Invitation to Trust ...

Wednesday, Jan 7, 2015. Is Christian faith something for privacy only, not relevant in our daily life, not relevant on the political agenda, not relevant for science? I do not believe that. I think that indeed faith is highly relevant and will change each and every of our days, if taken serious.

How to act? …

There are many questions, how to act, each day. It is everywhere. How do you manage your daily workload? How do you organize things? How do you deal with those people, who are not honest, but cheat others and themselves? How do you deal with all those unjust things? How? How? If you honestly look into your environment - close and far - you will find hundreds of difficult things to deal with.

We can be completely absorbed into difficulties. That will not help us to make much progress. We can also move into some mode of ignorance. This is a quite worldly behaviour, and it is the standard reaction. People just ignore the problems. The danger is that we move into some partial illusion about our world.

The New Testament invites us into another mode. The invitation is to live with the Holy Spirit. The invitation is to live as a child of God, to live in faith in Jesus. It is a different mode. It is as if we would enter another kingdom. It is as if we are suddenly free from many reaction patterns, which have shaped our view for a long time. Let us read, what the apostle Paul writes to the Galatians:

The Children are free …

1 What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. 2 The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. 3 So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces1 of the world. 4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir. (Galatians 4, 1-7)

We might see nice images here, but not the reality of these things. Paul uses the images to describe reality. His invitation is a real invitation to live as a child of the Lord. It is as if we would enter another spirit, another world, another area of influence. God is good, and he is friendly, and he is reliable, and he is supportive.

A key step to get into this mode is to start prayer. We need to trust him, the father and the son and the holy spirit. We need to ask him to come into our life. We need to trust our life into his hands. After a first and generic step, the challenge is to start living it. The challenge is to trust him with daily steps. With each step where we manage to trust him, we see his presence and his spirit in our life! (RWEP) ... more texts