The theme of trust is something people in the Christian community think about and talk about all the time. The word, “Trust” appears more than 80 times throughout the Bible. All of us know what is trust, but if someone were to ask us what it is, how would we say it? Some say that to trust is to have a strong faith in something. When faith becomes stronger, it becomes trust. When someone tells us to have trust in something, it means we start by having faith in something, and grow from there. But what does that mean? If trusting is having faith in the reliability, truth, ability or strength in something, then trusting God is having faith in his reliability, his Word, his ability and his strength. But what does that mean???
Let’s look at some verses in the Bible that talk about trust.
Psalm 56:3
When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.
Psalm 118:8
It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.
Proverbs 29:25
The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.
John 14:1
Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.
But what does that mean? All of us say we know what it is to trust, but how will we know if we have done just that? If we did something, anything, how would we know if we have or if we have not just trusted God? This is important because if we are doing it all wrong, we want to correct ourselves, and make sure we are trusting God from here onward.
Even though I do not agree that when our faith becomes strong, our faith eventually becomes trust, I do think that trust is related to faith. Trust has something to do with faith. This may surprise you but when I think of trust and faith in the Bible, I think of them as quite separate things. I take a different approach. Let me explain.
Here on earth, we make decisions every day, large and small. Sometimes, we face decisions where there are two options. Other times, we face decisions where there are more than two, sometimes many more than two, options. But no matter if there are only two options, or many options, in my mind it boils down to basically two options. We can either do things God’s way. Or we can do things our way. If we decide to do something God’s way, that is trusting God. We have just trusted God. If we decide to do something our way, that is not trusting God. Rather, we have trusted in ourselves.
But trusting in God is more than merely saying to ourselves we have decided to do something God’s way. It is a bit more complicated than that. There are times we come to something in our lives that demand a decision. We take the time to think through the matter, to consider the different options, and we try our best to make the best decision. For argument’s sake, let us assume that after the thinking and considering, we decide the better option is not to do it God’s way. It is better to do it our way. But all the while we are saying to ourselves our way is the better way, we do something unexpectedly. We ultimately decide to do it God’s way. My friends, we have just trust God. Every time we decide to do something God’s way, even though we think our way is the better way, that is trusting God. It would not make the most sense, it would take longer to get where we want to go, it would set us back, it would be awkward for us and others, it would expose our weakness, or whatever is the reason, but in the end we decided to do it God’s way. We trusted God.