“SIMPLE TRUSTING FAITH”

The other day a dear brother in Christ was telling me of a book he planned to write, with the above title, lifted from a hymn he sang as a boy in a rural congregation. We eagerly anticipate the proposed volume, and when it is published we will be ready to call it to the attention of our readers. So this little editorial can hardly be a review of that book, but that lovely, delicate phrase has penetrated into my soul so deeply that I just must write a few paragraphs about it.

Simple trusting faith—what a blessed thought that is! It seems especially precious to me just now, for I have been struggling with a congregational problem that had become too large for me to handle. It was frustrating. It worried me, giving me a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. In my efforts to work out an answer in my own mind, I found myself relying on the machinations of men rather than placing trust in God’s providence. That arresting phrase—simple trusting faith—absorbed my thoughts. Do I really trust in God’s promises?, I asked myself. Do I really believe that He will do what He says He will do in our behalf when we place our confidence in Him?

It was this kind of simple trust that Isaiah urged upon Hezekiah as he confronted both his enemies and death. God said to the king through the prophet: “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; behold, I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and defend this city” (Isa. 38:5-6).

God sees our tears and hears our prayers, and we must believe that He will deliver us from evil like He promises. Isaiah uses some beautiful figures to describe simple trusting faith, such as: “I have hid you in the shadow of my hand” (51:16), “The God of Israel will be your rear guard” (52:12), “The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations.”

It is Isaiah who gives us “the song of trust” in chapter 26, in which he says: “Thou dost keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusts in thee.” He also says: “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (30:15).

A simple trusting faith is related to God’s mighty acts in history. If one believes that it was through divine fiat that the universe came into being and that God is indeed the author of all that is, it gives life a purpose that nothing else can. The origin, mission and destiny of man becomes simpler than the philosophers and psychologists would have it. God selected the “demonstration of the Spirit” rather than “the wisdom of men” to save mankind, so that “your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4).

The faith of the primitive disciples was wonderfully simple and simply wonderful. It expressed itself in such chants as the one recorded in 1 Tim. 3:16, which is introduced with “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion.”

He was manifested in the flesh,

vindicated in the Spirit,

seen of angels,

preached among the nations,

believed on in the world,

taken up in glory.

The apostle calls such religion great, and its greatness lies in its simplicity, a profound simplicity to be sure, but still it is simple. It is simple in that it defies all logic and is offensive to pride and human wisdom. It is the child-like mind that accepts the great truths about the Christ. It is simple trusting faith. Such minds cried out a prayer in those primitive congregations that further reveals ‘their simple trust: Maranatha! they prayed, perhaps as a chant, and it gave witness to their simple trust that their Lord would come again—“Come, Lord Jesus!”.

A few years ago David Wilkerson, a young country preacher, tells the story in The Cross and the Switch-blade of how his life was changed when he switched two hours of TV for a season of prayer. It led him from his comfortable parish to the ghettoes of New York City where violence, murder, rape, homosexuality, and gang wars were the rule rather than the exception. He went to New York in simple trusting faith, and the story of his work there demonstrates what God can do with just one man who really believes in His providence.

The faith of Dave Wilkerson is what most of us would call naive, for he believed that God would lead him to a street address of a dope addict that needed him. His decision to go to New York was contingent upon selling his TV set, and he had it understood with the Lord that if He wanted him to sell it, it would sell within 30 minutes after his ad appeared in the paper, which would be by 12 o’clock noon. He sat with his wife, staring at the TV, wondering if he really wanted to do God’s will, while the clock moved to 11:59 o’clock. His wife began to chide him for restricting the Lord and for not really wanting to sell the set. Then the phone rang, and the caller bought the set on the spot, sight unseen.

The Cross and the Switchblade is filled with such stories. When he wanted a house that would be a refuge for teenage hoodlums, he needed $4,200 for the down payment. He solicited help from a group of concerned people, and their contribution totaled $4,400. He wondered why the Lord had provided the extra money until the next day he learned of unexpected charges of $200. Later when another payment was due on the house that was being used to minister to delinquents in the name of Christ, he and his friends were praying for the Lord to provide when a knock on the door brought word of a benefactor who wanted to help them—to the tune of the exact amount of money needed!

Yes, such a faith is naive and child-like, for it defies all logic and reason. Nothing is so unreasonable as for a man to offer his own son as a sacrifice as one would an ox, but Abraham did so, and he is called the father of the faithful. And there was more nonsense than logic to Noah’s erection of the ark. How foolish it was to the world!

Think how sweet it is to the Lord for Him to look upon a humble and contrite heart that deeply trusts Him. Who knows but what Dave Wilkerson was the only man in all New York who really trusted in God to minister to the teenage gangs through him. Can we believe that God would fail such a man? No more than he would Abraham or Noah.

The pity is that simple trusting faith is a rare commodity. We place more confidence in a corner lot and fancy real estate than we do in the power of God. Congregations place greater trust in their financial resources, educated ministers, brotherhood connections, and “the system,” than they do in the leading of the Lord.

Where is the congregation whose first concern is not its own welfare—its building program, its budget, its program? Where are our churches that are dedicated to alleviating the suffering of mankind, irrespective of strains it would place on their own comforts? Churches should be like Jesus, and Jesus came “not to be ministered to, but to minister.” And he didn’t minister to them in order to make Church of Christ members out of them! He involved himself in the human predicament because He loved men.

When a man resolves in simple trusting faith to give himself to others, to yield his life to the rule of Christ, God will bless that man with whatever equipment he needs to do the job.

“In all things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37).