Our Choices Matter

Trust Decides Everything

Rom 8:29 - 30, Gen 2:16-17, Gen 15:1-6, Deut 30:16-20, John 3:16, Acts 16:31

October 4, 2002

I. When people decide to accept Jesus as their savior they come to a point in there lives where they are ready to put their trust in God instead of themselves.

A. When any of us accept Jesus as the only way that we can be right with God we are turning at least a certain amount of control in our lives over to him.

B. And most of the time there is a feeling of relief because we realize that God loves us, and we understand in one way or another that if God loves us that much then He’s going to do what is best for us.

C. The problem is that for some reason the longer we are a Christian and the more the new wears off the relationship we start to develop an "I" problem.

D. It happens in marriage too. The couple is in love and they can see no wrong in the other person, and everything is new, and great and then reality sets in, and they realize that life is going to go on.

E. The fact that if you live on love you will starve to death sets in, because love doesn’t buy food or pay bills, and responsibility gets in the way of things.

F. The daily grind takes its toll and if you are not careful the relationship begins to be routine. The excitement of it all gets lost in the day to day race to get all the things done that have to be done.

G. And then if you’re not careful you can begin to feel that the person that used to make you so happy is trying to keep happiness from you, and you start having an "I" problem.

H. I don’t ever get to.....I wish you would ... all I do is work all the time... I need more time to do what I want...and you can fill in the blanks, but I starts getting in the way a lot, and suddenly that person that you loved enough to make a relationship commitment to becomes an obstacle to your happiness.

I. You start to see them as the enemy. They are the one that is keeping you from doing and having what you want. They don’t understand you at all.

J. And, you start saying I, I, I, I...I am not going to let you keep me from having life the way a want it. I am not going to let you run my life. I am not going to let you keep me from having what I want.

K. And, if you are not careful this person that brought you so much joy can become the enemy, and a lot of times what ends up happening is what "I" want becomes and obsession and you decide to abandon the relationship, because you want more control in you own life.

II. Used to wonder why God made men and women so dependant on each other and so different. I used to wonder if God didn’t create man and woman and put them together in the garden and then look over at the Angels and say, watch this its gonna to be a hoot.

A. But I realized one day why God makes us so different and dependent on each other, why we have to work so hard at times to keep the relationship between us what it should be.

B. The reason that I came to was the working on our relationships with other people and especially with our spouse is training for working on our relationship with him.

C. You see we get the same "I" problem in our relationship with God that we get in our relationships with other people.

D. When we become a Christian usually it is because we realize that there is more to God and more to life than what we are experiencing.

E. And, we begin to question things that we have lived by, and somewhere in the process we realize that God loves us more than we ever imagined and that we need God to make the difference in our lives that nothing else can make.

F. So, we get honest with God, and find out that God really does love us more than we could ever know, and that there is more to life than we ever knew.

G. God is great, and we are closer to him than we have ever been before. We know that he cares for us, provides for us, and it is great.

H. But like any other relationship, if we don’t continue to work on the trust, and closeness in the relationship it is easy for the new to wear off, and somehow this God that we knew loves us so much can become the God that is trying to keep all these good things from us.