Wednesday, May 23, 2007 - Set Free From Fear
Our most useless fear is the fear of trusting God. This is our greatest handicap, the thing that keeps us from knowing the life and power that God intends for us to have.
Like many other people, I spent many years "doing my own thing", as we say, not obedient to God's voice in my life. Though God in His graciousness has turned those ashes into beauty, how I wish I had not wasted those precious years. I now recognize that the underlying problem in those ten years was that I was afraid to trust God with control of my life. Actually fearful of allowing the God of the universe to run my show. I shake my head now and wonder how I could have been so stupid for so long.
My particular fear of trusting God began when, as a single adult, I decided that the only thing that could make me happy was to find the perfect man to marry, and that the worst thing in the world would be to remain single forever. That, of course, was my first mistake. The worst thing in the world for a Christian is to be out of fellowship with God and to live a life of disobedience.
So, for almost ten years I retained control of my life and all my decisions. Then, through various events that God caused or allowed in my life, I finally came to the end of my rope. I remember well the sleepless night when I finally said, "God, I'll do anything you ask of me, if only you will give me peace. I'll even be single forever." Hesitatingly I finally exercised a little bit of faith and told God I was willing to trust Him. It was obvious that He couldn't possibly do a worse job than I was doing!
That little bit of weak faith on my part was the beginning of overcoming my fear of trusting God. Through weeks and months of pain, as I watched my hopes and dreams die, He replaced those broken dreams with Himself. And in the intervening years, I have learned to trust Him more and more, and know the joy and peace of His fellowship. And I testify to you that God is trustworthy. Furthermore, He's infinitely better at running my life than I was!
Why are we afraid to trust God? Because we don’t know Him very well. We trust who we know. We trust who has proven trustworthy. We trust when we are willing to let someone get close enough to us that they can prove trustworthy.
How well do you know God? How much do you pursue a knowledge of God? Has He proven faithful to you in the past? Then why can’t you trust Him now?
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