Chapter Thirteen: Choosing to Trust God
CHOOSING TO TRUST GOD
When I am afraid, I will trust in you.
In God, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I will not be afraid.
What can mortal man do to me?
PSALM 56:3-4
While this book was being written, my first wife, who is now with the Lord, was found to have a large malignant tumor in the abdominal cavity. After eight weeks of radiation therapy and another month of waiting, the doctor ordered a CAT scan to determine if the tumor had been successfully resolved. The day before she was to learn the results of the CAT scan, my wife found herself apprehensive and anxious over the news she would hear the next day.
For some days she had been turning to Psalm 42:11 for assurance during this difficult time. The verse says,
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Turning to Psalm 42:11 that day, she said, “Lord, I choose not to be downcast, I choose not to be disturbed, I choose to put my hope in You.” She told me later, as she recounted this to me, that her feelings did not change immediately, but after a while they did. Her heart was calmed as she deliberately chose to trust God.
David, in his times of distress, also chose to trust God. In Psalm 56:3-4, our text for this chapter, David admitted he was afraid. David was not cocky or arrogant. Despite the fact that he was a warrior of great skill and courage, there were times when he was afraid. The heading of Psalm 56 indicates the occasion of David’s writing: “When the Philistines had seized him in Gath.” The historical narrative of that incident says that he “was very much afraid of Achish king of Gath” (1 Samuel 21:12).
But despite David’s fear, he said to God, “I will trust in you. . . . I will not be afraid.” Repeatedly in the psalms we find the determination to trust God—choosing to trust Him despite all appearances. David’s declaration in Psalm 23:4, “I will fear no evil,” is equivalent to “I will trust in God in the face of evil.” In Psalm 16:8 he says,
I have set the LORD always before me.
Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.
To set the Lord before me is to recognize His presence and His constant help, but this is something we must choose to do.
God is always with us. He has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). There is no question of His presence with us. But we must recognize His presence; we must set Him always before us. We must choose whether or not we will believe His promises of constant protection and care.
Margaret Clarkson, in speaking of how we may arrive at a place of acceptance of adversity in our lives, said, “Always it is initiated by an act of will on our part; we set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we feel.”[1]
For many years in my own pilgrimage of seeking to come to a place of trusting God at all times—I am still far from the end of the journey—I was a prisoner to my feelings. I mistakenly thought I could not trust God unless I felt like trusting Him (which I almost never did in times of adversity). Now I am learning that trusting God is first of all a matter of the will and is not dependent on my feelings. I choose to trust God, and my feelings eventually follow.
Having said that trusting God is first of all a matter of the will, let me qualify that statement to say that, first of all, it is a matter of knowledge. We must know that God is sovereign, wise, and loving—in all the ways we have come to see what those terms mean in previous chapters. But having been exposed to the knowledge of the truth, we must then choose whether to believe the truth about God, which He has revealed to us, or whether to follow our feelings. If we are to trust God, we must choose to believe His truth. We must say, “I will trust You though I do not feel like doing so.”
BE WILLING TO BELIEVE
To trust God in times of adversity is admittedly a hard thing to do. I do not mean to suggest in my emphasis on choosing to trust God that the choice is as easy as choosing whether or not I will go to the store, or even choosing whether or not I will do some sacrificial deed. Trusting God is a matter of faith, and faith is the fruit of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:22). Only the Holy Spirit can make His Word come alive in our hearts and create faith, but we can choose to look to Him to do that, or we can choose to be ruled by our feelings of anxiety or resentment or grief.
