God and His Self-Expression 10

From all of this, I have drawn one main inference—the imperative urgency of Trust.

I had hitherto thought of trust as a gritting of the teeth and stiffening of the nerves to believe and endure, no matter what compulsion one put upon oneself. Gradually, in the light of the experience sketched above, I came to see it as simply the knowledge that the supreme command rules everything to everyone’s advantage. The more we can rest mentally, keep ourselves at peace, be still and know that it is God, the single and sole Director, the more our interests will be safe. This, I take it, is the kind of trust for which the great pioneers of truth plead so persistently in both the Old and New Testaments.

Trust, then, is not a force we wrest from ourselves against reason, against the grain. To be trusted at all, it must be loving and spontaneous. It cannot be loving and spontaneous unless there is a natural impulse behind it. And there can be no natural impulse behind it unless we have something in our own experience which corroborates the mere hearsay testimony that there is a Power worth trusting to. Job’s “Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him,” could only have been wrung from a heart that had proved the Divine Good Will a thousand times and knew what it was doing. Some experience of our own we must have. It is an absolute necessity. Desperate hope in another man’s God may do something for us, but it cannot do much. A small thing that I have proved for myself is a better foundation for trust than a Bible-learned parrot like by rote and not put to the practical test. Once I have found out for myself that to rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him is the surest way to security and peace I have the more willing confidence in doing it.

THE END

PHOTO CREDIT : KELLY SIKKEMA