce tyrannical nation of Egypt, going to lead them out into freedom out of captivity. And the person who's going to do it was a murderer. Moses murdered someone and he was on the land. He ran away and then he finally comes back. He has some speaking problems. He's not a strong leader. He's a weak man. And this person is going to lead his people out. My God's going to use impossibility. We see this theme. He's going to cross the red sea. My God's going to park the waters. You see, all the way to King David who wrote this song. King David was the runt of the family. King David fought Goliath. It's giant. He's not saying it over and over and over again throughout his story. To follow me is overwhelming all the way to the point of Jesus Christ. That a penniless teacher from Nazareth is going to be the savior of God's people. And he's going to do it through the cross, through apparent defeat. And so you look at your life. I want to apply it. See, here's a point. To look at this song is to look at God's story in your life. It's not that you're not doing it right. It's that you're following God. It feels overwhelming because it is. Look at, look at verse one of this song with me. I waited patiently for the Lord. He inclined to me and he heard my cry. He drew me out, drew me up from the pit of destruction out of the myri bog. And he set my feet upon a rock. And then later he talks about having these enemies. People who were plotting against him. And so here's this song is written out of a place. A place of profound either depression and illness and fear. And an understanding of his shame and his guilt before God. He goes, he's come out of a pit. A pit of destruction. He says that my feet were in a myri bog. And the image here is this deep marsh of mud. It's this swampy, confusing place. That's what he means. A place where he couldn't get footing in this pit of destruction. His feet were stuck. There was no firm place to stand. Stuck in confusion. Well, that would really, if you wrote a Christian book called Stuck in Confusion. That would fly off the shelves, wouldn't it? How different that is from a much of our sort of 21st century happy, clappy sort of Christian kind of stuff. But what he's saying is, I met God and I cried out to God when I was stuck in confusion. And folks, that is where people who are following Jesus often find themselves. Have you been there? Are you there right now? Have you been praying about something over and over and over again? You don't even know how to pray for it. Maybe you're stuck in a certain pattern of sin. And you're stuck in your own past and your own guilt. And there's some certain issue that you can't resolve in your life and the relationships and things that you think to yourself, what am I doing wrong? I thought following Jesus was supposed to make life easier. And you keep waiting, and you keep waiting, and you keep waiting. That was not what this Psalmist believed. See, following Jesus doesn't fix life. It brings you into the great story of a God who is going to rescue and restore all things. It's not a program. It's not a religion that you work in order to make life more manageable. It's a relationship with the one true God who does not promise to give you your little dreams. He promises to give us life abundantly. Do you hear that? But the reality is our definition of abundant life, and God's definition of abundant life are really different. It's always overwhelming. So I say that. This is a weird thing to say, kind of. I say that to encourage you today. I say that to encourage those of you who have been following Jesus, who find yourself often stuck in confusion, who find yourself more days than you can remember, more days than you can count, crying out to God for help. And you're finding you want to wait, you're going to come to a place where you're not going to cry to God for help. You're going to say, hey, God, go deal with someone else. I'm pretty good today. And so I say that to encourage you. If you find yourself always crying out to God for help, always crying out to God for need, God is taking you in place where you are overwhelmed. He does it to David. He did it to Moses and Abraham. He even did it to Jesus. This is what it feels like to trust God. It's too much. Here's the second thing that it reveals to us. Something is always destroyed when we seek to trust God. Something is always destroyed. Here's the first thing we see in this Psalm. The first thing that we often see is destroyed is our sense of control. If you're going to seek to follow Jesus, and you want to trust God, God takes away the illusion of control. Now, you realize that's why some people keep God at arm's link. It's because they want the illusion. And it is an illusion, an illusion of control of their life. And to follow God, to lean on Him, takes away your sense of control. So much so that the psalmist says, I cried out to God. I cried out from a pit of destruction. He cries out for mercy. He was at the end of his rope out of a myry bog. God takes us to the places where we realize we are not in control. And that's where you find yourself crying out for help, crying out for mercy. See, there's Lewis in his book, Grief Observer, put it this way. Nothing will shake a man. Or at any rate, a man like me out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be not silly before he comes to his senses. Only tortureable will bring it out. We'll bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. And that's what you find in this psalm. And in psalms like psalm 42, where you have this imagery of a myry bog or of water. When you look in the Psalter and throughout the Old Testament, this image of water, you use this illustration of water, or psalm 42, it says, all your waves and your breakers, they wash over me. The psalmist is saying something. Water meant chaos. Water was the place of confusion and fear. To say he's trapped in a pit of destruction, just trapped in a myry bog, he says he's beyond his capacity, he is not in control. And you know what it feels like to be in waves or in breakers, in psalm 42, says this. Even when you were a kid and you would get stuck in the waves and the waves would have their way with you, when you were a kid, it's like a rag dog. Remember that feeling? Absolutely out of control. And the way the ancient people talked about life being out of control. And sometimes we feel like that. You folks, one of the things that God destroys is our sense of control. What do you think Jesus was always on a boat, on the water? Something