When does trust mean that we do nothing except let go and sit and wait for God? When does trust mean that we get active and make some plans and start to do things and allow God to empower and guide while we are in motion?
When I went on my yearlong mission back in 1986, one of the jobs I did was roofing. While installing a roof on a two story home, I slipped and started to fall off the roof. At the last moment my hand reached out and grabbed the gutter. In my terror, I yelled for help.
The foreman (one of my brothers on the mission) yelled back, “do you believe?”
Still very scared I answered a quick, “Yes!”
“How about faith, do you have faith?”
I really couldn’t believe he was asking me this while my life was in peril… “Yes” I screamed, “now help me!”
He said, “Then Let go!”
When I first started attending Church, I had a real problem with tithing because I had a lot of bills. I decided to speak with a Pastor about this. The pastor replied, "Paul, if I promise to make up the difference in your bills if you should fall short, do you think you could try tithing for just one month?"
"Sure” I stated, “if you promise to make up any shortage, I guess I could try tithing for one month."
"Now, what do you think of that," he replied. "You say you’d be willing to put your trust in a mere man like myself’ who possesses so little materially, but you couldn’t trust your Heavenly Father who owns the whole universe!"
In the first account, trust meant letting go and in the second, trust meant doing something and then trusting in God. Does trusting mean that we do nothing and wait on God, or does it mean that we seek God actively as we get moving along? We really experience the depth of God’s promises - in dangerous, uncomfortable, and unsafe situations.
Remember how the city of Jericho falls into the hands of the Israelites? They take the city simply by marching around it for seven days, and then God miraculously tears down the walls at the shout (yes, shout) of the Israelite army. God had a plan for the fall of Jericho; He knew how it was going to happen.
Before this all happened though, Joshua had sent a couple spies into the city. Secretly, meaning he did this on his own, this wasn’t part of God’s plan. They obviously weren’t going to need detailed reconnaissance on the military readiness of the people of Jericho. Why send the spies if God was going to do a miracle? Even worse, isn’t this whole spy thing contrary to the very nature of what it means to trust God – isn’t it an example of Joshua acting in his strength rather than in God’s?
Obviously God was not upset at Joshua, or there definitely would have been consequences for doing his own thing. Sometimes it is ok for us to get busy and do the things that make the most sense. I have known people who wanted to walk with God and be so dependent on Him that they would literally wake up in the morning and pray about which pair of socks to put on.
God gave us the ability to make decisions. We often take that and run with it and try to make all the decisions ourselves, without involving God in our daily lives, and that is wrong. But it is also wrong to never make decisions.
Trusting God means that we wait on Him for guidance and direction and leadership – and it also means that we get going in the direction He points us in.
Sometimes in life we get stuck. We get in a rut, we feel like we’re spinning our wheels, we’re discouraged and down and going nowhere. Are you stuck because you don’t know where to go, or are you stuck because you do know where to go but are waiting for something else to happen before heading that direction?
God has it under control. He knows the hurdles and the pitfalls and the obstacles, and He is bigger than all of them. If you are going in the direction He wants you to go in, trust Him to take care and let go.
Trusting God means waiting on Him for direction; it also means using the minds and gifts that He has given us to head in that direction. As long as we head in that direction in His strength and not in our own, as long as we continue to trust Him along the way and even let Him make mid-course corrections, we can be confident that we are to trust in Him and walk in His power and not our own.
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