“All I have seen teaches me to trust in the Creator for all I have not seen.”
R.W. Emerson
TRUST IS DANGEROUS
Trust is a dangerous thing. It means placing our welfare, our wellbeing, in the hands of another. Therefore, trust is only as safe as the thing or person we’re trusting in.
We must make the choice of whether to trust God or not. Indecision will cripple us and keep us bound in a prison of hopelessness. If you have a hard time trusting God for the future you can look to the past and gain strength.
If the person or thing has demonstrated trustworthiness in the past, we are comfortable trusting him or it for the future. If the person or thing has not demonstrated trustworthiness in the past, we are not comfortable trusting him or it in the future. It is as simple as that.
On a side note I recently read a book titled The Present by Spencer Johnson, an absolutly wonderful book. I would recommend that you read it. I will not divulge the secret of the book here but I will just recommend that you read this book.
KING SOLOMON
In Proverbs Solomon spends much of the time telling us the reults of wisdom and the results of foolishness. When we see how consistently foolishness produces pain and how consistently wisdom produces joy, there is every reason to trust God and follow his principles of wisdom in life.
When we have a healthy view of the fool and his foolishness we can clearly see that foolish living will only bring us pain and suffering, ultimately it will bring death to our life if we follow it.
THE EXAMPLE OF A CAR
Our trust in God is simply the same type of trust that we give to several other things in life every day. Let me give you an example:
Everyday I travel in my car, sometimes at speeds of 70 mph on the highways. This is a deadly thing to do given the statistics of people dying everyday in car accidents. Yet, I trust my car with my life. I trust in it’s power to get me where I need to go, I trust in the streering wheel to direct my car down the winding roads, and I trust in it’s brakes to stop me when I have an emergency.
Now some of you may read this and say my car is a piece of junk, I don’t trust it as far as I can throw it. To that I would ask, why do you not trust it?
I know your answer already. “because it is a piece of junk and has let me down before.” That is how we base our trust in God as well. We can see a great cloud of witnesses all around us that give us great reason to trust in God. The reason your car is not very dependable is either because it is old and time to be replaced, or it has not been treated in a good manner.
God never grows old and weary, and his hand is never too short to reach down and save us. But, we have to trust him to receive it.
AN EXERCISE IN FAITH
Grab a piece of paper, a pen, and plan on spending about 10-15 minutes on this exercise. Now don’t hit your back button already. This will be the most encouraging 15 minutes you can spend.
Find a quiet place where you can think without being disturbed. Answer the following three questions after thinking on them for a few minutes each. Don’t rush through it.
1. Think back to your earliest memory of God in your life. Maybe a sunday school class when you were a kid or maybe even a church when you were 21. Just think about your first encounter with God. Go back to your childhood and try to see a place where you heard about God. Write down as much detail as you can about this first encounter.
2. Think over your whole life and find 2-3 situations where God answered a prayer for you. Descibe as much detail about the answers as you can.
3. Think over your whole life and find 2-3 times where God did NOT answer your prayers. Try and find prayers that cannot be answered anymore. You want things that have no chance of being answered anymore. Be careful as you think about situations. Try and list other things that could have stopped your prayer from being answered.
CONCLUSION
Most people will wonder why I would ask someone to try and find 2-3 things that God has not done for them. Well, this challenges our mind to think. This kind of thinking usually helps us take a good look at why we feel the way we do about God. It helps us identify things that have happened in our life that has caused our faith to lessen.
If we look hard at these things we will most likely see something or someone that failed us rather than God failing us. But we must look at them from a clear vantage point. If we are still in the midst of the emotions tied to them our thinking is skewed.
People can hold onto prayers they did not feel were answered by God for a long time. This leads to our faith growing stagnant and weak. King David encouraged himself in the Lord. He knew what God had done in the past for him and this helped him trust God for the future. If God had worked in his life before than surely God would do it again.
1 Samuel 30:6
And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.
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