When You Cannot Trace God, Trust Him
By: Thomas E. Mcdaniels
Tags: Spirituality, God, Religion, Faith, Christianity

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths, (Proverbs 3:5–6, NKJV)

The December scripture prompt from Koinonia is one of the most popular verses of scripture. Proverbs 3:5–6 is a verse packed with truth, wisdom, and challenge. The verse will inspire us and challenge us.

I call trust the second layer of faith. Trust is what we lean on when our faith is dormant. Faith births awareness of confidence that trust supports.

The old saints used to say, Trust the Lord even though you cannot trace Him

Confidence is the result of knowing. We love to know where we are going and how we will get there.

Our Father reserves the right to lead us into unforeseen moments

As humans, we trust our feelings more than our understanding of God. God’s plans escape our awareness. As humans, we often stumble unaware into God’s plan.

We don’t always know where God is leading us. We go out to dinner, and during the dining experience, we realize we are in a God-moment. During the God-moment, we face the challenge of leaning on our understanding as we try and figure out what’s happening.

God desires that we lean into the assignment He has planned for us.

When we are not sure of what God is doing, we must trust His ways

Trust God

To trust the Lord with all our heart is a command. No easy order for sure. Trust is what we have when our faith is off course.

We tend to trust ourselves when we cannot trace God. Abraham could not trust how God would give him his firstborn child, so he trusted the advice of his wife, Sarai.

Abraham and Sarai waited twenty-five years for their son to be born because it is “through faith and patience [we] inherit the promises” (Heb. 6:12; see also 10:36).

When God had called Abraham, He promised to make of him a great nation that would bless the whole world (Gen. 12:1–3). God also promised Abraham to be the father and Sarah (not Hagar) would be the mother (Genesis 17:19; 18:9–15, NKJV)

Sarah did not believe that God was working fast enough.

So she decided to take the situation over.

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. (Genesis 16:1–4, NIV)

The problem with the plan of Abraham and Sarai’s was that it was not God’s plan. Abraham and Sarai developed a self-made plan.

Are we guilty of making our own plans and going our own way? Sure we are.

Photo by Julian Lozano on Unsplash

Acknowledge God

God asked us to acknowledge Him in all our ways.

The scripture says, we plan our way, but God orders our steps

So we plan and God orders. The difficulty is to recognize the places God has ordered for us to do His work. We forget that God is the director of our story.

We can look at Jacob for a great illustration.

Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran. So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven, and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. Also, your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep[c] you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” (Genesis 28:10–17, NKJV)

Jacob sets up camp at a specific place. There is no indication that anything spiritual is about to happen.

God turns commonplaces into holy ground

As we go about our business, God moments show up. These moments come by surprise. Similar to Jacob’s camping experience. Jacob said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Most of us would love more clarity to where God is leading

I sure would. That is why faith is so important.

Faith is similar to being blind. The blind person must trust the person leading them.

When we cannot trace God, we must trust Him.

That’s easier said than done.

Thank you for reading this post. You can have similar articles delivered to your email? Subscribe here.

Like us on Facebook here.

This post first appeared here.