John Newton, author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” watched cancer slowly and painfully kill his wife over a period of many months. In recounting those days, John Newton said:
I believe it was about two or three months before her death, when I was walking up and down the room, offering disjointed prayers from a heart torn with distress, that a thought suddenly struck me, with unusual force, to this effect—“The promises of God must be true; surely the Lord will help me, if I am willing to be helped!” It occurred to me, that we are often led . . . [from an undue regard of our feelings], to indulge that unprofitable grief which both our duty and our peace require us to resist to the utmost of our power. I instantly said aloud, “Lord, I am helpless indeed, in myself, but I hope I am willing, without reserve, that thou shouldest help me.”[2]
John Newton was helped in a remarkable way. During those remaining months he tended to his usual duties as an Anglican minister and was able to say,
Through the whole of my painful trial, I attended all my stated and occasional services, as usual; and a stranger would scarcely have discovered, either by my words or looks, that I was in trouble. [The long affliction] did not prevent me from preaching a single sermon, and I preached on the day of her death. . . . I likewise preached three times while she lay dead in the house. . . . And after she was deposited in the vault, I preached her funeral sermon.[3]
How was John Newton helped? First he chose to be helped. He realized it was his duty to resist “to the utmost of our power” an inordinate amount of grief and distraction. He realized it was sinful to wallow in self-pity. Then he turned to the Lord, not even asking, but only indicating his willingness to be helped. Then he said, “I was not supported by lively sensible consolations, but by being enabled to realize to my mind some great and leading truths of the word of God.”[4] The Spirit of God helped him by making needed truths of Scripture alive to him. He chose to trust God, he turned to God in an attitude of dependence, and he was enabled to realize certain great truths of Scripture. Choice, prayer, and the Word of God were the crucial elements of his being helped to trust God.
The same David who said in Psalm 56:4, “In God I trust; I will not be afraid” said in Psalm 34:4, “I sought the LORD, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.” There is no conflict between saying, “I will not be afraid” and asking God to deliver us from our fears. David recognized it was his responsibility to choose to trust God but also that he was dependent upon the Lord for the ability to do it.
Whenever I teach on the subject of personal holiness, I always stress that we are responsible to obey the will of God, but that we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit for the enabling power to do it. The same principle applies in the realm of trusting God. We are responsible to trust Him in times of adversity, but we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit to enable us to do so.
Again, let me emphasize that trusting God does not mean we do not experience pain. It means we believe that God is at work through the occasion of our pain for our ultimate good. It means we work back through the Scriptures regarding His sovereignty, wisdom, and goodness and ask Him to use those Scriptures to bring peace and comfort to our hearts. It means, above all, that we do not sin against God by allowing distrustful and hard thoughts about Him to hold sway in our minds. It will often mean that we may have to say, “God I don’t understand, but I trust You.”
GOD IS TRUSTWORTHY
The whole idea of trusting God is, of course, based upon the fact that God is absolutely trustworthy. That is why we spent twelve chapters of this book studying the sovereignty, wisdom, and love of God. We must be firmly grounded in those scriptural truths if we are to trust Him.
We must also lay hold of some of the great promises of His constant care for us. One such promise we will do well to store up in our hearts is Hebrews 13:5: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” The Puritan preacher Thomas Lye remarked that in this passage the Greek has five negatives and may thus be rendered, “I will not, not leave thee; neither will I not, not forsake thee.”[5] Five times God emphasized to us that He will not forsake us. He wants us to firmly grasp the truth that whatever circumstances may indicate, we must believe, on the basis of His promise, that He has not forsaken us or left us to the mercy of those circumstances.
We may sometimes lose the sense of God’s presence and help, but we never lose them. Job, in his distress, could not find God. He said:
But if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
But he knows the way that I take;
when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.
JOB 23:8-10
In previous chapters we have seen lessons from some of Job’s struggles to trust God. Job apparently wavered, as we do, between trust and doubt. Here we see a strong affirmation of trust. He couldn’t find God anywhere. God had completely withdrawn from Job the comforting sense of His presence. But Job believed, though he couldn’t see Him, that God was watching over him and would bring him through that trial as purified gold.
You and I will sometimes have the same experience as Job—perhaps not in the same kind or intensity of sufferings—but in the seeming inability to find God anywhere. God will seem to hide Himself from us. Even the prophet Isaiah said to God on one occasion, “Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel” (Isaiah 45:15). We should learn from Job and Isaiah, so that we are not totally surprised and dismayed when, in the time of our distress, we can’t seem to find God. At these times we must cling to His bare but inviolate promise, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
The apostle Paul speaks of “God, who does not lie” (Titus 1:2). This is the God who has promised, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” He may hide Himself from our sense of His presence, but He never allows our adversities to hide us from Him. He may allow us to pass through the deep waters and the fire, but He will be with us in them (see Isaiah 43:2).
