Trust as an Antidote to Fear

5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; 6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. 7 Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil.
Proverbs 3:5-7

Implicit within trust is the belief that God will never leave us nor forsake us, that He loves us more than we can ever know and that He will protect us and meet all of our needs. We should make ourselves aware of the fact that God has a plan for our life and that worry is one of the biggest hindrances to that plan being actualised in our life. God is for us and not against us.

If we can just learn to trust God, no matter what is happening around us, then we are in a good position to be able to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us and to meet all of our needs.

In the Lord’s Prayer, the Lord Jesus Christ said, “Thy will be done…” He did not reel-off a whole list of demands and wants. Sure, Jesus also said, “Give us thy daily bread…” But again, there is an element of trust in this statement: we trust that God will meet our needs in His method and timing – not ours.

A prayer from an anxious mind will say something like this: “Lord, I’ve got to get that job! Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get it – I’ll be so disappointed if I don’t. Please Lord; please give me the strength and wisdom to impress those people at the interview so that I get it.” The truth of the matter is that we don’t even know if its God will that we get that job. We tend to think that prayer is about demanding what we want – when we want.

When we pray, it would usually do us better to say, “Lord, I know you love me and I know from your Word that you will supply all my needs. Therefore Lord I am trusting you in this situation and I trust that your will be done according to Your will.” Most of the time when you pray to God, rather than seeking to ask for something, you should use the time to express your trust towards God. This brings us back to what Kenneth E. Hagin once said in that we ought to substitute praise for prayer a lot of the time.

It is not really about believing God for specific things – it is more to do with trusting the broad-based concepts, promises and principles laid-out in His Word. It is more to do with trusting in God that your needs will be met and His will be done – more than anything else.

It is believing that God’s Word is true and that God Himself is faithful. Believing that God can do awesome things is not for the purpose of encouraging believers to fantasise about specific wants.

I am convinced that the reason we read about God performing miracles in the Bible is so that God can take the ceiling off our expectations. When we are anxious, we often seek to ascertain the boundaries of something, including our own limitations or the limitations of other people. Our beliefs and expectations are then controlled by those imaginary boundaries.

God knows this and He saw to it that the Bible we read and base our lives upon, shows us that we serve a God that is not limited or restricted in any way. Fear seeks to determine a person’s limitations and faults. But with God, He has no limitations and faults and the miracles we read about in the Bible testify to this fact.