Wednesday's With Words-Can You Trust God?

 

 I am reading through Trusting God by Jerry Bridges.  It has been a very challenging book and has made me appreciate God's sovereignty and wrestle with some issues I have had with trusting God.  I am finding a wealth of information to write from every chapter in my quote book, and I have to remind myself not to copy entire chapters.  I have appreciated the book so much because Mr. Bridges is very real about the troubles we face as we go through life and does not in any way try to sugarcoat anything.  He says on pages 15-16:

"Yet, I acknowledge it often seems more difficult to trust God than to obey Him.  The moral will of God given to us in the Bible is rational and reasonable.  The circumstances in which we must trust God often appear irrational and inexplicable.  The law of God is readily recognized to be good for us, even when we don't want to obey it.  The circumstances of our lives frequently appear to be dreadful and grim or perhaps even calamitous and tragic.  Obeying God is worked out within well-define boundaries of God's revealed will.  Trusting God is worked out in an arena that has no boundaries.  We do not know the extent, the duration, or the frequency of the painful, adverse circumstances in which we must frequently trust God.  We are always coping with the unknown."

This rang so true for me because that is the crux of my struggle.  I want to trust God, but I don't know what is going to happen.  So what I really want is control.  I want to trust God as long as I am controlling what happens.  Control is just an illusion though.  We fragile humans have no idea what will happen in the next moment let alone have enough wisdom to work out the plan for our lives.  We can no more control the working out of our lives than the rising of the sun each or even our next heartbeat.  That is why I was able to take comfort and encouragement from this passage from page 16 also:

 "In order to trust God, we must always view our adverse circumstances through eyes of faith, not of sense.  And just as the faith of salvation comes through hearing the message of the gospel (see Romans 10:17), so the faith to trust God in adversity comes through the Word of God alone.  It is only in the Scriptures that we find an adequate view of God's relationship to and involvement in our painful circumstances.  It is only from the Scriptures, applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, that we receive the grace to trust God in adversity."

 I am not going to ever know what is coming next or what the purpose of each trial is (besides conforming me to the image of Christ (Romans 8:28-29), but I can know God through His Word and that is in what I take comfort.  It will not always be easy.  Life is hard and full of joy and pain, but I rest in the Lord and His promises.  I can rest in Him because He is sovereign and He knows the end of the plan.