05 We Must Learn to Trust God

Copyright © Michael A. Brown 2022

‘Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.’ (Prov. 3:5)

‘I will trust and not be afraid.’ (Isa. 12:2)

‘Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’ (Rom. 10:11)

To walk with God, we must learn to trust him

The call to learn to trust God in our circumstances and difficulties is a principle that is repeated many times in Scripture and is illustrated to us therein through the lives and experiences of many people.  This implies that this is a lesson that we also need to learn – if other generations of believers have had to learn this, then we need to learn it too.  Furthermore, if this lesson is repeated many times in Scripture for our learning (Rom. 15:4), then it means that we ourselves will probably only master the lesson of deep trust in God over the span of being allowed to go through several such experiences in life.  We need to be trained into trusting God.  It takes time to really learn this lesson and to drive it home.

Although the two concepts of faith and trust are related, yet trust is different to faith.  Trust means learning to keep hold of someone else’s hand as they guide you along a path that you yourself are not familiar with and which you might perhaps be finding difficult.  This underlines the need to develop implicit confidence that this other person knows the way and that they know what they are doing.  It means being willing to hand over the reins or the steering-wheel which determines the direction of your life’s journey, and agreeing not to be a back-seat driver, telling them where they should or should not be driving you.  We cannot (and will not be able to) walk with God, if we cannot trust him with the reins of our life: ‘Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.’ (Isa. 50:10).

So how will you respond?

The Israelites in the desert (in the books of Exodus and Numbers) responded in the way they did, perhaps because their expectations of what it meant to walk with God were also wrong.  As believers, we are called to walk with God through life, through ALL of life, however this turns out to be.  This means that we cannot expect that walking with God will mean that life for us will somehow become a bed of roses; this is simply not true.  The Israelites made the mistake of leaning on their own human understanding, and their wrong thinking led to wrong expectations and therefore also to wrong responses.  They did not live surrendered lives, and so their expectations were wrong and, when difficulties arose, they turned away from God in their hearts.

We need to adopt the perspective of learning and of being trained to trust God in and through our circumstances, rather than falling into the trap of thinking merely of our own comfort and simply wanting to be delivered from our difficulties.  It is through process that we learn the more valuable lessons involved in trusting God, and this is a major key to longer-term victory in our lives.

Somebody once made the point that difficulties can drive us deeper into the heart of God, or they can drive us away from him into bitterness, if we allow them to (cf. Ruth 1:20).  So, if we are to walk with God through the whole of our lives, then how we respond to practical daily life difficulties is a vital issue.

The stronger the wind blows, the greater the need for a tree to put down deeper roots.  Daily life circumstances are a call to exercise faith in God through the promises of his word.  Instead of complaining like the Israelites, Moses prayed and sought the Lord for his deliverance (see Ex. 15:25; 16:4,11; 17:4-6).  Similarly, on other occasions in their later history, the Israelites were exhorted by their kings and prophets to seek God in times of national crisis, and, as they did this in repentance and trust, God delivered them in answer to their prayers.

If we are to continue to walk with God through the whole of our lives, then God needs to be the God of the whole of our lives.  If our faith is to continue to the end, then it has to interface with the whole of our life, or else it will inevitably fail at some point.  Life can sometimes be tough, and often it is issues of daily living and relating which defeat people.  The problem is life itself, not God.  So we need to surrender ourselves to him and to agree with him that we will walk with him through ALL of life, that we will ‘do life’ with Jesus.  Then when difficulties come, as indeed they certainly will, we will learn to hold his hand, trust him and walk with him through them.

We need to trust God both IN and THROUGH our circumstances (Isa. 50:10).  Trusting God is a choice we make, based on the fact that we have understood that he is trustworthy.  He is not capricious; he has integrity and will indeed see us through.    Only this kind of right thinking, ‘trusting in the Lord with all our heart,’ will produce the right attitude and the right response in difficulties.  Then we do not stumble or get stuck at the hurdle of circumstances or unanswered questions.  We overcome by walking with him through them.

Seek strengthening grace

So, as we are going through our difficulties and trusting God, we need to resolve that we will seek God for his inward strengthening grace in our hearts, which will be sufficient for us (Heb. 4:16, 2 Cor. 12:9).  As we do this and then begin to experience his grace and peace inwardly in our hearts, we find that we overcome any negative heart attitudes and wrong responses that we have, together with any associated fear, worry and anxiety: ‘You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.  Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD, the LORD, is the Rock eternal.’ (Isa. 26:3-4, cf. Phil. 4:6-7).

We draw strength from God’s word as we read and meditate on it and from his presence as we seek him in prayer (Isa. 40:31).  We can meditate on the experiences of people in the Bible who trusted God in their circumstances, and draw hope and strength from their example.  The Holy Spirit may well give us specific words or promises from the word of God as we seek him prayerfully and, as we continue to stand on these promises and declare them over ourselves in faith, we find that the inward strength that we need in order to persevere and overcome rises up within us.  God’s strengthening grace and his promises are there for us specifically so that the process we are in does not become overly discouraging.

We can also find strength as we talk and pray with other believers who have learned this lesson and who can encourage, pray for and support us through our circumstances (Heb. 3:13).

If, however, we do not learn to seek God and to trust him, then we deprive ourselves of the very grace and strength that could be ours in our time of difficulty.  As a result, we simply condemn ourselves to having to cope with everything merely in our own human weakness which, of course, so often fails us in life’s most crucial times.  And no doubt this all then leaves us feeling angry, frustrated and defeated.

Growth through trusting God in circumstances

An important principle in the Scriptures is that God can work good out of difficult circumstances (Rom. 8:28).  If we respond positively with trust towards him and learn to depend on him, seeking his face, he can then use these very circumstances to draw us and keep us closer to himself, and he will sustain us with his grace and strength as we go through the difficult time.  He will be with us every step of the way.

The net result of all this, is that our ongoing relationship with God grows closer: we grow in faith and mature in our walk with God; we grow in our understanding of his word and ways; our roots grow deeper into him; we develop greater levels of trust and faith, and we often see and experience God working for us in answer to prayer.  This then encourages us to trust him the next time we go through difficulties.  We prove in experience that God really is a rock in times of trouble and difficulty.  We can also testify to other believers of how we have grown and how we have seen God working, and we can encourage them as they too face learning the same lesson in their own lives.  We are learning that God can indeed be trusted!