Mathetes

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart,     and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him,     and he will make straight your paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6) If we were to compile a list of short Bible verses that encapsulate the life of the believer, this would surely make that list.  But this kind of total trust is not natural to us.  In some ways, the longer we walk on this earth, the better mechanisms we develop to try to handle the trials of life on our own.  Often, it is ironically our God-given strengths that we employ to this end.  But where we place our trust is what we ultimately look to as "god", even if that god is self.  In his Small Catechism, Luther said, "A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need.  To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart."  For me, one of the biggest areas I struggle with trusting God is when it comes to pain.

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of non-religious folks is that we're using "religion" as a "crutch."  Years ago, I would have become defensive and argued at the idea, but today I happily admit that Jesus is like a crutch but so much more.  Why the change of heart? Often we're tempted to think that our spiritual walk with God is a lot like physical therapy for person recovering from a crippling injury.  When many of us first come to believe, we imagine we're like someone who just awakened from a horrible accident and received the diagnosis that our legs don't work.  We rely heavily on God, especially at first, like a recovering man would with crutches or a walker.  And we imagine that as we work our spiritual muscles, as we do our disciplines and try hard to be good people, as we do more spiritual therapy, we get stronger.  God lets us walk through some hard times too, perhaps, and that gives us the extra push to work out a little hard

There are some things we get ourselves into trouble with that are the result of direct poor choices we have made.  There are other things that trouble us because they are afflictions we did not directly choose, burdens seemingly placed upon us that seek to destroy us.  Most of us would say that the first describes sin -even all sin (which often has lumped in with it things like depression and anxiety)- and the second describes something else, such as having a debilitating illness.  But in the context of what the Bible teaches, these overlap and both describe sin.   Many sins involve deliberate, poor choices.  Take adultery, for example.  Still, we know from Scripture that even bad decisions stem from what's already in the heart.  Other sins or spiritual maladies, in particular what our spiritual forefathers would call “besetting sins," are more heavily on the spectrum of crippling afflictions than they are deliberate poor choices.  To understand this distinction is important,