I realize. In my own life, and as I see the gospels, Jesus takes us to the place of our greatest fear. He does it in the Psalter. God takes us to the Mary bog. God takes us to the place we don't want to go, because I imagine following Jesus like, hey, Jesus, you know what? Let's not go to my greatest fear. Let's go up here where it's a little bit nicer. I want to sort of follow you here where I can sort of see everything and kind of feel like everything's going to be okay. And then my family's going to be okay, but here's what God does. God, He takes us to the place of our greatest fear. And sometimes, and this is why Jesus sleeps. Surely it's why He sleeps. It's sometimes, it feels like He's asleep in the storm. This is the way He makes followers. It's that's exactly where these fishermen who grew up on the sea have gallantly realized. Don't you care if we die? You've brought us out here to kill us. So you may be thinking, God's not only destroying the way I thought life was supposed to go, He's destroying the way I want to think of Him. He has a nice neat kind of genie God, or his one writer calls a Koch machine God. Then you put the quarter in, you put the prayer in, and whatever you want comes out. So He kills our sense of self-control. That's God. If you're seeking to really follow God, He's going to kill that. Here's the other thing He destroys, self-righteousness. Trusting God destroys self-righteousness. Look at verse 12, evils have encompassed me beyond number. My iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see they are more than the hairs of my head. My heart fails me. Something suffering does, is it destroys the way I want to think of me. I've used this quote before from T.S. Eliot, that we are absorbed in an endless struggle to think well of ourselves. Everyone is.

That one of the things that I realize, a looking back, you know when you look back after following God, things seem to make more sense sometimes, but in the midst of it, it just seems totally chaotic and crazy. When we're looking back and thinking, God was showing me a picture of who I really was, my sin, my guilt, my shame, my confusion, all those different things inside my own heart. He was showing those things, and I was arguing with God. God, that's not who I am. Don't you see? I was voted most likely to be famous. God, look, look at this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this. Jesus, He shows us, we don't know ourselves the way He knows us. God knows the real you better than you know you. He knows something about your internal world that you don't know, and folks, it's scary when He shows it to us. See, we can't have the way we one of you ourselves and the way God actually sees us. We can't have them both at the same time. We can't have the illusion that we want to cultivate about ourselves and God's truth. God is going to destroy the way we want to think of ourselves. And here's a way he's going to do it. He's going to show you your sin. Not sin in general. Do you see what the Psalmist is saying? My iniquities outnumber the hairs of my head. They're so great they've overtaken me that I cannot see. This is David. My sin is so great. It has blinded me. My sin is so great. It's more than the hairs of my head. That means it's beyond number. I can't count some of you. You can probably count how many hairs you have on your head. That doesn't mean that you're not simple. The picture here is the more you follow Jesus and you seek to trust Him, the more you're going to see how desperately wicked your heart really is. Ask any Christian who's walked with the Lord for a long time. They will not tell you I really feel like I deserve heaven more now. They'll be more amazed because the closer you get to the Holy God, the more you see how unholy you are and the more thankful you are for His grace. Paul, at the end of his life, and he wrote first and second Timothy near the end of his life. And remember the saying that he gives in first Timothy? He says this saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into this world for sinners. And I am the foremost. There's one of my teachers used to say the glorious present tense. He's not saying I was the foremost. He says I am the foremost. I am the foremost sinner. In other words, he never sees himself as deserving it. The closer he comes to God, the more he sees at his own sin. And God's going to destroy your self-righteousness. The myth that we had about ourselves, the little one-dimensional person that we want to think well of. Folks, he doesn't exist. It's so disappointing. It's so disappointing. And we're trying to build him or her back up. We want to believe. This is who I am. This is who I am. It's not who you are. Surely that's exactly what's happening with Peter and Jesus. Here's the third thing that God destroys is self-reliance. God destroys self-reliance. Surely by destroying our sense of control and destroying our self-righteousness, he takes away our self-reliance. Look at verse 4. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust. Who does not turn to the proud to those who go astray after a lie. Or he says it like this in Psalm 44, verse 5 and 6. Through you, we push down our foes. Through your name, we tread down those who rise up against us. For not in my bow do I trust. Nor can my sword save me. Or that well-known passage from Psalm 146, verse 3. Do not put your trust in princes or in a son of man in whom there is no salvation. Here's what it means. It means that your own strength will fail you. It means that other people will fail you. Here's that great song that's in our Trinity hymnal on Christ, the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground. So seeking to trust God, he will take away every single prop that we rest on. All other ground is sinking sand. What do I do? I think that maybe something over here isn't sinking sand. Until God takes it away. God will not let your heart lean on anything but himself. God will destroy self-reliance. It's what Paul said he boasted in his weakness and second Corinthians. Even in his thorn in the flesh and second Corinthians 12, a constant reminder of his weakness in Jesus said, my grace is sufficient for you. My grace is sufficient for you. So he boasted in his sufferings. He boasted his weakness. This is one of those things that I think is Presbyterians like we believe that. We don't really believe it either. We believe it but we kind of go, yeah, but we kind of got it together too. Do you really think God uses your weakness?

