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Trust is also critical to healthy spiritual living. God, who is the ultimate model for all that is healthy, has made trust the central fact of Christianity. For a righteousness of God by the Gospel is being revealed out of faith as a source back into faith, even as it has been written, and the righteous person shall live out of faith, and shall go on living out of faith. Romans 1:17 Trust is also at the core of what we can become. Look at Romans 1:17. This verse is saying that there are two ways to be righteous: either be a perfect human or participate in the righteousness that flows between God the Father and God the Son. A human righteousness depending upon perfect obedience exists. The righteousness belonging to God, however, is defined by the quality of relationship between God the Father and God the Son. When you exercise faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, no matter how little faith you can muster, God gives you the righteousness of God in Him. That is the definition of justification by faith. Our standing before God is not based upon our working to earn it. It is based upon relationship. God the Father is perfectly willing to treat us the way He treats His Son, if we will do one essential thing -- trust His Son. God is not suspicious. He is not dysfunctional. He trusts us instinctively. This does not mean we trust God at the beginning and then to maintain our place with Him must work like religious fanatics, i.e., become like tomato canners on His production line. We can neither keep His love by canning a lot of tomatoes or doing repetitive religious works. And may the God of hope, fill you with every variety of joy and peace in the process of believing, unto your abounding in hope by the inherent strength from the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13 We need trust for justification, but it is important to remember that we also need trust for emotional maturity. Scripture describes some very specific ways of affecting our emotions. The most powerful way is to trust. If you say to me, "I have trusted and I don't feel a thing," I will say, "You are deceived." I have worked with enough people to know that correct trust in biblical realities leads to a positive emotional explosion. However, I see three problems with using Scripture to solve emotional problems:
In order to understand biblical trust, we have to know where the problems originate, and we have to know what new realities exist. If I am correctly trusting, I will have every variety of joy and peace. The process occurs over time, but it does occur. Such strong emotions cannot be injected. Don't ever let yourself off the hook by saying, "I'm just an emotionless person." If you are, get a physical check up, because something is wrong. Emotions are the music of the soul. They tell you what you are really thinking. When God created music, He created emotion to be its counterpart within us. Like a beautiful melody that accompanies lyrics in a song, emotions are the background music for our thoughts and beliefs. If our beliefs are poor, our emotions will be also. If our beliefs are healthy, our emotions will be powerfully positive. The New Testament says in effect: emotions do not authenticate truth, but emotions do authenticate our understanding of truth. We can often tell where we are by the emotions we feel. The absence of emotion is a profound indicator of great stress occurring somewhere in the life. God is emotionally involved with us. We do not serve a cold Greek philosophic god. We serve a warm, kind Hebrew God who is similar to the image of man. He feels. For example, look at II Corinthians 1:3-4. God is encouraging. He has tender mercies. God desperately wants us to be melted into humanity, melted into a puddle of positive emotion by responding to His love. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of tender mercies and the God of every variety of encouragement; the encourager of us concerning every particular pressure with the goal being that we will be able to encourage those in every variety of pressure, through the encouragement with which we have been encouraged by God. II Corinthians 1:3-4 The richness of our emotional life is directly related to how we trust God and people. As we trust God, we will develop the capacity to see the encouragement He sends into our lives. As we trust God we will experience the positive emotions that the Spirit of God will produce, called the fruit of the Spirit. Christianity is intended to create a rich emotional life. The door to that is trust.
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rust is the basis of any healthy
relationship in life. You will only enjoy life as you trust
other people. The raw excitement of trust is worth the
inevitable experience of being disappointed by people. At
least we have lived, because the person who doesn't trust, doesn't
really live. You may end up divorced, you may end up
suffering, but at least you have lived because you trusted.
Trust is essential to healthy living.
