Trusting God Completely

I recently had the privilege of doing the devotional for my MOPS group.  Here is what the Lord put on my heart.  I hope it is a blessing to you all as well!

 

Taking the Plunge:  Trusting God Completely

We all know that as believers and followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to believe Him, to trust Him completely. 

Proverbs 3:5-6 is a very familiar to many.  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight.” 

Psalm 62:8 says “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.

We know we are called to trust God completely.  This is not really where the issue lies.  But knowing we are to trust Him and truly living this are two very different things.  So the question that I will focus on today is how?  How do we trust Him completely?  How do we trust Him with our children, our husbands, our families, the daily stresses of life, the big life altering challenges that we face?  How do we “trust in Him at all times”; how do we trust Him “with all of our heart”? 

First and foremost we must determine if God is truly trustworthy. 

Who is God?  What is He like?  We know from scripture that God is unchanging…He is immutable, His Character forever constant.  So who is He, and what is His Character? 

If you have never truly dug into this question before, I would encourage you to spend some time digging here for yourself.   Truly knowing who God is, believing it, knowing it in the very fabric of who you are is foundational.  It is not something that someone can tell you in a 15 minute MOPS devotional.  But when you seek Him, meditate on His Word, spend time with Him in prayer, you will find Him, you will learn His character.  In order to trust Him completely, you must first know who He is, because How can you trust someone that you do not know?  Let me tell you a little bit about who the Bible says God is…let me tell you about my God:

My God is all powerful, all knowing, ever present, unchanging, completely sovereign, wise, good, faithful, true, strong, victorious, gracious, perfectly just, loving, merciful, compassionate.  Most of all, my God is trustworthy.

So, who is your God?  Is He trustworthy?  If so, trust Him.  If not, then why are you wasting your time being a Christian?  If God is not trustworthy, then quit believing because all of this is for naught!  But if He is, then choose to trust Him.  Our faith in God must based on His character, not on our circumstances.

So how do we trust Him regardless of the circumstances?  We are going to dig deeper with 3 more points…

1.       Focusing on the Who and not the what

2.       Focusing on the Who and not the what if

3.       Focusing on the Who and not the why

First: Focusing on the Who and not the what

There are and always will be things in life that attempt to draw our eyes off of God and place them on the reality of our circumstances.  This can be especially true as a mom…a sick child, a rebellious child, a disobedient child, a needy child, a messy child…you get my drift.  It may be a stress at work, family problems, marital conflict, financial stress.  Life is messy and there will always be something,  The size of that something really doesn’t matter…it may be a big “what”, it may be a small “what”, but the tactic of the enemy is always to get your eyes off of the Who and onto the what.

But regardless of what our eyes may see, our minds may perceive, our senses may assess, we must know that the reality of God is greater and more real than anything we are going through.  There are many, many stories in scripture that teach us that God is bigger than our circumstances, and that regardless of the “what” we can trust Him.

In the Old Testament, for example, there is the story of the Exodus.  God’s people, enslaved to the Egyptians for 400 years, have just been radically set free by a mighty work of God.  But soon they find themselves backed up to the Red Sea with an angry Egyptian army hot on their trail.  Things look bad…things look very bad.  If there was ever a time to stop trusting God, the circumstances would tell the Israelites that this was it.  The reality of their circumstances said that they were all about to be slaughtered or taken back into slavery.  But, having history on our side, we know the end of this story.  In a grand finale sort of miracle, God, the great miracle worker, comes through and parts the Red Sea.  His people all walk across on dry land.  The Egyptian army, who try to follow, are then swallowed up by the sea …and hooray, God wins the day.  God’s ability and God’s reality was very different than the reality of their circumstances.  Moral of the story…trust Him, no matter how bad things look.    

Think also of the stories of: The Battle of Jerico where the army of God fell the impenetrable walls with a trumpet’s blast, the victory of Gideon’s tiny army of 300 over the much much larger Midianite army, God saving Judah from the unstoppable and cruel Assyrian army in the days of Hezekiah, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after 4 days in the grave, Peter walking on water with Jesus, Peter being miraculously set free from jail when he was facing certain death…and on and on the list goes.  In all of these and many more, God shows us that the reality of God is greater than the reality of our circumstances.  So rather than focusing on our circumstances, rather than focusing on the what, focus on the Who.  Can we be certain that God will always come through with the rescue, with the miracle…no.  But when we focus on the Who, we remember that no matter what we can trust Him because He is Good, He is Trustworthy, and He is faithful.   He will never leave us, and He will never forsake us. 

