Summary
In this episode, Alan Wartes explores the vital connection between trust and radical repentance in the context of living in chaotic times. He emphasizes the importance of trusting God fully and understanding the sequence of trust leading to obedience and true spiritual freedom.
Transcript
Welcome to Dispatches from the Spiritual Front. I’m Alan Wartes.
It’s been a couple of months since my last Dispatch. I promised then to talk more about the connection between repentance and trust. I suggested that we will continue to fail at radical repentance and fully abiding in Christ until we have settled the question of where we place our trust — in God or in Satan’s deceptive counterfeits? It’s hard to imagine a more important topic, and I’ll finally share some ideas in a moment.
But first I want to tell you why it has taken so long to keep that promise. These conversations certainly aren’t about me, but I think there could be value in sharing what I’ve been going through because it might shed light on your own experience.
The truth is that we live in extraordinary times, maybe even unique in history. I know that’s not news, and you already sense this for yourself. It’s hard to deny that our collective assumptions and beliefs about everything are frankly starting to fall apart. The world we think we know and have depended on is convulsing under our feet, and not just in trivial ways at the surface, but all the way down to the roots of shared reality. The pace of that change seems to pick up speed every day.
That’s scary, chaotic stuff, no matter who you are. It’s especially so for someone who feels called to speak up about what we see and even dare to challenge others to question what we’ve been told, to consider uncomfortable ideas and radical new ways of looking at these things.
I haven’t been shy about claiming that we live in an age of unprecedented deception. It’s not an overstatement to say that everything about our civilization is built on Satanic lies. His purpose is simple — to hide God from us and even to take His place, if that were possible. He also aims to obscure the truth of who we really are as God’s redeemed children.
I believe that the reason for all the chaos we are currently experiencing is that this age of deception has now reached a decisive moment of disclosure. Lies that have thrived in the shadows for centuries are now being dragged into the light and exposed. People are hungrier for truth today than I’ve ever seen in nearly seven decades of paying attention. That’s great news and can only be a work of the Holy Spirit of God. Praise Him.
But here is where I sense danger and have personally felt the need for heightened discernment and caution before speaking out. It’s way too easy to fall for new lies in the process of dismantling the old ones. That happens when we look for truth with a small “t” instead of seeking nothing less than the complete revelation of all that Satan has worked so hard to hide from us. That is the full knowledge of God as sovereign creator of all things and who we are meant to be in Him through Christ Jesus.
Getting caught up in small “t” truth is especially troubling when so many of the old lies we are confronting are deeply embedded in what the modern church teaches and how it behaves in the world. I’ve said before, the church is not exempt from the deception and corruption we are talking about.
As one who dares to speak out, the prospect of inadvertently misleading anyone about that is, frankly, terrifying. So, I confess. I’ve been dragging my feet and finding reasons to be busy with other things. But, in His infinitely tender and loving way, the Lord sent a couple of fellow believers to gently encourage me to just trust Him with all those fears and to faithfully say what He has helped me to see. In other words, to pursue a healthy fear of the Lord and not let worldly fear paralyze me.
So, this is me passing that message along to you. As followers of Jesus in this age of chaotic, even catastrophic, disclosure, we don’t have to be afraid to ask inconvenient questions, challenge cherished beliefs or consider new ideas. God is never threatened or offended when we search for truth. And what we earnestly seek in Jesus’ name, we always find, even if the path doesn’t lead exactly where we expected.
Going forward, I’ll certainly put this to the test in these Dispatches.
Which brings me to what I really want to talk about: Trust.
All that I just shared was a reminder to me to trust God if I’m anxious or timid when speaking up in public about things I see. But the lesson applies equally to everything else in my life — to worries over health, money, keeping loved ones safe, political upheaval, you name it. The key is trust.
In the face of all those fears and more, I will always trust something. The default setting of my old sinful nature is to trust what everyone else trusts — that is, all the things the world promises will provide relief and security. You know what these are. They are Satan’s counterfeits, and they always add up to a false sense of power and control over life’s circumstances in order to dictate outcomes. It is an illusion that is nevertheless extremely powerful.
Radical repentance, as I’ve been discussing it, calls us to recognize Satan’s deception in all of those counterfeits and to “come out” of that world entirely. Paul wrote in Romans 12:
“Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Romans 12: 1-2
Here’s the problem: To even the most earnest followers of Jesus verses like that sound like a commandment to obey; to somehow find the courage to renounce everything we’ve ever been taught we need to survive and just “do better” at “proper worship” instead.
