It's All About Trust

I'm in a women's Bible study and we're going through the book, Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts, by Jerry Bridges. In the chapter about choosing to trust, he describes that most often we don't feel like trusting God, especially in adversity. That's how I've been most of my life. I've wanted to wait for my feelings to calm down before I trust God. In the height of the fear, it's more natural for me to trust my feelings - the fear itself - than to deny those powerful feelings and trust God.

But God doesn't work that way. He wants us to trust Him despite our feelings. Trust first and our feelings will follow. It is by trusting Him that the feelings of security, peace and calm come to us. I've heard this before.  I've experienced it and know it to be true. I've mostly heard it applied to love. If we don't feel like loving someone or doing loving acts for them, we should do them anyway and the feelings will follow. (I find praying for people greatly enlarges my feelings of love for them.) By doing a loving act for them, we fertilize the soil of our feelings and then the feelings of love emerge. Bridges points out it's the same with trusting God. In the midst of adversity we don't feel like trusting God. Our lives are upside down with anxiety and we feel like panicking, worrying, taking matters into our own hands, etc. But when we choose to trust Him, He brings peace to us. Trust first, feelings follow.

In the study guide, one of the questions is: "Why do you think our emotions work this way?"

While we could speed past this question with a superficial answer of "that's how God made us," if we slow down we find it's a very interesting question. Why would God make our emotions like that? Why would He design us so that our feelings follow our choices? I bumbled around in answering this for awhile, writing things like "because our feelings are unreliable, fickle, and have been affected by our sinful nature", but that doesn't really get at the why. Why did you make our emotions that way, God?

Then I was struck with a thought. There is a deeper reality - a truer truth - than our earthly experience. God's eternal spiritual world is truer than this earthly world we live in. There is a truer value system than the one we have from our finite earthly perspective. Things can look dismal in our earthly world, but the fact is God is in control and has a far weightier good intended for us than the scales of our present adversity would lead us to believe. Our loving God is trustworthy. When our feelings lie to us and the danger seems more real than His trustworthiness, we must trust Him.

And trusting God is what it's all about.

I think He made our emotions to follow our choices, as in the examples of loving others and trusting Him, because it makes trusting Him a necessity.

OK, so why would He want trusting Him to be a necessity?

I believe it's because we cannot receive His love without trusting Him. He has all this love for us but we cannot experience it (receive it) if we don't trust Him. Like a child or a puppy, if they don't trust you, they won't come near you. They will not experience your love for them unless they trust you. It doesn't matter how much love you have for them, they'll never know it unless they trust you. It's when they trust you that they can actually receive what you have and want to give them. It's the same with God. If we don't trust Him, we cannot experience His love, regardless of the fact that He is brimming over with love for us.

He loves us so much and longs for us to know His love, to receive His love. He lavishes me with His love everyday but I cannot feel it, know it, experience it, unless I trust Him.

I think God designed our feelings to follow our choices so that trusting Him would be a necessity in this life so that we can know and experience His deep love for us. God IS love. He wants to give us Himself through His great love for us.

It's all about trust because it's all about receiving His love because it's all about receiving HIM.