Trusting God’s Love

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People will betray our trust. It happens. I’ve seen it my life, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. But what happens with each betrayal? Am I becoming jaded? Do I think twice (or maybe thrice or even more) before I allow myself to trust someone again?

The good news is that, while people may be fickle, God can always be trusted.

But here comes the tricky part: sometimes God’s actions seem to us like He has let us down or that our prayers to Him have gone unanswered. Unlike encounters with our fellow humans, we don’t realize that God is all-knowing, all-seeing and that yes, it is possible for something completely terrible to happen to us and for God to still be trusted.

But how?

Let’s look at the words of one of my favorite Bible heroes for some insight:

Psalm 13

1 How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.

6 I will sing the LORD’s praise, for he has been good to me.

How could David go from the depths of despair and anguish to a re-established affirmation of his trust in God’s love? The key is in the final line of the Psalm: “…for He has been good to me.” Don’t assume that because of that line David lived a flaw-free life. Far from it. In fact, during the time that this psalm was written, David was on the run for his very life! So no, it wasn’t that there were no obstacles on David’s path. But he had embraced a technique that can be helpful to all of us even now, so many years later.

He remembered God’s goodness.

In the midst of all my disappointment, am I forgetting that God has, in fact, been good to me? Even though right now it feels like He has let me down, He has answered so many prayers and provided for me in ways I didn’t even know to ask for. The real prescription for my lack of trust is to recall the goodness of God in my life and dwell on it like David did in this psalm. To sing about it, write about it, and remember it for those times when I’m tempted to question if He will, in fact, be coming through for me or not.

At the end of the day, I can realize what David realized, which is that I don’t need to understand every thing that is happening in my life to know that I can trust God. He is good. He is worthy of my trust. Perhaps part of the reason that we struggle trusting God’s goodness and love is because we’ve placed human expectations on it: if we get good things, we assume God is good, but if we get bad things, we wonder at why these things are happening. But God is not human. It is impossible to try to fit Him into our human perception completely. His ways and thoughts are higher than my own (Isaiah 55:9).

Today, try something. Write out your thoughts. Really, that’s all the Psalms are – prayers, thoughts, cries, and pleas. It’s okay to start out with your frustrations. If you read David’s words, he sounds pretty desperate. But try to bring it back around like David did. Don’t leave it there. Remember his goodness. Remind your soul and your heart Who God has been to you. It’s not all about what He’s done, but Who He is that is our very sustenance. We live because He is.

Try writing your own psalm today and see how it brings you back around to the fact of God’s truth: you can trust Him, because He has been good to you.

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