Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

There are a handful of people who have had a particularly significant part in shaping my faith and understanding through the years.  Brennan Manning was one of them.  This former Marine and former priest was brilliant, compassionate, and very human.  I had the privilege of participating in a two-day retreat with Brennan some twenty years ago.  I have been blessed by a number of his books.  This morning, I want to share an excerpt from his book, Ruthless Trust.

When the shadow of Jesus’ cross falls across our lives in the form of failure, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, unemployment, loneliness, depression, the loss of a loved one; when we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own pain; when the world around us suddenly seems a hostile, menacing place – at those times we may cry out in anguish, “How could a loving God permit this to happen?”  At such moments the seeds of distrust are sown.  It requires heroic courage to trust in the love of God no matter what happens to us.

The most brilliant student I ever taught in seminary was a young man named Augustus Gordon.  He now lives as a hermit six months each year in a solitary cabin deep in the Smoky Mountains above Liberty, Tennessee.  The remaining half-year he travels the country preaching the gospel on behalf of Food for the Poor, a missionary outreach feeding the hungry and homeless in Haiti, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.

On a recent visit I asked him, “Gus, could you define the Christian life in a single sentence?”  He didn’t even blink before responding. “Brennan,” he said, “I can define it in a single word: trust.”

It has been more than four decades since I was first ambushed by Jesus in a little chapel in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania.  After thousands of hours of prayer and meditation over the intervening years, I can state unequivocally that childlike surrender in trust is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. And I would add that the supreme need in most of our lives is often the most overlooked – namely, the need for an uncompromising trust in the love of God.  Furthermore, I would say that, while there are times when it is good to go to God as might a ragged beggar to the King of kings, it is vastly superior to approach God as a little child would approach his or her papa.

     Why is trust so important?  Because it is trust that keeps us in the one place we need most to be – especially in times like this! – the warm embrace of our loving God.  There is, indeed, a kind of heroic courage in making the choice to trust God when everything we are experiencing would seem to deny His presence and His love.  But it is precisely there, in that choice of child-like trust, that we continue to abide in this One who offers strength, encouragement and hope no matter what might come our way. 

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:14-15)