Because God will never leave you nor forsake you, you are invited in the words of Peter to “cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). This is a passage of Scripture that is very familiar to many of us, in fact it seems too familiar. Some passages of Scripture like this one seem so familiar, and consequently so elementary, that we often pass right by them. It is almost like knowing that one plus one equals two. That’s for first graders! But it also happens to be the most foundational truth in mathematics. Without that truth we couldn’t have algebra, calculus, and all higher forms of mathematics.
Let’s go back then and take a deeper look at 1 Peter 5:7. God cares for you! Not only will He never leave you—that’s the negative side of the promise—but He cares for you. He is not just there with you, He cares for you. His care is constant—not occasional or sporadic. His care is total—even the very hairs of your head are numbered. His care is sovereign—nothing can touch you that He does not allow. His care is infinitely wise and good so that again in the words of John Newton, “If it were possible for me to alter any part of his plan, I could only spoil it.”[6]
We must learn to cast our anxieties on Him. Dr. John Brown says of this verse, “The figurative expression ‘cast,’ not lay, seems to intimate that the duty enjoined is one that requires an effort; and experience tells us it is no easy matter to throw off the burden of carefulness.”[7] So we are back to the matter of choice. We must by an act of the will in dependence on the Holy Spirit say something such as, “Lord, I choose to cast off this anxiety onto You, but I cannot do this of myself. I will trust You by Your Spirit to enable me to, having cast my anxiety on You, not to take it back upon myself.”
Trust is not a passive state of mind. It is a vigorous act of the soul by which we choose to lay hold on the promises of God and cling to them despite the adversity that at times seeks to overwhelm us.
Several years ago I encountered a series of related difficulties within a few days. Not major calamities, but of a nature as to cause me great distress. At the outset, the verse Psalm 50:15 came to my mind, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.” I began to call upon God asking Him to deliver me, but it seemed the more I called, the more the difficulties came.
I began to wonder if God’s promises had any real meaning. Finally one day I said to God, “I will take You at Your Word. I will believe that in Your time and in Your way, You will deliver me.” The difficulties did not cease, but the peace of God did quiet my fears and anxieties. And then, in due time, God did deliver me from those troubles, and He did it in such a way that I knew He had done it. God’s promises are true. They cannot fail because He cannot lie. But, to realize the peace they are intended to give, we must choose to believe them. We must cast our anxieties upon Him.
PITFALLS IN TRUSTING
As difficult as it is to trust God in times of adversity, there are other times when it may be even more difficult to trust Him. These would be times when circumstances are going well, when, to use David’s expression, “The boundary lines have fallen . . . in pleasant places” (Psalm 16:6). During times of temporal blessings and prosperity, we are prone to put our trust in those blessings, or even worse, in ourselves as the providers of those blessings.
During times of prosperity and favorable circumstances, we show our trust in God by acknowledging Him as the provider of all those blessings. We have already seen that God caused the nation of Israel to hunger in the desert and then fed them with manna from heaven in order to teach them “that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
So how about us with our cupboards and refrigerators filled with food for tomorrow’s meals? We are just as dependent upon God as the Israelites were. God rained down manna for them each day. For us He may provide a regular paycheck and plenty of food at the supermarket ready for us to buy. He provided the Israelites’ food through a miracle. He provides our food through a long and complex chain of natural events in which His hand is visible only to the eye of faith. But it is still His provision just as much as was the manna from heaven.
How often are our expressions of thanksgiving at mealtimes hardly more than a perfunctory ritual with little genuine feeling? How often do we stop to acknowledge God’s hand of provision and to thank Him for other temporal blessings such as the clothes we wear, the house we live in, the car we drive, the health we enjoy? The extent to which we genuinely thank God for the blessings He does provide is an indicator of our trust in Him. We ought to be as earnest and frequent in our prayers of thanksgiving when the cupboard is full as we would be in our prayers of supplication if the cupboards were bare. That is the way we show our trust in times of prosperity and blessing.
Solomon said,
When times are good, be happy;
but when times are bad, consider:
God has made the one
as well as the other.
ECCLESIASTES 7:14
God makes the good times as well as the bad times. In adversity we tend to doubt God’s fatherly care, but in prosperity we tend to forget it. If we are to trust God, we must acknowledge our dependence upon Him at all times, good times as well as bad times.
