Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make you righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun. Psalm 37:3-6 Do you have trust issues? Some people I know don’t. It seems everyone they come in contact with, from the minute they learn their name, they are able to trust them. I really don’t get that. Maybe it is just how it seems. Can you possibly trust that easily? I can’t! I grew up under the phrase that goes something like this: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.!” It’s probably fairly easy for you to guess that I’ve not had a lot of people that I could truly trust in my life growing up. Outside of my parents and grandparents.
I guess because of my disappointments for a long time, I wasn’t able to trust God either. Maybe you have felt the same way. Because of so many things that seemed to really go against me, I began to feel that I couldn’t trust God. I had heard the famous quote of John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” And somehow decided that God must love everyone but me. Because of that crazy thought I did not trust God.
Now that I am older, I have come to realize that it wasn’t God who was against me, I had to come to terms with the fact that a lot of the bad that I was experiencing was my own fault or a result of other people and not God. But still no trust. It was only when I became convinced that God truly does love me that my trust issues were resolved.
I believe in order to trust someone you have to believe that they love you or at the very least have your best interest in mind. That is the first step in trusting someone. The next step is making sure you have time for that person or in this case for God himself. I believe both, God loves us more than anyone else can possibly love us, and that He has our best interest in mind, and He wants to spend as much time with us as we give Him. Once I began trusting God with my life, I found that I wanted to spend much of my time praying or in conversation with him. It wasn’t long and I was enjoying every second of the time I had with God. The Psalmist above would call this “delighting in the Lord.”
Since I have learned to trust in the Lord, and delight in the Lord, it became very easy then to commit my way to the Lord. Literally meaning whatever he wants from me, I try to do. Oh, believe me, there are times when the old self comes in, and I have those tinges of trust issues with God, but I quickly look back at how faithful he has been to me, and say what Jehosophat once told God: “I don’t know what to do, but my eyes are on you.” The way I might put it is: I don’t know what to do Lord, but I’m going to continue to trust you, no matter what, because you have shown me your love, and that I can always trust you!
I hope as you read this today, you will do some soul searching on who you trust. I also hope that you will consider the King of King and Lord of Lords as someone to consider giving all of your trust to. If you do, just know one day your righteous reward will shine, and until then, you will be blessed. And the biggest blessing of course is He will be with you. So, Trust in the Lord, Delight in the Lord, and commit your way to the Lord, and you will feel and experience lots of wonderful things one of them being the peace that passes all understanding!
(Editor’s Note: This column is written by a different Littlefield pastor for the Leader-News each week. The columns are published on this page on Wednesdays.)