The Process Of Trusting God

Hey you! Yes, you! Do you struggle with trusting God? You know who God is and the power that He has; yet, you still find it difficult to fully put your trust in Him? You say that you fully trust Him, but you find yourself playing a never ending game of tug of war with said trust. You only fully trust God with certain situations, and you doubt Him when it comes to other things! More often than not, you find it easy to trust Him with the small things; however, with the bigger things, specifically the unknowns, it seems to be the hardest to trust God. If you find yourself in any of the aforementioned trust issue scenarios, then you’re not alone. Just like you, I struggle with trusting God too, and I think I’ve found a few ways to aid in building that trust!

Just as it takes time, knowledge, effort, and communication to build trust in our human relationships, it takes the same, if not more work, to build trust with God. We must learn to trust God and know that it is a process! Similar to scholastic learning, we must take the time to learn the true nature of God in order to become familiar with Him, and subsequently build trust in  and with Him. We must spend time in worship, prayer, and scriptural study in order to better identify the voice of God. Just as we take the time to learn and understand the characteristics of our spouses or friends, we must learn the Lord’s characteristics; and the only way to do so is through reading His Word. If we don’t take the time to learn and study God’s Word, we won’t know His true nature, and we will ultimately have a hard time trusting Him! After all, how can we trust someone whom we don’t truly know?

As I fore-stated, building trust in any relationship takes time, knowledge, effort, and communication! We’ve covered the time and knowledge part, now let’s discuss the effort and communication! We cannot gain the knowledge if we are not first intentionally consistent with putting the effort into communing with God. When we hear the phrase, “communing with God”, most of us instantly think about prayer! Yes, prayer is one of the most important ways to commune with God. However, most of our communication with God is one sided. We pray and tell God what we need and want or ask for direction and guidance, but rarely do we stay still enough to give Him a chance to speak back to us! We don’t put forth the effort to actually spend quality time with God! Think about your natural relationships. If every conversation was only one sided and you’re doing all of the talking, how can you actually get to know the person and build trust with them? Consequently, the relationship would be fractured, because you aren’t putting the effort into listening. When we don’t put the effort into stilling ourselves long enough to listen to God, we miss what He has to say to us! Then, we begin to think that either God isn’t hearing us or that He’s forgotten about us; when in actuality, we’re not hearing Him due to the lack or nonexistence of effort and communication skills! The more effort you give to applying healthy communication habits with God, the more you will begin to know His voice and subsequently trust Him!

What I’m simply trying to say is that learning how to trust God is a process! It’s not something that happens overnight! We cannot be naive enough to believe that we can trust God without truly learning Him and His nature. Furthermore, we cannot think that our trust in God won’t be tested. God builds trust with us by testing us! He allows us to go through certain situations to build our trust in Him. Over time and circumstance, seeing the Lord’s deliverance and His established track record of making ways for us only increases our capacity to trust in Him as our Way-Maker, Miracle Worker, Promise Keeper, and Light in the Darkness. This capacity only becomes greater as we transition from learning to confidently knowing beyond a shadow of doubt that if He did it before, He’ll do it again. Same god right now. Same God back then. Nonetheless, we must put in the time and effort, gain the necessary knowledge, and communicate with God daily in order to trust Him. Trusting God is definitely a process; nevertheless, it’s a necessary and rewarding one! The more time and effort that we put into it, the more we get out of it! Then, we’ll be able to most assuredly sing the words to one of my favorite hymns, “Tis so Sweet”, and actually believe what we’re singing because we’ve learned to trust God!

https://youtu.be/IeaMxC03rpE?si=q3EerAYPfMqaEmtc