Trusting…And Leave the Results to God

at it should have in your eyes for you to get a response I think this is something that we can all relate with and if we’re honest with ourselves has probably made us question God from time to time and if we can trust him or possibly even if he’s real I can definitely relate with this and it’s got me thinking about today’s topic and how it fits into our lives this summer series titled and leave the results to God we all have areas in our lives

where we we want to do our best and we want to give it our all but we’re at the end of the day we truly have to leave the results to him pray and leave the results to him last week we talked about fasting or fast and leave the results to him and this morning we’re going to discuss today Trust and leave the results to him to God even in times where we don’t get an answer or we don’t get an answer that we like let

me ask you a question do you believe that he’s God do you believe that he’s a good God do you believe that he holds a world in his hands that he’s worthy of your trust because even if things happen in this life that we can’t make sense of if he is a God that we truly can trust then at some point we have to surrender to him and we have to believe that whatever happens to us is really going to be for our growth or that

he’s going to bring about good from it or that maybe he does have our best interest in mind and he knows more than us the question is not is he worthy of trust the question is will we trust him because the Bible tells us that he’s trustworthy that he will be with those who trust him Psalm 36 5-6 says commit your way to to the Lord trust in him and he will do this he will make your righteousness like the dawn the justice of your cause

like the Noonday son Jeremiah 17 7-8 says blessed is the person who who trusts in the Lord and whose confidence is in him let this let this picture be painted for you he will be like a tree planted in the water that sends out its roots by the Stream it does not fear when the heat comes it its leaves are always green it has no worries in the year of drought and never fails to bear fruit and this is an amazing picture of what it looks

like when we trust in the Lord but what is Trust because trust is different than Faith especially when it comes to the difference between faith and trust in the Lord and you may think that faith and trust are synonyms and in some ways they are but there is a distinct difference track with me here faith is believing that the chair will hold you up but trust means sitting in the chair a person can have really strong faith in Jesus and believe that he’s real but at

the same time still have very little or no trust in him trust includes putting our belief God has been taking me on a journey lately helping me realize that my trust in him needs some work and it’s been very insightful to learn in a more full way what trusting in Him really looks like and means and I am still learning had I had some things happen to me when I was growing up that not only broke my trust but that also formed and changed the way

that I Define Trust and without knowing it I buried this Foundation of distrust and began to build on top of it without even realizing it and and many years later after my house so to speak that’s been built on top of this Foundation I finally realized that there’s a problem and now I’m having to uncover this problem and to to fix that Foundation and so it’s only been about five years that I’ve understood this problem of distrust in my life and so I’m still working through

this idea of trust in my life and trying to fix this crack in my Foundation but here’s what happened and here’s how I missed that I had a problem see I’ve always had strong faith in God ever since I can remember back when I was six years old and I got baptized and ever since I made my faith my own in ninth grade I’ve walked closely with the Lord and I’ve I’ve pursued my relationship with God and because I had such strong faith and belief in

God I thought that this equated to me having strong trust in God as well but what I didn’t realize until somewhat recently is that there that I lived through some things in my younger years that not only hewed my view of trust and my ability to trust others and to let others in but without me even realizing it it also unconsciously skewed my trust of God as well without like I said without me even realizing it and when it finally hit me that not only do

I struggle to trust others but that I struggle to trust God too it was a hard and humbling moment but it’s also been a growing moment because we have a God that can miraculously there’s no other way to describe it but that he can miraculously take the house my life and lift it up and expose the foundation so that he can not only address this crack of distrust in my life but fix it and repair it and heal it so that the house can be strong

again and like I said I’m still processing through this and working through this and what does trust look like with God but there have been a few things that have really helped me tackle this and address this and work on this idea of trust in my life and trust with God and one of those has been counseling and getting some good Counseling in my life number two has been working toward reconciliation and hard conversations and forgiveness and then number three has been asking the Holy Spirit

asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to me the next steps and then taking them as he reveals them to me but I’ve got to ask you a question this morning can you relate do you think that you you too may be struggling with trusting God maybe you two have a strong faith but you’re real you’re realizing right now as I’m talking that maybe you also struggle with trusting God in your life in some ways or maybe your faith and trust in God both need some work

and if this is you this is okay too see God never said that we need to have it all together only that we need to have our hands and our hearts open and to allow him access to work in our lives at a heart level but how do we trust him well there’s many verses that I could take you to this morning that talk about how to trust the Lord but one of my favorites and the one that I want to spend some time focusing on

today and I’m packing for you a little bit is Proverbs 3 5 and 6. So go ahead and open up to it Proverbs 3 5 and 6. And as we look at this passage it’s going to give us three ways to go about trusting God and Proverbs 3 5 and 6. I want to share what these three ways are with you as well as give you some ideas and thoughts from the Bible about how to go about living this out and applying each of these three

