Yom Kippur

Do You Trust Him?

Yom Kippur.  On this day I have a chance to review my relationship with the Lord, to look deeply into the commitment I have made.  What I find upsets me.  What I find is riddled with compromise and conditions.  I am not a man of clean hands and a pure heart.  At the bottom of the well, the water is brackish.  For me, the biggest issue is trust.

If I were satisfied with a cognitive faith, I could claim that my study and my teaching demonstrate a heart for God.  But the biblical idea of faith isn’t built around the mind.  It isn’t primarily cognitive.  The biblical idea of faith is trust and trust is a verb, not a noun.  Trust is revealed in actions, not in statements.  The doctrines and creeds of Christendom mean very little if my behavior does not reflect complete reliance upon the Lord.  Moses taught, and Jesus confirmed, that the summary of my life should be seen in the Hebrew word kol, “all.”  I am to love the Lord with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my resources.  There is no room for partial commitment.  And since love is also a verb, what God demands and what Jesus endorses is action that exhibits total commitment.  When I withhold any part of who I am or what I have, I commit a sin.  For this, I need forgiveness.  Yom Kippur must become my sacred day, my day of need.

I need forgiveness for two kinds of sin.  Both are related to trust.  The first sin is to trust someone or something else in the place of God.  When I ultimately rely on someone or something other than the Lord, I replace God with an idol.  That idol might be as subtle as mood altering behavior or emotional escape.  It might be as “harmless” as substituting study of the Word for conversation in prayer.  It might be as benign as worrying about anticipated problems.  This is the sin of substitution.  It is idolatry.  To trust the Lord is to put Him first and the act accordingly.  No one can claim to rely on the Lord whose actions demonstrate other priorities.  “All” means all.  Trust is active reliance.  When I rely on someone or something else, my sin is trusting the wrong god.

The second sin reveals another facet of trust. It is the sin of not acting.  To trust the Lord is to do what He asks.  When I don’t do what He asks, even if I don’t replace Him with an idol, I am still guilty.  Inaction violates the commandment just as much as action in the wrong direction.  When I withhold my commitment by not acting, I demonstrate a lack of trust.  This is perhaps an even more dangerous form of unfaithfulness for it is so easily rationalized.  God whispers to me.  I am reminded of His will in some slight way.  Perhaps I am reminded that I made a promise to pray about someone’s need or that I determined to alter some habit, but when the time came to do so, I put it off.  Who would know?  It was a private commitment.  God’s prompting is private.  It is so easily dismissed in the hurry of my life.  But trust is an inconvenient verb.   Delaying response is a sign of unfaithfulness.  The Hebrew expression is “Here I am,” not “I’ll be right back.”

Do I trust Him?  If the answer must be digital, then I am ashamed with the assessment.  I am a man of gray scale faith when the Bible requires black and white.  But today, on Yom Kippur, God is willing to wipe away all that murky discoloration and restore my color balance to His standard.  Today I can see the world as black and white again.  He is faithful.  I am called to accept His faithfulness and make it my own.  I must put away the idols that have crept into my life – all those things that alter the priority of love.  And I must refuse to be delayed in my response.  I must act and act with haste to fulfill His will.  Fear is my enemy – the fear that if I step toward Him I will fall.  It is not a cognitive fear.  I know that His word says He will lift me up.  This is emotional, pure and simple.  It is the emotional trauma that comes from the hole in my life where the idol used to be.  It is not a rational fear.  I know God is able to sustain me, is willing to do so, and is committed to bringing about the wholeness my idols never provided.  But I am afraid.  So I must act anyway.  Fear is never conquered by thinking about bravery.  It is conquered by acting bravely.  God says He is trustworthy.  I must prove that He is by acting on His word.  Only then will my irrational fear be removed.

Today is the all or nothing day.  God is willing to take away all my guilt if I am willing to let nothing else get in His way.