Another pitfall we need to watch for is the tendency to trust in God’s instruments of provision rather than in God Himself. In the usual course of events in our lives, God provides for our needs through human means rather than directly. He provides for our financial needs through our vocations and gives us medical personnel to treat us when we are ill. But these human instruments are ultimately under the controlling hand of God. They succeed or prosper only to the extent God prospers them. We must be careful to look beyond the means and human instrumentalities to the God who uses them.
In Proverbs 18:10-11, there is a very interesting and instructive contrast drawn between the righteous and the rich. The passage says:
The name of the LORD is a strong tower;
the righteous run to it and are safe.
The wealth of the rich is their fortified city;
they imagine it an unscalable wall.
The contrast is not between the righteous and the rich in an absolute sense, as there are many people who are both righteous and wealthy. Rather we should see the contrast drawn between the two primary objects of man’s trust: God and money. Those who trust in the Lord are safe; while those who trust in their wealth only imagine they are safe.
There is a much wider principle for us in this passage. All of us tend to have our fortified cities. It may be an advanced college degree with its ticket to a guaranteed position or our insurance policies or our financial nest egg for retirement years. For our nation, it is our military build-up. Anything other than God Himself that we tend to trust in becomes our “fortified city” with its imagined unscalable walls.
This does not mean we are to disregard the usual means of supply God has provided. It means we must not trust in them. Earlier we saw that the psalmist said, “I do not trust in my bow” (Psalm 44:6), but he did not say, “I have thrown it away.” To put the use of ordinary means and a trust in God into proper perspective is to look in trust to God to use the means He has provided. At the time of this writing, my wife is experiencing some physical pain, possibly an outgrowth of her bout with cancer. While we are seeking an expert medical diagnosis as to the cause of the pain, we are looking to God that, according to His will, He will give wisdom and guidance to the doctors. Though we respect the medical skill of the physicians, we know God has given them that skill and that only He can prosper that skill in any given situation. So we respect and appreciate the doctors, but we trust in God.
Human means and instrumentalities can be depended upon only insofar as we recognize and honor God in them. Philip Bennett Power, a nineteenth-century Anglican minister, wrote, “We cannot expect God to prosper anything which intrudes itself into His place, and detracts from His honour. . . . [We must] make God the great object of our trust, even though the usual human instrumentality of help may be at hand.”[8]
We should also keep in mind that God is able to work with or without human means. Though He most often uses them, He is not dependent upon them. Furthermore, He will frequently use some means altogether different from that which we would have expected. Sometimes our prayers for deliverance from some particular strait are accompanied by faith to the extent we can foresee some predictable means of deliverance. But God is not dependent upon means that we can foresee. In fact, it seems from experience that God delights to surprise us by His ways of deliverance to remind us that our trust must be in Him and Him alone.
Still another pitfall to trusting God, which we are prone to fall into, is to turn to God in trust in the greater crisis experiences of life while seeking to work through the minor difficulties ourselves. A disposition to trust in ourselves is part of our sinful nature. It sometimes takes a major crisis, or at least a moderate one, to turn us toward the Lord. A mark of Christian maturity is to continually trust the Lord in the minutiae of daily life. If we learn to trust God in the minor adversities, we will be better prepared to trust Him in the major ones.
Quoting again from Philip Bennett Power:
The daily circumstances of life will afford us opportunities enough of glorifying God in Trust, without our waiting for any extraordinary calls upon our faith. Let us remember that the extraordinary circumstances of life are but few; that much of life may slip past without their occurrence; and that if we be not faithful and trusting in that which is little, we are not likely to be so in that which is great. . . . Let our trust be reared in the humble nursery of our own daily experience, with its ever recurring little wants, and trials, and sorrows; and then, when need be, it will come forth, to do such great things as are required of it.[9]
I once asked a dear saint of God who has experienced much adversity whether she found it as difficult to trust God in the minor difficulties of life as in the major ones. She replied that she found the minor ones more difficult. In times of major crisis she readily realized her utter dependence on God and quickly turned to Him, but she often tried to work through the more ordinary adversities herself. Let us learn from her experience and seek to trust God in the ordinary circumstances of life.
But whether the difficulty is major or minor, we must choose to trust God. We must learn to say with the psalmist, “When I am afraid, I will trust in you.”