Everyday Trust and Surrender

“And those who know your name put their trust in you,

for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.”

~Psalm 9:10 (NRSV)

“We would fear people less if we feared God more, and we would tremble less before our enemies if we trusted our Saviour more.”

~W. Graham Scroggie

It seems we can boil down the living of the faith-life to the simplicity of trust—a paradoxically hard thing to execute. Trust-in-God is just an idea unless it is expressed in surrender. It finds its scope for bearing via pragmatism: surrender is the form of obedience that demonstrates such trust-in-God.

Those who know the Lord’s name—the Divine character and commands—will trust their God. And their trust will be known by surrender. That surrender is given as a gift of faith in their Lord; the One who has not forsaken them. For, why would we trust God if we believed that God could let us down?

Converting An Idea Into A Reality

Again, we build from the idea of trust unto the reality of surrender. Our faith means close to nothing if we cannot surrender, willingly, enthusiastically, spontaneously.

Yet it’s the emergent wisdom of those who know their God, to trust sufficiently in order to discern the deception of the evil one. Satan tries his ploys to unbalance us in the area of trust. With our trust, we are to enlist wisdom to gauge the Presence of God in the moment of our trust.

And when we know when and how to trust God, we convert that idea of trusting into the reality of surrendering. Those that trust in God have the habit of living their faith in action-oriented ways. This is an everyday trust and surrender.

Trusting God Is The Ideal Protection

Why do we trust God unto the surrender of faith?

We might know that living faithfully is the idea of the theological triple-horn famed in Proverbs: righteousness, justice, and fairness. We know it as God’s design for living. We trust God and obey because we know it is God’s will that we do.

But there is a more practical reason why we can be convinced that it is best for us to trust and obey. It’s because the more we trust and obey God, the less we will be harangued by the world. The more we surrender to God, the less we surrender to the fear propagated by our world. The more we focus on God, the less we worry about our enemies.

***

Trust leads to surrender, but it depends on what we trust in as to the worth of our surrender. Trusting in the Lord, which leads to our pragmatic surrender, is the greatest favour of investment for our future that we could achieve for ourselves. In faith, we shall see.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.