What Does it Mean to Trust God?

Have you ever been told to “trust God?”

People who believe in God like to say this a lot, to themselves and others, especially when things aren’t going well.

But how do you trust God? Especially when you are afraid and don’t feel like it? What, even, IS trust?

“Trust,” according to Google, is:

Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Trust in God does NOT mean that:

1. You believe everything will go the way you want it to, and it does

If that were true, those who follow God should be the most enviable people on Earth. Everything would go their way.

But obviously, it doesn’t, and they aren’t.

Believers living in some parts of the world are literally murdered for their beliefs. Others lose their jobs or livelihoods for their faith. Still others are mocked and belittled for the same.

Some people think that “believing in” God does entitle them to a problem-free life. If they have problems, they think they either don’t have enough faith or God is “not holding up His end of the bargain.”

But the Bible contradicts that idea.

“In this world, you will have trouble,” Jesus once said (John 16:33; emphasis added). And a lot of the most Godly characters in the Bible suffered tremendously.

God did perform many miracles, but he did not miraculously protect all of His people from everything:

• Joseph was wrongly accused of rape and spent years languishing in a prison for nothing.
• Ruth lost her husband and became a poor peasant in a foreign land far from home.
• All but one of Jesus’ closest friends were tortured and murdered for proclaiming the truth about Him, and the one who survived was banished to an isolated island in his old age.

In the end, suffering and pain is something everyone must face, whether you trust in God or not.

2. God will explain everything that is going on in your life

God didn’t answer Job when he asked “Why me?”

God doesn’t owe you an explanation when life is painful and confusing.

When bad things happen — really, really bad things — many of us are tempted to ask why. Some of us get an answer…but many of us never do.

I won’t advise you to stop asking entirely, because maybe your specific situation is one of those that will get an answer. But I am saying that if you don’t get an explanation, don’t be surprised.

Trust in God DOES mean that:

No matter what happens, you will turn TO Him instead of away.

That’s it.

That’s as far as I understand “trust in God.”

• Even if other people laugh at you and say that you believe in a capricious and demanding “flying spaghetti monster”
• Even if, in your darker moments, you sometimes feel like God is a capricious and demanding “flying spaghetti monster”
• Even if life hurts real bad and nothing you asked God for worked out the way you were hoping it would…

Even in spite of those things, trusting God means you continue to turn to Him, and away from the naysayers. You keep praying, even when those prayers seem to have absolutely effect. You keep saying, like Job:

The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Does trusting God make you stupid?

That depends on how you define “stupid.”

According to Google, “stupid” is defined as “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.”

If you take the “common sense” part of the definition, then maybe. Trusting God is not common sense for most people. Not in our comfy 21st century Western culture.

People today prefer to think that they are their own gods, bearing total responsibility for their life — which, in the sense that they have the power to choose how they respond to situations, they do.

But in the sense that they have control over all (or even most) situations, they do not.