*This is the third in the series on Trusting God and is a repost from September 2010. If you have read it already, I hope that you will read it again, because the Lord had given me new insights and new things to write. I hope that it will bless you.
So...trusting God, take 3. How do we come to the place of total trust in God, in His goodness, in His faithfulness, in His love? It doesn't seem like the hard places of our lives would be where we learn to trust God, but they are. Why is that? Why did God allow Jezebel to threaten Elijah and send him running to the cave? Why was Abraham tested to the point of taking his son to be offered as a sacrifice to God? And why do we face our cave, our climb up the mountain ready to sacrifice that thing we love most? Abraham, Elijah, us--why does God take us through the various trials that we face? Is He just mean and gets a kick out of seeing us suffer? No! First and foremost, we must remember that God is good and He loves us beyond measure. I know what you're thinking, "Ok smarty pants--then why does He allow us to go through these trials?" I will answer that question with a story. When I started a fitness program with a personal trainer, he told me that in order to lose the most weight quickly, he needed to start me on a strength building program with weights to build muscle, and the muscles would then burn the fat as fuel. Now, can I tell you that this was not at all pleasant at first! Some of my weight routines required that I lift as much as 120 pounds and that was hard! In the first couple of weeks, I was so sore I hated the thought of going to the gym! As I continued to go, I began to look forward to my workout time. A few weeks more and I began to see definition in my muscles, my clothes began to fit better and I had more energy than ever! The muscles that I had begun to build were now using the stored fat as fuel. Even when I was doing simple tasks like walking the corridors of my school, my muscles were working, burning fat; the strenuous workouts that my trainer created for me were conditioning my body so that even when I wasn't actually working out, my newly formed muscles were working. So how does this relate to our learning to trust God? I believe that each time we face trials, we have one of two choices: trust God to bring us out or hide in the cave. If we decide, "I really don't know how God and I am a little afraid, but I am going to trust You," what we find is that God does come to where we are and gives us the help that we need. Every time we make this choice, we build our faith and trust in God. Just like I build muscles every time I workout, which in turn allows me to get stronger; every time we face a situation where we must trust God and only God, our faith and trust in Him grows stronger! Our trials create a track record by which we can trace the faithfulness of God, we in turn develop a stronger and more lasting faith. We must come to know that God does not do things the way that we think He should, we can't even imagine sometimes how God is going to respond to our place of trial, but we must know that our God can do anything. The Apostle Paul says it this way, "Now unto Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or imagine according to the power that works in us." What power? The power of the Living God in the person of the Holy Spirit. The scripture reminds us that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is working in us. How can we fail? How can we be destroyed? How can anything take us down when we have the power of the Eternal God working in us and for us? This power allows us to stand in the face of our "Jezebels" and "mountain climbs" knowing that our God loves us and He always has a plan for our lives, "to do us good and not evil and to give us a hope and a future." That being said--Let's keep pumping, building our faith physique..."One, I'll trust you Father, two, I'll trust you Father..."
Continue to fight the good fight of faith dearly loved ones!Evangelist Carolyn
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