God is destroying the way we want to think of ourselves and he's destroying the way we want to think of him. As Lewis continues, my idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time and God shatters it himself. See, God is not sentimental about my little dreams and my little props and my little kingdom. He's not sentimental about my little comforts the way I am. See, I'm sentimental about that view of that I want to have of myself. I'm sentimental about those things and I want to protect him. I want God but I want to protect this little kingdom and this little world and this little view of myself. I want I'm sentimental about it. God's not sentimental at all. In fact, he hates my little kingdom. What? God hates my little dreams. He hates them. And so he goes after them and he tears them apart. God kills the right in front of my face. This view of my own power and my own strength, he cuts it. He cuts its throat and it bleeds out in front of me. He seems to be very harsh with my little kingdom, my little dreams, my little comforts. You're a fine God doing that. Why is God like that? Why is God destroying those things we trust in? God hates our little kingdoms and our little dreams because he loves us so much and he loves his kingdom so much and he will not allow us to settle for anything less. He still want to trust God. Maybe God's not this nice neat little PCA God. That's the Presbyterian Church in America that started allowing me. 5K or whatever it's called, 403B. About all my little things, what about my plans? The psalmist tells us God is a much bigger plan because even as he destroys something that is something we care about so much, our sense of control, our self-righteousness, our own reliance upon ourselves, he's creating something that will last forever. He's creating humble reliance and joy. He's creating Christ-likeness. Look at verse 1 with me again. This is after much reflection that David has looked at this great trial. Pick a trial. I don't know which one it was. The dude had a lot of trials. So he's looking and he's in some place and he says literally here's what the verse 1 means. In waiting I waited. In waiting I waited for the Lord. I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited and I didn't get the answer I desired. I kept waiting and I kept waiting in the pit of destruction and the Maori ball in a state of confusion. I stayed there. I stayed there. My circumstances hadn't changed but something I knew. God created a trust for him. I knew he still loved me. See one of the first things that God creates is waiting. Waiting. Waiting. You see that's God's much more interested in teaching and training someone to wait on him than just giving us what we want. A waiting heart. A patient heart. God is destroying conditional obedience that is native to all our hearts. Conditional obedience is God I will follow me if dot dot dot. I will follow you if you give me this marriage. I will follow you if you give me this job. I will follow you if you make this person well. I will follow you if if if and waiting on God destroys conditional relationships. See God more than anything wants to give us Himself. So Romans 5 verse 3 says that we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance. And endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts. Through the Holy Spirit He has given us. See one of the things God's doing to you and the myri ball. One of the things that God's doing to you in that place where He's taking you seems to your greatest fear into the waves and the breakers into the water where He's taking you. One of the things He's teaching you is that you can trust me. You can wait on me even when you don't see me. You see that even when you don't see me. Even when it seems like I'm asleep produces character and character produces hope. The second thing it produces is joy. So verse 3 says he puts a new song into my heart. There is joy now that is produced even in the midst of this suffering. He is experiencing joy as he reflects on it. God's faithfulness to him has produced joy. He says a new song. He's not singing about something that no one's ever heard before or other scholars believe that this new song is just another new song about God's ancient love. Do you have a song that you can sing about God's grace to you personally that you reflect on God's goodness to you and it produces joy. It produces joyful worship. John Stott once wrote that when he attended some church services he says he often thinks that he's come to a funeral by mistake. He says everybody is dressed in black. Nobody talks or smiles, the hymns are played at the pace of a snail or a tortoise and the whole atmosphere of worship is gloomy. He said if I could overcome my Anglo-Saxon reserve I would shout cheer up! Christianity is a joyful religion and every service should be a celebration. He says I wish I could quote... He said I wish I could just tell you the words of Archbishop Jeffrey Fisher, whoever that was. And this is what this great man said before he died. The longer I live the more I'm convinced that Christianity is one long shout of joy. Do you see that at all in your Christian life? No matter from what, joy from this, no matter what you're going to face tomorrow or the next day or in the next five years or ten years, no matter what you've faced in the past or facing right now, what you're experiencing. If you are in Christ you will be with God forever and ever. But no matter how evil the world becomes, no matter how much you've been tarnished by this world, no matter what your family is, no matter what your name is or your reputation. If you have trust in Jesus, if you simply lean on Jesus, you will be with God forever