Growing up as a Christian kid I attended powerful conferences where vibrant speakers would implore us to “trust God!” As a young adult I still attended conferences, took home the same message and did my best to try to integrate it into my reality.
I was operating under the principle that if I wanted to get God to do anything for me I had to trust Him. Sometimes I gave lip service to a faith filled message. Sometimes it was genuine but most of the time it was broken.
I believed I had to trust God because I was a Christian.
Both God and I knew deep down I didn’t.
The Apostle Paul writes about the dilemma of our inner worlds brilliantly in his discourse on the human condition found in Romans chapter seven. In this passage he goes back and forth stating, “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.” This is how trusting God felt for me for a long time and I’ve found out I’m not alone.
Why is it so hard to trust God?
One key to this issue is found in uncovering the link between the relationship we had with our earthly fathers (or father figures) and how we see God.
We paint onto God the image our earthly father figures imprinted onto us.
This is what the truth of God is up against within us. For example, our souls ability to trust and connect is severely damaged by an experience of abandonment. If our father figure was not safe and trustworthy, we relive that when God as a Father says, “trust Me.”
Where someone else didn’t come through for us we have to learn He will. We are like wounded creatures who shrink away from Him until encounter after encounter leads us to His heart.
Trust deepens as we come to know His heart and character
God has always been a Father.
Jesus came to reveal that to us and become the way for us to be reconciled as sons and daughters.
“Father”, is the preferred way God wants to relate to us (Jer.3:19). The experience of salvation is largely a process of being re-parented under perfect love.
In Luke chapter 15 verses 11-32 we read a story Jesus tells us about a lost son who comes home to his father after a life lived recklessly. In this story the father runs out to his son as soon as he sees him coming home.
This story is an illustration of who our Father really is.
His love is the love we really need. When we are transformed by His truth and wrapped in His love we heal.
Trust is a byproduct of feeling safe and loved. We need to let Him love us and come home to Him in order to bring alive our trust in Him. He is so good and so deserving of trust.
Let His perfect love set free our ability to trust.
“We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in His love…” (1 John 4:16)
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