Will We Trust God?
| By: Nancy Missler; ©2000 |
| We must learn to free ourselves of sin and self in order to become conduits of God’s Love. Nancy Missler explains how this can happen. |
Introduction
God finds new ways every day to ask us, “Will you trust Me? Will you trust Me to do towards you all that I need to do, in order to accomplish My perfect will through you?”
In our dark seasons of life, God doesn’t ask us to understand everything that He is doing, but simply to trust and believe in His Love through what He is doing.
Brother Lawrence once said:
- If He is truly King, then this suffering could not come to [us] against His will. I believe that such things come to us to make us more completely His, and that rightly accepted and borne, they bring great sweetness and consolation into our lives. This suffering is not an enemy to be fought against, but an ally in the spiritual warfare to be gladly received and used. “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Therefore, anything, life, joy, pain, death that brings me nearer to Him cannot be bad. If we are accustomed to living in the presence of God and if we believe that everything comes to us, comes with His permission, then those two facts will help to alleviate our suffering.[1]
Listen to that again, “if we are accustomed to living in the presence of God and if we believe that everything comes to us, comes with His permission, then those two facts will help to alleviate our suffering.” This is another “key” to the Christian life.
Most of us still rate the events of our lives as either a “good” thing or a “bad” thing, but when we’re finally able to merge all the events of our lives into the category of a “God” thing, then we will be where He wants us.
God wants us open and pliable to whatever He needs to do in our lives in order to accomplish His will. He wants us not only surrendering the moment to Him, but also surrendering our reactions to that moment to Him. We all need to get to the place where Job was when he said, “Though [You] slay me, yet will I trust [You].” (Job 13:15)[2]
An Example: Diana
Whenever I think about ultimate trust in God, I immediately think of a dear friend of mine named Diana Bantlow. Diana was just two years old in the Lord when she was diagnosed with leukemia and given only six months to live. She had a beloved husband who adored her and two precious children, Hillary, three, and Stephanie, one.
Diana, however, had tremendous faith in God. And, she knew that because God loved her, He would not allow anything into her life that wasn’t “Father-filtered” and that wouldn’t eventually bring Him glory. So, throughout her ordeal, no matter what the circumstances were and no matter how much pain she was in, she continually chose to trust her God and to abandon herself to His will.
Now you know that she must have experienced things like fear, doubt and anger because she was human. But because she loved God and trusted Him unequivocally, she kept making those non-feeling choices—no matter how she felt or what she thought—to do His will.
Even though Diana had enough faith to literally “move mountains,” and had been prayed for many times by the elders of her church, God in His sovereignty, chose not to heal her physically. He knew that the example of her faith and the witness of His Life through her frail condition would affect more lives than anything else. And, it’s true. As I have shared Diana’s story at different seminars over the last 20 or so years, many people have come up to me and told me how they had known Diana and how her life had touched them.
In particular, two nurses from California came up after one seminar and shared how they had both attended Diana in the hospital the last few weeks of her life. They told me that they both had come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior as a result of seeing His Life through Diana, even though she was dying.
They said, as they would go into her room to administer her pain medication, Diana would softly whisper, “No, thank you, my Father is taking care of me.” Then she would go on and say, “And may He bless you abundantly in all you do today.” Both these nurses shared how uncharacteristic this is of terminally ill patients. Either the patient is totally “out of it” (almost semi-conscious) and unaware of what is going on around him, or he is emotionally and mentally distraught as the reality of death approaches. They both said this was not at all the case with Diana. They saw in Diana a Love, a peace and a joy that “passed all human understanding.” And they yearned to have what she had. Both eventually accepted Christ as a result of Diana’s witness.
As it came closer to Christmas, Diana told everyone that God was going to allow her to go “home” for the holidays. Now she thought God meant her physical, earthly home, but on Christmas day 1974, God took His precious child “home” to the one He had prepared for her from the beginning of time (John 14:2).
We must all get to the place where we can accept even the bad things (from our point of view) as being good, because they are from God.[3] As George MacDonald tells us, “I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain.” God has a plan for our lives and sometimes that plan includes suffering.
In 1 Peter 4:19 it says, “Wherefore, let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator.”
God is the One who warms us in the sun and it is God who sends the rain. It is God who feeds us and it is He who also withholds our food. He sends the winter and He also allows the hot summer days. God, by His Love, does all of the above. “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).[4]
Our responsibility is simply to yield ourselves to the inner workings of God’s Spirit and know that everything He does in our lives comes from his Love.[5] We are being asked to trust Someone who has the power to keep us from all danger, threat and violence. The question is, “Will we trust Him unconditionally to do so?”[6]
- “As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out My sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.” (Ezekiel 34:12)
We might ask ourselves the same questions that Fenelon raises, “Why am I afraid to break out of my chains? Do the things of this world mean more to me than You [God]? Am I afraid to give myself to You? What a mistake! It is not even I who would give myself to You, but You who would give Yourself to me!”[7]
[…] Will We Trust God? By: Nancy Missler […]