Trust to Verify

Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. (Psalm 37:1-6 ESV). In the increasing intensity of current political campaigns it seems most of the conservatives are working very hard to identify with President Reagan. There is no doubt he is one of the most admired and quoted conservatives of our modern era. Some of the favorite one-liners to come from him are no doubt familiar to you. He said: “Sometimes in this administration, it seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the far right hand is doing.” And, he also had a famous political maxim: “Trust, but verify.” Its primary application was to arms limitation treaties, but it is often sound wisdom in dealing with other people. The more I think about that truth, the more I find it totally inaccurate in our relationship with God. We should never find ourselves of the mind that the only time we can really trust God is when we can verify that he will indeed give us that which is good in our lives. Here is the crucial difference between trusting God and trusting other people. With God it’s not “Trust but verify,” but rather, “Trust to verify.” The wonderful promises in our reading today are a summary of how God always brings us good. In fact, the psalmist indicates that all the desires of our heart will be given to us. Sometimes that promise will come literally true for us in earthly terms. At other times it will seem like it doesn’t. But all of us who “take delight in the Lord” will discover that one day our deepest desires will be satisfied, even if we didn’t truly know what they were. The lesson for us is that it is the very act of trusting God that provides indisputable (and indescribable) verification of his promises in our hearts. I know that there are many who are wondering how this could possibly be true since they are in the midst of difficult and painful circumstances. And, there are those who simply point to the caveat of whether we are really trusting in God, doing good, and delighting ourselves in the Lord. Those are people who can only trust, but verify. It is as if those people will only believe it if they see it. It pivots the responsibility of good to the individual rather than God. In my experience that simply doesn’t work. No matter how much good I do, or how deeply I trust in my own resources and thoughts, I cannot produce good from bad. Only God can do that. Take the death of Jesus as an example. Now that was a bad day! However, when the tomb was emptied and Jesus was resurrected, that was proof that God could be entirely trusted. Commit yourself to Trust to verify.