Saints and Cynics

All your allies have driven you to your border; those at peace with you have deceived you; they have prevailed against you; those who eat your bread have set a trap beneath you— you have no understanding. -- Obadiah 1:7

We want to trust the people, believing that our friends and family have our best interests at heart, as they sometimes do.  The only Person we can trust fully and completely without exception, without reservation is God.  He is enough.  If I trust God then the weaknesses and betrayals of allies and companions can be handed over to Him.  It is a great comfort and takes the pressure off us, as well as off our friends.

Relationships suffer when one or more of the parties ask others in the relationship to be as strong, dependable, steadfast, and giving as God is.  This is especially true if the person so depended upon doesn’t have the right connection to the Lord.  We can be a channel of God’s love, mercy, power, and faithfulness, but we can never be a source.

By submitting ourselves to God we can transcend the limitations of our self-life.  The self-life of even the best of us will fall short in satisfying the yearnings of another’s heart.  In ourselves, we will disappoint, stumble, fail, and sometimes fall.  But in Christ, my heart becomes a funnel for the love of God, and the more I let out the more He will pour in. 

If we are living life according to the flesh, more often than not, we are going to be caught up in dramas, schemes, deception, and treachery.  People we thought we knew, thought we could rely on, will let us down, turn on us, stab us in the back.  As a natural cynic, I am never terribly surprised by this, but I would rather be a born-from-above “cynic” like Jesus: 

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.  But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:23-25).

Jesus knew that we can’t be trusted, that we have our own agendas and ulterior motives, yet He never let that stop Him from doing good and doing what was best for each of us.  It never made Him stop loving us.  Maybe it made Him love us more for He saw how alone and helpless we are apart from Him.  He knew His Father would take care of Him.  He wants us to know it, too, and to follow in His path of pouring our lives out for love.