Good evening lovely people! This is a blog post I am really excited about because it applies to every single aspect of our lives all at once.
This week, I have been thinking a lot about how much I have yet to learn about trusting God.
Take a second and ask yourself when the last time was that you and I sat down and said “God, I know your plan for me is much better than anything else I could ever come up with so I want you to take over. Don’t let my plan get in the way but let your will be done”.
I haven’t said that in a loooong time.
Here’s the thing, I tend to go through these cycles where I trust God with everything and I feel really great because I’m at peace with God.
And then, I start thinking.
My brain says, “If you trust God, you don’t have any control about where you end up. What if you can’t afford it? What if you don’t want to do whatever He says? What if my friends think I’m crazy?”
I start by trusting that God will take care of us and then quickly default to my normal, control-freak self.
Cool.
Just the other day, Ethan and I were talking about our future and we both agreed that it holds a lot of uncertainty. To a degree, I was okay with that. I was comforted by the fact that as long as we continue to worship God together it won’t matter what obstacles try to block our path.
We talked and talked about what our dreams were and what we thought God’s next steps for us might be. We ended the conversation in the exact same place we started - not knowing what God’s future held.
As we talked, I came to this peaceful place where I knew beyond the shadow of any doubts that as long as Ethan and I were together worshipping God, it wouldn’t matter where we were.
The next day, I started thinking.
As a planner, I thought about whether or not we will be able to afford it (because God’s plans always lead us out of our price range - right?! Lol wrong!). I thought about the future I had sketched in my head - what could possibly be better than Fantasy Land?!
Let me show you a snippet from my journal on the day after Ethan and I had our inconclusive conversation:
“...All I can say is that I have seen God working up to this for a while now. I have been reading my bible a lot lately. I started in Judges and I’m now in 1 Kings. In Judges, the Israelites trust God and everything goes well for them. It’s only when they don’t trust God that everything starts going wrong. Then, Ruth completely uprooted her life and trusted God to take care of her - which He did. Then, David is anointed by Samuel even though there is another king, Saul, who is literally chasing David all over the countryside trying to kill him - and God delivered David, because David trusted and honored God.
Why did God have me reading THOSE passages in the weeks leading up to this indefinable declaration by Ethan and have me taking my leaps of faith on the very DAY that Ethan talks to me about this? God has been preparing me for this for a long time and I want to trust him...the idea scares me if I think about it too much. I think the reason for this fear is that I don’t have a next step. I need a checklist of things for me to do but I don’t have that. For that next step, we just have to pray that God opens up a door...That thought makes me nervous but I always remember that if I trust in God, he will get us through and I have confidence in that...”
I often had a lot of free time while at work so I found myself reading the Old Testament. I started in Judges and read all the way through 2 Samuel in about three days at work. I saw so many patterns that I never really noticed when I had just read a few chapters at a time.
It started to become so obvious just how much the people in the Bible trusted God and just how much He took care of them in ways they could never have planned for.
Let me give you some specific examples:
The Israelites (the book of Judges)
The Israelites were becoming more and more like the pagan countries every day. They made idols and worshiped other gods while also worshipping the LORD. Before Joshua died, he urged them to repent. They made a covenant with God in Joshua 24:14-28 saying that they would worship only the LORD. When Joshua died, they slowly started becoming more and more like the other countries were: pagan, evil countries.
Eventually, after years of falling away from the LORD’s commands, they called on the LORD to save them because they were about to get slaughtered in a war. The LORD delivered them and sent the first judge to rule over them, Othniel. Othniel was to direct them in the ways the LORD wanted the people to go.
As we read this book we begin to see the Israelites fall into a cyclical pattern. See, the Israelites would worship the LORD while they had a judge and they would obey the LORD’s commands. However, when the current judge died, the Israelites would quickly revert to their old, sinful ways until their lives were threatened by another country. Then, they would cry out to the LORD to save them, the LORD would send a judge and the Israelites would live according to the ways of the LORD until that judge died. And so on.
This happened for several generations.
This whole book is one of my favorite examples of trust that can be found in the entire bible. The reason for that is because I am 100% positive that if I were to write out everything that I have done, the cycles of my faithfulness (and unfaithfulness) to God, it would look a lot like that.
Obey. Disobey. Pray. Obey. Disobey. Pray.
When the Israelites were obeying God’s commands and forsaking all other idols, they prospered in the land; the LORD went with them in battle and they were successful in claiming and maintaining territories that the LORD guided them to. However, whenever the Israelites did not obey God’s commands, the whole land suffered. It wasn’t until they were about to be slaughtered by an enemy territory’s army that they finally turned back to the LORD’S commandments.
Like I was saying earlier, it only takes one string of thoughts for me to completely spiral into a pattern of self-reliance and that leads to my disassociation with the One who holds every second of my future in His hands.
