Where is your trust?
"How can I rest in You and be at peace when storms keep coming my way, God? It seems like every time I settle down another one comes and I'm on my feet again." That question was one that I asked God this morning.Sometimes, I pull out my journal and instead of closing my eyes to pray, I write a prayer to God. Mainly because it is so hard to find the words when I'm just talking. At the end of the prayer, I closed the journal, opened my bible to Jeremiah and began to read. I began in chapter 16 and read through to 17.
A passage grabbed my attention that I had underlined in purple and gold on one or two of my previous read-through's.
"This is what the Lord says: 'Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the Lord. They are like stunted shrubs in the desert, with no hope for the future. They will live in the barren wilderness in an uninhabited salty land." (Jer. 17:5)
Why do we have such a hard time being at rest when hard times happen? Here is what we tend to do with tough situations:
1. Putting your trust in man- Sometimes the first place you and I turn when things go wrong is another person. We run to a friend, mom or dad, sister or brother, someone we respect and trust, and ask for their advice. That is not a bad thing to do, but it shouldn't be the first thing we do!
2. Relying on human strength- Often, I find myself trying to be strong and last through a tough situation. I try to figure out what I can do, and then try to do it. Maybe its a problem I encounter that I think I have the ability to fix, or maybe I've already tried to fix it and it isn't working and I'm plain frustrated... But it's human strength I'm trusting in, not heavenly strength that comes from God.
3. Turning your heart away from the Lord- And then, after these two things don't work, the frustration mounts, and we blame God, and think that He could have been doing a better job, when all the while, we weren't even looking to Him to do anything at all about it!
The results are that we won't bear any fruit, we don't have any hope about the future, and our life loses it's true meaning.... Read the verse again. Could all of that be because God wished it upon us? No way! It is because we were basically cutting off the supply of help that He would've sent, had we done something very important...
What brings God's blessing?
1. Trusting in the Lord- Believing Him capable, seeing Him to be bigger than all of our circumstances, abandoning all other resources. He's at the center, before our eyes, and we trust Him, taking Him at His word, believing His promises.
2. Make the Lord our hope- It doesn't matter how hopeless life itself becomes, He is our hope. He stays and endures through every storm. We run to Him for solace, seeing Him as the Ray of Sunshine on a stormy day, the Anchor when waves beat upon us, the Fortress when enemy forces attack. He is our only hope of life and survival.
3. Make the Lord our confidence- He becomes the reason we take yet another step in life forward, upward, becoming more and more like Christ, on the offense against the enemy. We can keep walking, keep fighting, because He is our strength that holds us up, He is the one all our chance of victory depends on. Because of Him, we know we will win. It is no longer a mere possibility, but a promise of victory. He is our promise of victory!
...The result is that we are fruitful in every single circumstance. Life's ups and downs don't throw us off course, threats don't worry us. All because He becomes the reason we keep going, He becomes All!
But, Christian, so many of us try to look like we are doing that all the time, but God wants your HEART! The next couple of verses strongly state this:
"'The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? But I, the Lord, search all hearts and examine secret motives. I give all people due rewards, according to what their actions deserve.'" (Jer. 17:9-10)
Your outward appearance doesn't cut it with God! He searches our hearts, looking for right motives. Earnestly desiring that we love Him unreservedly. Because if we don't, when those trials and hard circumstances come, the first to go is that "good" appearance we had. Yes, your outward actions matter to God, but they don't always show what God sees. God sees all the time where our heart really is, and it's those hard times, those trials, those difficult storms, that reveal where our hearts really are.
Are we making the Lord our hope and confidence? Are we trusting only Him, abandoning all other resources? Is He your hope?
Give Him your all, worship Him alone, and you will find, as I have, that in Him is all the rest and peace we need for every circumstance.
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