Where is your trust?

"The great lesson of this book [Judges], then, is that we must take God seriously about the enemy. Jesus Christ has come to save us from our sins -- not to allow us to settle down to live all our lives with them. He has come to drive them out from us and to separate us from them. If we do not take God seriously about these things that we call trivial we will experience an inevitable sequence, taking us step by step away from the intervening grace of God, onward to a course that brings us at last to moral collapse. I think this is the answer to those sudden moral collapses of men and women who have apparently been outstanding leaders for God, who present, on the outside at least, a fair and happy prospect that looks as though their spiritual life is strong. Then suddenly we read of some terrible moral collapse. What has happened? There has been an inward deterioration, exactly along the pattern of the book of Judges."

by Ray C. Stedman

(I know I have shared that quote before when talking about something else, but it is relevant to this too)

Jeremiah 17:5-8 (NASB)

⁵Thus says the LORD,
"Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his strength,
And whose heart turns away from the LORD.
⁶"For he will be like a bush in the desert
And will not see when prosperity comes,
But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness,
A land of salt without inhabitant.
⁷"Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD
And whose trust is the LORD.
⁸"For he will be like a tree planted by the water,
That extends its roots by a stream
And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought
Nor cease to yield fruit.

Where is your trust?

Is it in man that will eventually fail you?

Is it in a "good" teacher or leader? Even a "good" Bible teacher?

If it is not in God, you are in trouble.

Where do I put my trust?

Do I put my trust in man more than God? It is a scary question to ask. Sometimes, I have been guilty of putting my trust in a human rather than the living God.

There will be this great Bible teacher or Christian leader and I am like, "yeah! They have the answers, I will just follow them and I will be made well." Even if my heart won't admit that is what it is thinking, sometimes it is.

Don't get me wrong, we need people and we need godly leaders in our life. However, they can not be the ones we trust to guide our lives or fix them, that has to be God. Also, we need to be checking the advice they give, the sermons they preach -- be thinkers and seeing if it lines up with God's word.

God has to be the one we go to first and for most. If those that are claiming to be godly leaders don't point you to Him and His word first, be afraid.

If when a godly leader you looked up to fails --big time-- you lose your faith and fail too; was your faith really in God in the first place, or in that person that just fell?