Jesus said: “your acts of righteousness were…” what? What were the three acts of righteousness? Prayer; fasting; and giving alms to the poor (Tzedakah).
Faith, then, is a mixture of: “turning my head in order to face the one who can bear the burden”.
As I turn my head, to face the one who can bear the burden, I change my mind to think like Him. As I change my mind to think like Him, He regenerates my heart, and lets me do at some points, even greater things than Him.
Tzedakah - that is faith; and living a life like this.
It's really easy to make grace cheap, because there's a part of grace that's free - but it's not cheap. Are you forgiven of every sin? Jesus said (in red letters): “Every sin a person commits will be forgiven him” - every sin. Every sin a person commits, shall be forgiven him; except for unforgiveness, and the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. But does that mean that it's cheap? No, because Paul said it this way: “where sin abounds, grace abounds much more”. So you're going to have a hard time ever out-sinning grace.
Holiness is the best life. God might forgive sins; but people say: because God forgives sins, that means He's not punishing sin.
Let's just assume for a second, let's say: God doesn't punish sin. I'm not saying He doesn't, I'm just saying, let's assume for a second, an axiom that might be true. I don't think it is, but let's just say it is.
Even if God doesn't punish sin, sin has punishment built into it naturally. Sin has this thing called death, that's built into it by nature; so even if God takes His hand off the punishment of sin (even if God's not punishing sin any more), sin punishes you - just the natural consequences of what it is.
So the best life then, comes from a life that is built around: Tefillah, Teshuvah, Tzedakah; this is a daily thing. I love this definition of faith, because it's not a definition of faith that says: pray a prayer once, and you're in!
It's a definition of faith that says: “every day I can pick up my cross”. Every day I can turn my head, and face the one who bears the burden. Every day I need to change my mind, and make sure my mind is thinking like He does; and every day, this should be producing acts of righteousness.
It should produce something in life; and one of the things it produces is Trust. I want to talk to you, for the rest of this first session, about Trust.
We're going to talk about Leadership; and God's biggest idea: that one of the responsibilities we have as leaders, is to trust; and one of the trust factors, one of the things that trust is the antidote for, is temptation.
Years ago, this group of psychologists, they were doing a study. It was a longitudinal study, which is very rare, but they do it. What they do is: they take a group of people, and they study them over a long period of time; the same group of people, over a very long period of time. It's called a longitudinal study.
What they did back in 1965 is, they took a group of 6-year-olds, and they were going to study that same group from 6 to 36; so from 1965 to 1995 they were going to track their progress. You'd have to compensate people pretty well to do this, I would imagine, but here's what they did when they were six years old is, they put all of these kids in a room.
This is one of the questions they were asking: how does a kid's ability to delay gratification at age 6, translate to that same kid's ability to delay gratification at 36? So hey put homemade, piping-hot, chocolate-chip cookies in front of them! The kids came in, and sat around the table; and every one of them had a plate, with a piping-hot, still-smoking, freshly-homemade chocolate-chip cookie in front of them.
They were only given one set of instructions, because six year olds can't handle more than one set of instructions. The instruction was this: you cannot eat your cookie. Ooh!
If you eat your cookie, there will be no consequences. We're not going to be mad at you, but you will not get the prize.