ways in our lives with the promise that when we do he will make our path straight so follow along with me as I read Proverbs 3 5 and 6. It says trust in the Lord with did you hear it trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding in all your ways acknowledge Him and he will make your paths straight many of us know this verse very well or maybe we’ve even memorized it but have you ever taken the

time to really think about what this verse is saying and how we can apply it to our life when it comes to trusting in the Lord there’s three things that this passage reveals to us about how we can go about trusting in the Lord number one it says to trust in the Lord number one with all of your heart another way to phrase that would be wholehearted devotion and there’s a couple of passages that begin to frame this concept of wholehearted devotion and what it means

and first Samuel chapter 16 verse 7 it says but the Lord said to Samuel the the prophet and he said this to Samuel when he was looking at Jesse’s oldest son and thinking surely this must be the one this must be Israel’s next king and it’s in this moment that the Lord says to Samuel do not consider his appearance or his heart for her his height for I have rejected him the Lord does not look at the things man looks at says man looks at the

outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart you see God doesn’t say in the in this verse that we just read Proverbs three five and six trust in the Lord with all your career he doesn’t say trust in the Lord with all your possessions he doesn’t say to trust in him with any of your outward appearance because God’s desire first and foremost is that we would trust him with our whole heart and this is a lot harder to do but this is what he’s looking

for now we know that King David is the one that is chosen to be king in first Samuel 16 because he had the right heart that God was looking for but fast forward with me to the end of King’s David of King David’s life and now listen to me read a passage for you where King David is now sharing some words of wisdom with son Solomon who would be king and First Chronicles 28 9 it says and you my son Solomon acknowledge the god of your

father and and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind for the Lord searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts we see here that the motives that we have show a lot about our heart and about if we have wholehearted Devotion to God but regardless we see again that God’s desire for David for Solomon and for us is that we would trust him with all of our heart and have wholehearted devotion for him and for him alone but how do we

do this what does this wholehearted devotion look like well the Bible tells us or uses a word in the Old Testament in the Hebrew that gives us quite an understanding of what this means or how to go about this and this is the word has said and it’s not so much about saying it right as it is about rightly understanding what it means and living it out and well what is this you might be asking well this word has said meant Covenant faithfulness or keeping the

Covenant and in First Kings 8 23 it says O Lord God of Israel there is no God Like You in Heaven above or on earth below who you who keep your Covenant of Love with your servants who will continue wholeheartedly in your way a covenant was a pact and a binding promise between two people or between two groups that they would Shake on and this was a binding promise that would stay in effect as long as both people or both groups kept their edge of the

Covenant now the Bible talks about different covenants that God made with his people and with each Covenant there were terms that God was to uphold and there was terms that the people were to uphold and God always kept his part of the covenants that he made but time and time again if you read the Bible you’ll see God’s people breaking their end of the Covenant but the whole idea behind this Covenant faithfulness was that each person would would live and give their best to the Covenant

and to be faithful to come to this Covenant and live wholeheartedly to it the meaning of has said was Covenant hear this it was Covenant keeping to the best interest of the other in covenanted partner what this means is that it’s not about you but it’s about them and as we see in the Old Testament living this way of Covenant faithfulness also produced blessing God says if you fully obey me I will send rain on your land and you will be blessed Deuteronomy 11 13 and

14 says this and in Seasons where they did keep the Covenant through loving one another and God through serving one another and God through submitting to one another and God wholehearted devotion thrived they were loving the Lord their God with all of their heart as Deuteronomy 6 5 tells us and it made a difference and God bless them and he made their path straight this has said or Covenant faithfulness is one of the ways that we too can trust in the Lord with all of our

heart living out our part of the promise that we have made to him trusting him with all of our heart I just want to ask you this morning how is your wholehearted devotion and Covenant faithfulness towards God now a few more ways that we can trust God with all of our hearts is through pursuing obedience pursuing godliness pursuing surrender and pursuing the fear of the Lord now I really want to I want to touch very quickly on this this topic of the fear of the Lord

before getting back and sharing a little bit of my story with you because we mostly get pursuing obedience and pursuing godliness and pursuing surrender if we want to trust the Lord with all of our heart but a lot of times this topic of fear is one of the ones that we have the hardest time wrapping our minds around now when I say fear I’m I’m not just talking about the type of fear where we should be scared of God although I think sometimes it’s okay for

us to have a healthy fear of God who could literally wipe us out at any moment because he’s so big and he’s so mighty and might I add in the Bible he did that a couple of times in the Old Testament and in Matthew 10 28 Jesus also reminds us at a time or he reminds his disciples when he’s talking to them and saying hey don’t be afraid when you’re going out to evangelize when you’re going out to share me with people he says don’t be

afraid of those who will kill the body but cannot kill the soul rather be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body and health and this should breathe a little bit of healthy fear into US of how powerful of a God that we serve but please hear me this is not the only definition of fear in the Old Testament a more full definition of fear in the Bible when it comes to God also includes reverence and respect and ah you see we should