and paradise. No matter how hard your marriage is, no matter how much your heart has been broken, God loves you. And see that's supposed to produce joy, a new song. Do you know any joy in being a Christian? Why not? I'm not saying that life isn't hard, see joy is different than happiness. When life is hard, you're not happy. Big deal, that's right, right? So when someone says we all say we're happy, we're fine, but we're lying. But when life is hard, you're not happy, but you can still be joyful and life be hard. See joy comes from a deep abiding trust. It comes from knowing God. Can you ask God about your joy or lack of it? So it produces waiting, it produces joy. Here's the third thing we see it produces. It produces a care and concern for others. Verse 3, he says that many will see in fear and they will put their trust in the Lord from my song. From my story, people will hear this. In other words, the psalmist doesn't just see this as something that just for him. See what God does in your life is not just for you. What God does in your life is for me, it's for others. When God encourages you, when God comforts you, it's to overflow into the lives of others. You aren't just supposed to hog it. And so the psalmist says, I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation. Behold, I have not restrained my lips as you know, O Lord. I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart. I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation. I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation. Here's something that happened in my own life and this is absolutely true. You can go ask people in Little Rock. You can go ask them if I was this way. I was really hard to know growing up and I didn't really care about other people. I really was, I was nice, I was friendly, but I didn't care about people. I cared only about myself. And so unless you could do something for me, I would have no relationship with you. But something happened to me when I was ripped out of that world in Nashville, Tennessee, and I experienced my sin, I experienced failure, and I said, God, what are you doing with me? Out of the fiery pit and out of the ball, God says, I'm curing you of yourself, Richie. And so I experienced salvation for the first time in my life and some miracle happened. I actually, for the first time in my life, I actually wanted other people to be encouraged. I started talking to people about Jesus. And it's not because I'm a nice guy. I'm naturally, you see, I'm naturally not a nice guy. It was supernatural because I experience how gracious God is. And you see that when we preach sermons to you, when we take God's Word and we apply it to your life, that's us preaching to the great congregation, that's us telling you how good God is. It's not us, it's God through us teaching you, but he doesn't stop there. Independent. We are not called to just hear sermons and to get into our cars and go to holiday ham or wear them. You're called, I'm not kidding. If you've been encouraged by God's Word in your life in any way, you're called to preach to each other. And one of the reasons we live in so much discouragement is because you're not preaching to each other. You're not giving new songs of joy to each other. You're not telling each other how good God is. Now, this is a central part. This, in fact, it starts from the pulpit. We preach the gospel, but it doesn't start there. Do you realize how hard life is for some people in this congregation? Because some people are holding on to their life by very thin thread. Some people are so down. Some people are so discouraged. Some people are so fearful. Some people are on the brink of suicide. And God says, I didn't give you that good word, that good news, that joy that you have in me. I didn't give it for you to hoard it. God is saying, I want you to find, I want you to use that. Folks, it may be a text. It may be an email. It may be one word of encouragement. You may reach out of your little world and God wants to minister through you. That's what happens in this Psalmist life. David said, I will not keep silent because people need to know how good you are. In the great congregation, here's the fourth thing it produces. Trust produces trust. How can I trust God more? Well, God overwhelms us. He destroys the way we want to see ourselves and the way we see Him and gives us a biblical picture of who He is. And He gives us a little trust. And that trust produces more trust and more trust. See, the gospel is our greatest source of strength and comfort. What does that mean? Folks, do you know the reason God will incline to hear your cry for help? It's because Jesus cried for help and the Father turned his back. You see, the reason God will hear us is because He didn't hear Jesus. Jesus became our sin. Jesus cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And the Lord punished Him when we deserve to be punished. And the reason that we will be accepted in is because Jesus Christ was forsaken. Your trust is not in some idea. It's not in some mere human person. It's not even in some establishment. Your trust is in a Jesus who died and who rose again 2,000 years ago. He really did. And so your faith, your trust is rooted in history. And so that's why God says once again, trust me. Trust me. Trust me. Let's pray. Lord, we come to you now and we ask that you would give us the gift of trust. We know that we can't produce it in our own hearts. But Lord, as you reveal our weaknesses, as you reveal our sin, as you reveal our utter dependence on you, I pray that you would give us that sweet experience, the sweet taste of your grace and your goodness to us. Bless your people to that end in Jesus name. Amen.