Secondly, we must focus on the Who and not the what if.

I think for me, this is one of the greatest challenges.  More than the what or they why, the “what if” can rouse the greatest amount of fear in me. 

What if something happens to my husband…this family cannot function without him?  Why hasn’t he called yet…maybe he got in an accident?  What if something happens to my son? What if he runs into the street or gets hit by a car in the parking lot...what if he gets sick with some kind of crazy disease?  What if something happens to both Ethan and I, what will happen to Eli?  One after the other, these terrifying thoughts assault me continually.  Sometimes, this can even be a very “spiritual” sounding attack.  Often times to me I will hear, “well, you know God’ll be with you and use it for good, but He is going to make you go through something really terrible.  A storm is coming, and you’ll come out stronger in the end, but it’s going to be bad so get ready.” 

And just like that, the enemy has stolen my joy and replaced it with fear.  He had taken my eyes off of the Who and focused them on the what if.  Can anyone else relate?  

The enemy knows that if he get our eyes off of a faithful and trustworthy God and onto the what if of the future, than he can cancel out our faith with fear.  He can render us ineffective in our Kingdom Work, He can steal our joy, our peace, and ruin our witness.  Think about it, he doesn’t even have to do anything but get us worrying about something that may or may not ever even happen and he has paralyzed us with fear.

I think what is at the core of this attack is the very same strategy that Satan used with Eve.  Essentially, he is challenging the very nature of God. 

Look at Genesis 3:1-10

3 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

² And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; ³ but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

⁴ Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. ⁵ For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.

⁸ And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

⁹ Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”

¹⁰ So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

·         The serpent challenges God’s word… verse 3- “Has God indeed said…?”

·         The serpent challenges His trustworthiness…verse 4- “You will surely not die…”

·         The serpent challenges God’s goodness…verse 5- “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…”

He gets Adam and Eve to buy into the lie that God is not really Good, He doesn’t have their best interest in mind, and they can’t really trust Him.  So rather than trusting God for who He is and what He said, they trust what they can see, feel, sense.  The enemy got them with the “what if.” “What if God is holding out of you?  You better not trust Him, your better trust yourself instead.”

And what was the result of believing this lie?  Fear.  Verse 10…”I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid…”

We must remember that regardless of our future circumstances, God is who He is and He does not change. 

·         Do you know that you know that God is Good?

·         Do you know with all of your heart that He is trustworthy and His Word is true?

·         If so, we must resolve that as the lyrics of the song Bless the Lord O My Soul say, “whatever may pass or whatever lies before me, let me be singing when the evening comes.”

The greatest power that I have found in overcoming the fear of the “what if” is praising the Who.  Rather than entertaining the lies of the enemy, give praise to the One to whom praise is due.  And when you take your eyes off of the “what if” and focus them rightly back on a gloriously loving God, you will be amazed at the peace, joy, and hope that immediately replace that fear…for there is no fear in love. (1 John 4:18) 

Which brings me to my last point…

Focusing on the Who and not the why.

If there is one thing that is clear in scripture, it is that trials and storms will come, and suffering is not only a part of life, it is a part of the Christian life.

So how do we reconcile this?  I know by now that you know where I am going…you must focus on who God is rather than trying to understand the why.  Trying to figure out why something happened may very well drive us crazy and we are not assured any answers.  Even if we do get answers, they hardly go toward healing our wounded hearts.  Understand is not satisfying or restorative. 

Rather than seeking out the why, we must seek out the Who.  There are many things that we will never understand on this side of Heaven.  

Why do some prayers for healing get answered and some don’t?  I don’t know.

Why do some people lose a spouse, lose children, or go through major traumas in life while others don’t?  I don’t know.

Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why are some nations plagued by such horrible death, disease, war, oppression? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that God is both sovereign…all powerful, in control…and that He is good. 

Even when we don’t understand Him, will we trust Him?  When we let go of our need to understand the why and seek out the Who, it is then that we find Him as healer.  Old Testament, New Testament, and the work of the Holy Spirit today all confirm that God’s very nature and heart love to heal.  He is the restorer, He makes all things new, He binds up the brokenhearted, He brings rejoicing in the morning.

So, on this day, my challenge to you is to take the plunge and choose to trust God completely, not because of your circumstances but because of who God is.  In doing so, your life will look radically different.  You will be marked, set aside, by your peace, your joy, your hope, and your faith regardless of the circumstances.  Let’s pray.