Can God Trust Me.

Can God Trust Me?

2 Kings 5:1-18 1 Timothy 6:3-10 Text 2 Kings 5:18-28

The most important thing God has given you is your abitlity to choose your actions. Can God trust you with the ability to choose right from wrong free will. Can God trust at you at school this coming year to go where you are supposed to go and do what you’re supposed to do? Can God trust you at work to be honest and faithful? Can God trust you, when you’re at home and nobody knows what you’re doing? Can God trust you when you’re away on a trip and nobody knows you’re a Christian?

There’s a funny thing about us. We have a tendency to want God to trust us in the areas we have not yet been, rather than in the areas we already are. We treat God like we treated our parents. We asked our parents, "can I go to the dance, it will be over at 11:45". The parent says " why am I going to trust you to stay out until 11:45 when you didn’t make the 10:30 deadline I gave you last week. The response is, "yes I know I didn’t make it then, but this time it’s going to be different, I just know it will." But why.

The story is told of a farmer who believed God could trust him with just about anything. The country preacher said, "Jed you really love the Lord don’t you." Jed said, "of course I do preacher." The preacher said, "Jed if you had a 100 horses and God asked you for 50, would you give them to him?" "Of course I would." Lord bless him with a 100 horses. He said Jed what if you had 50 cows, and the Lord asked you for 25, could He trust you to give Him 25 cows? Lord bless him with 50 cows.

"Just as certain as the sun rises every morning he could." The preacher said, but Jed what if you had two hogs, and God asked you for one of them. Could the Lord count on you to give it? Jed said, "That ain’t no fair question. Preacher, you know I got two hogs.

How many of us have tried a similar snow job on the Lord. God you can trust me with anything? That’s one of Satan’s great lies. There are plenty of things we cannot be trusted with. Saul could not be trusted with seeing someone else being praised. Samson could not be trusted with women. Ananias & Sapphira could not be trusted with wealth. King Uzziah could not be trusted with power. If we are smart, all of us should recognize we cannot fully ourselves to handle any and all situations.

Some of us are still walking in the Lord today, not because we can handle any and all temptation, but because the Lord has not allowed some temptations to come our way. When God does allow temptations of any form to enter our paths, can God trust us to do the right thing, or do we first look to the right and then to the left to see if anyone else is looking?

No matter what sin we may commit, keep in mind, it’s not our cleverness that keeps it hidden, it’s the mercy of God which allows it to be kept out of sight. The Bible teaches us, our sin is always seeking a way to expose itself. Our sin becomes the devil’s dirt to make us ineffective for use in the kingdom of God.

Let’s look at a man that’s fairly well known in the Bible in 2 Kings 5: starting at verse 19. His name is mentioned 20 times in the Bible, and it means visionary. His name was Gehazi, and he was the servant of the great prophet Elisha. Gehazi was preparing for the ministry. You see his master Elisha had served as a servant to the prophet Elijah before he went into heaven. Gehazi is now in the former role of Elisha. He has a great future ahead of him. Gehazi was there when Elisha did many of his miracles, such as raising the Shunamite’s son from the dead.

Gehazi was the one we met in the Old Testament reading when Elijah sent him out to tell Naaman the Syrian to go and wash in the Jordan River. But Naaman did not show Elisha or Gehazi the kind of respect Gehazi felt they deserved after he got the message. Naaman had stormed away angry from Gehazi’s presence. When he did it, Gehazi allowed some bitterness and resentment into his heart.

God had trusted Gehazi with a message to bring healing to Naaman. Gehazi faithfully gave it. But then Gehazi allowed the actions of others to twist God’s opportunity for a blessing for his faithfulness, to become an opportunity for the devil to plant a seed. When Naaman got through telling Gehazi where he and Elisha could go, and how much cleaner the waters in his own country were compared to the Jordan River, Gehazi was probably pretty hot. He would have liked nothing better for God to have struck him dead. How dare he tell them how God ought to heal him. Just who did he think he was that he knew better than God what ought to be done.