Why?

And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

1 John 5:3b-5 NIV

I said in the previous devotion that it is trust in a trustworthy God that enables a man (or a woman) to become a trustworthy person. When we know that we can trust God to supply our needs, we can be no longer ruled by our desires, and instead think of the needs and wants of others. That is to be trustworthy.

But someone may respond, “I don’t need God to be trustworthy. I can be a person of integrity and fairness, a person of self-denying benevolence and kindness, without any recourse to a God theory.” Yes, you can, but why would you? Perhaps you might say that it is because society works better when people live like that, and you want to contribute to a wholesome society.

But let me ask how long you will continue to behave in those ways, when it begins to appear that that kind of unselfish behavior is, in fact, making your individual life more difficult than the lives of those around you, which it almost certainly will. You won’t be as rich; you won’t possess as much as they do, and you won’t achieve the positions of power, influence, and authority that they do. Why should you prove yourself trustworthy, when it does not “pay off?”

The only satisfactory answer to that question is that it will “pay off” in the long term. If you live for God now, you will live with God for all eternity. If you deny yourself now, you will be rewarded with all that truly matters forever. Can I prove that? No. But is there good reason to believe that it is so? Yes. There is reason in the testimony of millions of Christians who have lived (and died) in the faith across the centuries. There is reason to believe in the way in which the Christian faith makes sense of life when nothing else does. There is reason to believe in the confirming whisper of the Spirit in heart of the believer. Step out in faith and know!