{"id":18,"date":"2009-10-26T09:09:35","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T01:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/?p=18"},"modified":"2009-10-26T14:58:48","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T06:58:48","slug":"trusting-in-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/archives\/18","title":{"rendered":"Trusting in God"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8216;Trust God&#8217; Two words. Simple &amp; easy (assuming you are confident in your perception of God &#8211; if you&#8217;re not then there are a lot more issues!) &#8211; For the sake of this blog post let&#8217;s assume that God is an all loving, all knowing perfect creator.<\/p>\n<p>Biblically, we are told we should trust God -\u00c2\u00a0Trust in the <span style=\"FONT-VARIANT: small-caps\">Lord<\/span> with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;\u00c2\u00a0in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. &#8211; Prov 3:5-6 (NIV). If you remove the idea of God from it, it also seems to make sense. If you had a friend who could prove to you that he was all knowing, all loving and he would give you money if you trusted him &#8211; would you? I would, and the money probably wouldn&#8217;t be necessary. The Bible also says\u00c2\u00a0And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him &#8211; Romans 8:28 (NIV) Smilarly, why would we not trust someone who is working for our good, it seems the logical, deserving and appropriate response.<\/p>\n<p>So, what then are the issues? I think the nature of God can be one hurdle. Even if we follow the premise above, I think there are two issues about the nature of God which can make us wary about trusting Him. (At this point I should note that when I say trust Him or trust God you should read trust Him unconditionally &#8211; not just when it suits us!) Firstly, God isn&#8217;t tangible &#8211; I&#8217;m convinced that without a doubt God exists, yet I think its almost part of human nature to inherently distrust something that we can&#8217;t touch or feel. I think the second issue only occurs sometimes, but this is the instinct of saying &#8216;It&#8217;s OK for you God, but you don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m going through, you don&#8217;t understand, how can I trust you in these circumstances&#8217;. I find it helpful at these point to remember that Jesus, was a man himself and he does know what we&#8217;re going through.<\/p>\n<p>I think there are also two extremes in trusting God. Obviously, there is never trusting God, which I have mostly covered above, this is, in my opinion unbiblical and unhealthy. I also think it is possilbe to use your &#8216;trust in God&#8217; as an excuse to do almost nothing. You can be completely passive and say I&#8217;m trusting God, if He wants me to do something I will, if He wants me to get somewhere I&#8217;ll get there if I put in the work or not. An example of this, and something that I have almost fallen into once or twice is I don&#8217;t need to study for exams, if God wants me to pass exams then I will, me studying won&#8217;t have any impact.<\/p>\n<p>To me, the verse that comes to mind is the verse Jesus quotes to Satan when he is being tempted:\u00c2\u00a0Do not test the <span style=\"FONT-VARIANT: small-caps\">Lord<\/span> your God &#8211; Deut 6:16 (NIV) This may not be the best verse, but I feel that it applies and it has helped me in the past. I\u00c2\u00a0believe\u00c2\u00a0that taking the second approach can often being doing exactly what Satan wants, I have no doubt he loves passive Christian who trust God, but never do anything abouth their faith &amp; trust.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, to finish on a positive note, whenver I do trust if God, things always work out. I think, again of Matthew where Peter walks on water to Jesus, the second he doubts, he begins to sink, Jesus response is\u00c2\u00a0<span style=\"COLOR: red\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">O you of <\/span><a name=\"27161x23\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">little <\/span><a name=\"27161x24\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">faith, why did you<\/span><\/span><span style=\"color: #000000;\"> <\/span><span style=\"COLOR: red\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">doubt?<\/span> &#8211; <\/span>Matt 14:31 (ESV) If we trust God, he will come through things will work. When we don&#8217;t trust him we might fail, but luckily Jesus is there to catch us when we fall, and even though there are countless times when I haven&#8217;t trusted, God doesn&#8217;t get suspicious of my trust when I repent and return.<\/p>\n<p>I know this is a long post, but I think Mark Schultz&#8217;s song When the Mountains Fall has a good chorus to quote in this respect:<\/p>\n<p><em>When the mountains fall, when the rivers rise,<br \/>\nSecurty crumbles before your eyes<br \/>\nThe one thing you know: in faith you&#8217;ll find<br \/>\nsomething to stand on or you will be taught to fly<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Edit: I almot forgot, a lot of this blog post came out of a discussion I had with a friend of mine, actually, 2 seperate convesation with 2 different friends, so I&#8217;m sure some of their thoughts and views are reflected here<\/p>\n<p><!--EndFragment--><!--EndFragment--><!--EndFragment--><!--EndFragment--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8216;Trust God&#8217; Two words. Simple &amp; easy (assuming you are confident in your perception of God &#8211; if you&#8217;re not then there are a lot more issues!) &#8211; For the sake of this blog post let&#8217;s assume that God is an all loving, all knowing perfect creator. Biblically, we are told we should trust God [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simon.treadgold.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}