Today in the Epistle reading from the Letter of the Holy Apostle Paul to the Romans, Paul describes the tremendous confidence that he has in the salvation that the Lord Jesus has worked for us. The meat of his argument is this: that our reliance is not on any earthly thing and no earthly thing can ultimately harm us, because we have become conformed to the image of the Son of God, Who died and rose from the dead. Our confidence is in our God, Who has taken our the matter of our salvation in hand and has worked it for us.
The main theme of the Book of Psalms, or the Psalter as it is otherwise known is confidence in God. Therein David the primary author of the Psalms says again and again that we should put our trust in God, not in ourselves and not in other things. For this reason, the Church uses the Psalms throughout the day and night in its worship, reinforcing this main theme again and again, many times each day, because temptation always tries to take away our trust. We can see that this is true especially in this culture in which we find ourselves, where future planning of various different kinds has become something of a religion. Retirement planning in particular has become a major industry that thrives upon the anxiety that people naturally fall into apart from God. We saw this last week in the reading from the Sermon on the Mount. There, the Lord Jesus spoke about those who were worrying and hand wringing, asking themselves "what are we to eat, what are we to drink, what are we to wear?" The Lord Jesus pointed us towards confidence in the goodness of the Father.
Beyond the Book of Psalms, the same message can be clearly seen throughout Scripture. Whenever God's people put their confidence in God, that trust was rewarded with an abundance of grace and blessing. But when God's people put their confidence in earthly things or false gods instead of God, their lives quickly went from bad to worse.
In the account of the Lord Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, the Lord becomes hungry after His forty days of fasting. Satan tempts the Lord to be concerned with food. The Lord Jesus replies to the temptation by quoting a verse spoken by the Prophet Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God." In Moses' discourse, spoken just before his death in the plains of Moab, before the Israelite armies crossed over the Jordan in the Promised Land, the prophet tells the people that confidence in God, and God alone, was the reason for the manna during the people's forty years of wandering in the desert. The manna was the people's "daily bread," which they received for their daily sustenance. It is this same confidence in God, which the Lord Jesus refers to in the prayer, which He taught us to be a model of all true prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread."
We Christians, conformed to Christ as we are, are called to be sustained first and foremost by grace. The Holy Apostle John the Theologian tells us that "grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." In Christ we have access to an abundance of grace, as the Akafist Hymn puts it "a table full-laden with appeasement." The grace of God is a feast for us from which we are never to fast. Unlike physical food, which harms us when moderation is exceeded, the life and love of God knows no moderation but is able to increase everlastingly, just as the Lord Jesus tells us: "I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly."
Today, our commemoration of all the saints of Rus'-Ukraine is an invitation to reconsider our orientation to the world. The saints of Rus' were like all the saints throughout history: they were sustained by the grace of God, not by reliance on earthly things. In the same way, we must become like them. We must change our appetites, so that we desire to feast at the table of God's abundance, divine grace poured out in answer to prayer, and not at the table of immoderation.
We should turn with confidence to God as often as possible, feasting at the table full-laden with His grace, especially when we feel our energy ebbing away and our temptations increasing.
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