2. Ruth (the book of Ruth)
I have always loved the story of Ruth. Just listen:
Ruth and her husband lived close to her brother-in-law and his wife and her mother-in-law (her father-in-law had already died). After about ten years of marriage, Ruth’s husband and her brother-in-law both died. Ruth, her sister-in-law Orpah, and her mother-in-law Naomi are left with no husbands. Did I mention that this was all happening during a famine?
Important note: During this time, women were considered shameful if they were left alone with no husband. This meant that if a woman’s husband died, she needed a Kinsman Redeemer. A kinsman redeemer was a jewish law put in place so that if a man died, his brother was able to marry the widowed woman in order to help her produce a son, an heir to their property and someone to take care of his mother and father in their old age. In Naomi’s case, she had two grown sons who were more than capable of taking care of her so she was not required, by custom, to remarry. It wasn’t until her two sons died that the real trouble arose. Because both of her sons were now gone and she had no other son to offer to Ruth and Orpah as a redeemer, Naomi told Ruth and Orpah to return to their homelands, “to their mothers home”(1:8).
Orpah returned to her mother’s home. Ruth stayed with Naomi.
“16 But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” 18 And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.” (Ruth 1:16-18, emphasis added)
Ruth and Naomi trusted God to take care of them as they traveled back to Naomi’s hometown, Bethlehem. Ruth began working in a man’s field. That man was a distant relative of Naomi’s deceased husband.
Because Boaz was a distant relative, he was able to be a kinsman redeemer for Ruth and he did so by marrying her.
Think about how scary it would have been to be in Ruth and Naomi’s position .They had to travel and live alone in a culture that did not recognize women as people capable of operating outside of a man’s discretion.
Quick note: None of this is to say that women were useless. They were considered second to men because the man was considered the head of the household during this time. If you have any questions about what a strong biblical woman did, go read Proverbs 31 and then message me and we can talk about it.
Let’s use this story as a reminder that when everything looks completely bleak around us, when we lose our family (Ruth 1:5), our home (Ruth 1:6), and everything around us, God is constant (Malachi 3:6). His words never fail (Joshua 21:45). He never leaves us or forsakes us (Deuteronomy 31:6). His word never changes (Malachi 3:6). He loves us (John 3:16).
3. David (1 Samuel 16-1 Kings 2)
David’s story begins by highlighting how young, inexperienced, and untrained he was. During this time David was working for his father as a shepherd, Samuel was commanded by God to appoint a new king.
Keep in mind, God told Samuel to appoint a new king while there was a king sitting on the throne.
When Kind Saul finally found out about this, he was very angry (). Despite the fact that David and King Saul’s son, Jonathan, became close friends, King Saul’s fear of David ignited into jealous hatred.
For years, David had to evade the king’s constant attempts against his life and narrowly escaped on several of those occasions. Throughout those attempts, David showed the courage to trust God even when his very life was being threatened. He chose to trust God in all circumstances. There was even one time when David was in a dark cave that Saul had just walked into even though Saul had no idea David was in there. It would have been so easy for David to surprise Saul and kill him in the dark cave. David chose to show him mercy because David trusted in God’s future and not his own (1 Samuel 24 - David spares him again in 1 Samuel 26).
These examples always remind me just how important it is to put all of my trust in God because he is the only one with the power over my future.
Here’s the thing, I am never going to trust in God’s plan 100%. You won’t either. But that’s not the point. We don’t focus on how much we don’t trust God but we repent, we learn from our sins, and we continue to trust God with our future.
2 Corinthians 12:9 says, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
My weakness, my inability to give my future 100% to God, is covered in grace. Does that mean I can continue on trying to take control of my life despite his sovereign plan?
Romans 6:1-2 says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
Just because we mess up and get stressed out over our plans instead of trusting in Gods, that doesn’t mean we need to continue down that path of self-deprecation. God’s grace covers every single one of my sins and every single one of yours. But that verse commands us not to continue in our cycle of sin just to abuse grace. We are to die daily to our sins (See Luke 9:23, Lamentations 3:22-23) in order to live a life seeking after God (1 John 2:6).
Why should we obey God’s commands?
As we can clearly see with the Israelites, when we don’t obey, there will be consequences. However, as we also said, we have grace through Jesus’ sacrifice.
Our consequences look much differently today than they did in the Old Testament. The reason for this is because we live under a new, fulfilled law that Jesus fulfilled in His very existence (Matthew 5:17). We aren’t punished the same way that the Israelites were and we don’t have to make an animal or grain sacrifice for our sins because there was an ultimate sacrificed that covered all of our sins (1 John 2:2). That is where grace comes from. Grace is there to cover our punishment for sins, not to create a means for us to keep on living our cycle of sin.
Let me end with this reminder: Our plans are insufficient but God’s plan is sufficient.
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