“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5)

To trust in the Lord with all our heart, means that we must wholly rely upon God’s promises, His wisdom, power and love to help us in every situation, every circumstance.

Human understanding is subject to error. God, on the other hand, sees and understands all, and He is the One we can lean on and trust.

I don’t know about you, but often times , (especially afterwards) I find that I am not always right. 

I like what Proverbs 14:12 reminds us of this: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (emphasis added). You see, Sin taints our understanding and leads us to destruction. That said should we be basing our understanding on what is partial, sinful, or destructive? I think not, especially when we have ready access, twenty four seven to God’s perfect understanding of our present and our future. Or should we trust in the God who is Omniscient (All knowing) and Omnipotent (All powerful)?

 In our best day, we honestly have no clue what is going to happen next. I remember an illustration by Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa that stuck in my head of God’s Omniscience and Omnipotence looked like.

He painted it like this, about our understanding and God’s understanding. He said, (paraphrase), ‘Imagine you’re at a parade, and as your watching it, you have understanding as far as what is coming by before you in a present time. God, however is living outside of time, and sees not just the parade coming by, but how the parade will finish. What a comfort that I don’t need to understand everything if I lean in to and trust God.

And since our perspectives change through time, our understanding at best is flawed.

God however does not change, (Read Malachi 3:6) Unlike us, our decisions can change at the drop of a hat; God’s are not capricious or evil.

Psalm 92:15 says that “The LORD is upright; He is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in Him.” In other words, we can trust God because He is not evil and will not lead us to destruction.

Instead, God leads us into paths of righteousness. (Read Psalm 23:3) God never lies. (Read Numbers 23:19 and Hebrews 6:18) And, God is faithful to keep His promises. (Read Psalm 89:34)

God’s plans are perfect, holy, and righteous, and He works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. (Read Romans 8:28).

In other words, God is Worthy of our trust.

So How do I begin trusting in God? What does that look like?

Trusting in the Lord begins by believing in Jesus for salvation. When we trust in Him, we acknowledge that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Read Acts 4:12)

We get to know God more as we spend time in prayer and Bible study. The more we know God, the more we will love Him. The more we love Him, the more we will trust in Him alone—with all our hearts—for wisdom, for decisions, for everything.

One of my favorite ‘go to’ verses are found in Jeremiah 17:7-8 and describes benefits that come to the person who trusts the Lord with all his heart:

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, And whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.

Have you ever looked around at your life and assumed that nothing is ever going to get better? That the hard things will just get harder and the good things might disappear? That there’s no point in hoping anymore because it will only lead to disappointment? I have.

12 years ago, my new bride and I went from Camelot at our wedding to my diagnosis of cancer a few weeks after our honeymoon.

We were in an excruciating part of the story God had prepared for us both. We felt like it was an unending nightmare, from the emergency room where I was minutes away of being poisoned by a ruptured tumor, to surgery, to recovery and then to rounds and rounds of chemotherapy. In fact, it was probably the hardest year of our lives. Everything we deemed “good and normal” came tumbling down.

In the middle, all we could see was what had gone wrong. What God had taken from us. What seemed irredeemable and broken. I felt that I had lost everything. And I didn’t believe that God would do anything through me or through my circumstances. My bride, my life was a mess, and my body was failing. How could anything good ever come out of this unimaginable pain?

We are all works in progress. And we are all in the middle of our stories. We don’t know how things will turn out. We do know, however, that nothing is impossible with God. (Read Luke 1:37). He “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).

But at the same time, our stories may not look the way we planned. Nothing may look like it’s tied up with a bow. We may not see our kids return to Christ, our marriages restored, or our diseases cured. But we can trust that God is in the story. And He is the author, orchestrating the tiniest details for our final good. We may not understand why things happen, but we can be certain that God has a glorious purpose to the pain we are enduring.

Last June, after five years more of CT scans and various other quarterly tests, I was pronounced “cancer free” and in it all through the trial, through the testing we look back and see how God kept His Word.

We’re still in the middle of our story. And so are you. While none of us know the joys and trials we have yet to encounter, we do know that Jesus will be with us through them all.

And we can be confident that one day, after the last chapter is written, our story will be tied up with a bow in the most glorious way possible.

“Joni Eareckson Tada is celebrating her fifty second year in a wheelchair. Does celebrating seem the wrong word? It certainly would have to Joni as a 17-year-old desperately wanting to end her life.

And yet looking back, one can see her rapid rise in her character growth and the countless lives — my family’s included — God has touched through Joni.

Scripture teaches us that in our sovereign God’s loving hands, no suffering we face is ever purposeless, no matter how it seems at the moment.

How many times does God have a purpose in events that seem senseless when they happen?

Within our family we see ages ranging from late seventies to two, from various diseases from rheumatoid arthritis to multiple cases of cancer. In the cases of cancer, God chose to use these diseases in building a stronger foundation that the ones delivered could help build up those others facing or going to be facing character building challenges. In it all He has brought a unity in faith and support among each other, building and encouraging each other through prayer and allowing Jesus to be seen within the circumstances.

God has led all of us to trust Him even more as we know by who He has been in and through our individual trials, seeing with our own eyes His hands at work. We praise His Name!

I’m sure there are many of us who live in these bodies with some form of physical limitation at least in comparison to the view and perspective the world, our culture places on being “perfectly healthy”. There times and seasons when some days we feel physically good, mentally weak, mentally weak and spiritually strong, and yet it’s in the seasons of mentally weak when we are drawn closest in developing our relationship with our loving Father.

In Romans 8:28 we find one of the most arresting statements in Scripture: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.”

What a comfort to know that in all our groaning, all our doubt, that God’s concern is conforming His children to Christ’s image. And He does it through the challenging circumstances of our lives to develop our Christlikeness.

In the Old Testament, Joseph said to his brothers (who’d sold him into slavery), “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20).

“God meant it for good”

God didn’t just make the best of a bad situation; rather, fully aware of what Joseph’s brothers would do, and freely permitting their sin, God INTENDED a bad situation be used for good.

He did it in accordance with His perfect plan from eternity past. God’s children have “been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11).

In other words, God, our loving Father has allowed various trials within and without our lives for our good, not bad, that we could see His hand of deliverance aimed at bringing us to a place where we can clearly see the difference between our own strength (or the lack of it, especially when we think we need it) and the continuous resource of God’s strength at the exact time He sees we need it, and by so doing leading us to His loving purpose; that we become more like His Son.

Do you believe the promise of Romans 8:28? Try taking a moment with pen and paper and Identify the worst things that have happened to you, and then ask yourself if you trust God to use those things for your good.

I think you’ll find that the Bible asserts that He will.

Faith is believing today what one day, in retrospect, we will see to have been true all along.

Let’s not wait until five minutes after we die to trust that God always has a point. Let’s learn to do it here and now, eyes locked on our gracious, Sovereign, and ever-purposeful Redeemer

Those who trust in the Lord have hope and need not fear difficulty or calamity., because they know who is in control of their lives and that He is fully good and true. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” What a wonderful thing it is to trust in God with all your heart and to have Him direct your paths!

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