Not surprisingly, we fail. And we fail again. We will always fail. And having failed we take one of two paths. The first is to feel crippling shame and unworthiness at our weakness. We feel naked and start avoiding our Father, like Adam and Eve did in the garden. The second is to doubt that radically renouncing the world’s way of doing things is what God really meant by “repentance.” That leads to rationalizing how compromise with the world is really God’s will and His way of providing for us.
Both of those are dead ends. They each lead away from the truth that repentance is not about obedience or even about behavior at all. The call to repent is ultimately an invitation to trust. Everything else follows trust.
In thinking about this topic, I remembered a hymn I used to sing often as a young person in church — Trust and Obey.
Trust and obey
For there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus
But to trust and obey
I still love it. But something jumped out at me when I looked at it this time. That is, this chorus seems to present trust and obedience as two distinct things: trust and obey. The reality is that they form one thing, a sequence — we trust then obey. There’s no other way. Without understanding this, we will fail and keep failing.
One reason is that obedience — radical repentance — requires us to “forget the former things” that we learned over a lifetime of indoctrination and bitter experience and to step out into the apparent thin air of an invisible kingdom.
Imagine you are standing on a ledge at the top of a skyscraper, swaying in the wind. The memory of every fall you’ve ever taken fills you with fear. You feel it in your very molecules. You know what will happen if you slip. Then someone beside you says, “It’s okay. Jump. No harm will come to you.”
Can you imagine ever trusting anyone that much?
And yet, that is the essence of radical repentance. It is precisely what we are called on to do when we follow Jesus. Not to climb literal buildings and jump off, of course. But metaphorical ones? Ones with potential consequences that seem just as severe? Absolutely!
What else can we conclude when we hear the Master say:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?”
Matthew 6:25
The King James Version say to literally “Take no thought for your life….”
What? “Taking thought” about those things and a multitude of others is deeply ingrained in us by the conditioning of pain, fear and human persuasion. Satan offers a multitude of ways to “take thought” and control outcomes.
This is the enemy’s way, and it can’t be replaced by anything other than deep trust in God.
In fact, the entire Sermon on the Mount is an invitation to trust God enough to jump into a whole new way of thinking and being that looks idiotic, even suicidal, to anyone without the ability to trust. To them, obedience is unthinkable, impossible.
Here’s the tragic part: Millions of precious believers are locked in a struggle to obey without first cultivating trust. They’ve gone into battle alone and unarmed. Sadly, they are often surrounded at church by others who aren’t really interested in either trust or radical repentance, though they present a convincing illusion every Sunday. Compromise with the world’s way works just fine for them. Their influence adds another layer of confusion to those genuinely seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness.
Whether these people can be called believers at all is for the Lord to decide. If that seems overly harsh, then consider how Paul spoke about people who he perceived to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.
It is not our place to pronounce judgment, but it surely is our job to test the spirits, as John advised, to recognize deception when we see it and act accordingly. My prayer is that the Holy Spirit will guide every such person to the truth.
Today, I’m talking to that remnant of God’s people who truly hunger and thirst for righteousness, but are malnourished by the fast-food, feel-good gospel they hear and read about. They want to obey and they strive to comprehend what that means and how to do it. They fail because they haven’t yet seen the sequence: Trust, then obey.
But even now, we are getting ourselves. Trust, it turns out, is not the first item in the sequence. Without knowing this, we fail again, because we attempt blind trust, which is not what we are called to in Christ. Blind trust is not trust at all but is only gambling and hoping for the best.
Yes, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 that we live by faith and not by sight. But faith in what? In whom and why?
To succeed at trust and obedience you must know the answer to these questions. We are not called to trust in outcomes that always go our way if we believe. That is the “name-it-and-claim-it” prosperity gospel that would turn the Most High God into a genie in a bottle.
No, we are called to something invisible, eternal and infinitely more valuable.
“Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
John 1:12-13
Do you see that? We are invited by grace and faith into a loving relationship with the Most High God! It gets even better. Paul writes:
“So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.”
Romans 5:11 NLT
Are you kidding me? I get to be friends with the creator all things? Yes.
With Him as friend, I learn to trust Him, no matter my circumstances, no matter the outcome of trials I face, no matter the cost of repentance and following Him. I trust Him alone and that makes all the difference.
This leads us to ground we will cover in the next Dispatch. If this marvelous trust does not come first in the sequence that leads to radical repentance and the joy of abiding in Christ, then what does?
See you next time!