have such a deep reverence or such an overwhelming and deep sense of respect for God that we would literally be willing to do anything for him there should be such an awe in us and in our heart of how big he is and how powerful that he is that it makes us want to live differently and better because he’s worthy of it this is the kind of fear that the Bible is talking about when it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of

wisdom it means that wholeheartedly believing in and living for it and trusting in God is the beginning of wisdom because you begin to realize that living for him wholeheartedly and with that kind of devotion and reverence in awe really is the best thing possible Deuteronomy chapter 10 verse 12 says what does the Lord ask of you but to fear the lord your God to walk in all of his ways to love him to serve the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all

of your soul and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good God wants us to trust in him with all that we are and with our whole hearts and that happens through Covenant faithfulness through a healthy fear of God and through many other things but back to my story and just some of this this healing of distrust that God brought about in me I began to realize as I pursued counseling that one of the places that I

didn’t trust in the Lord was when I was evangelizing and for the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on why there would be some times where I could just go out and talk to people about Jesus no problem but yet how there were there would be other times where I would feel like God was telling me hey go talk to that person and I wouldn’t be able to do it I would just literally freeze up and get paralyzed and I just I couldn’t do it

so in my younger years I made some guesses and thoughts to why maybe this was happening because and I thought well maybe it’s because I’m fearful of rejection or maybe it’s that I was I’m fearful of persecution or maybe it’s that I’m afraid that I wouldn’t have the answers or that maybe people would think that I’m weird but what I more recently discovered and had a breakthrough on was when it when I finally realized that this was tied to my lack of trust in God not

only to my lack of trusting God but to the times in my childhood when I felt unsafe and how my body was willing to do whatever it took to keep me from those unsafe places and Ever Getting in one of those unsafe situations ever again I mean follow my logic here if God hadn’t kept me safe before then why would I want to put myself in another situation where I might not be safe and so without even realizing it even though I couldn’t make sense of

it consciously at the time I I just wasn’t trusting God in that area of my life and I wasn’t overcoming this this fear of evangelism and it made me feel so guilty because I’m like well as a pastor I should be doing this I should be able to evangelize right and so it was really eating me up inside but the more that I brought this before Lord the more that I process through this with my wife the more that I got Godly counsel the more that

things began to become visible to me my lack of trust in God had really come about with from undealt with trauma in my in my past of feeling unsafe and that is what kept me involved and bondage all of these years from healing from this and working through this and reconciling these things in my mind and in my relationship with God therefore this was keeping me from reclaiming the trust that God desires but the only way that this kind of healing takes place is by trusting

God with all of our hearts and leaving the results to him he had to bring it about so number one it says trust in the Lord with all of your heart another way to trust in God in Proverbs 3 5 and 6 as it states for us is by leaning not on your own understanding the temptation for all of us as people and as humans is to do things on our own power and strength and to do things on our own knowledge and understanding but the

truth that we’re met with in this next part of the passage is that in order to trust God we must lean on him leaning on him I had some friends the smallest who were Twins and my junior year of high school we became really good friends and we they were seniors and we’re we just started doing everything together we were in a musical together we’d go bowling together on dollar bowling night on Tuesdays I hung out at their house so many nights in the weekend up

till the wee hours in the morning and their home was one of the places in my younger years where I felt safe it was an incredible place to be and the smalls their family taught me something called the lean and the lean was something that you did where you would literally just fall onto each other like this and like literally turn your head to the side and you couldn’t use your hands and you just fell under each other and literally if you didn’t catch each other

you were going to fall to the floor but literally like I didn’t even realize it back then but just how amazing of a picture this was of what God desires for us with him was that we would put our full weight on him that we would trust in him because he is safe and he wants us to give us give him all of our anxieties all of our questions all of our fears all of our pain all of our depression everything we have to put it

on him to lean on him at First Peter 5 7 says to cast all of your anxieties on him because he cares for you and so leaning on him is so important but also this idea is kind of paralleled and being yoked with him Matthew 11 28-30 says come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest Jesus says take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am humble and gentle in heart and you will find rest

for your souls for my my yoke is easy and my burden is light okay guys he’s and ladies he’s not talking about Nick here he’s not talking about well is this over easy or is this sunny side up or is it scrambled this joke that’s easy okay he’s not talking about eggs he was talking about something that they would have understand which was a yoke of oxen that when they came together and when they plowed the field there was a harness that they would put on

called the Yoke that would allow them to plow the field together and do it together and think about this God is offering us Jesus is offering us to yoke with him and to allow him to carry the load with us to trust in him in that way to come to him and say I want to yoke with you but but how do we do that well we have to bring it all to him and we have to surrender to him in prayer and ask him for

his understanding in Paradigm in all of it another way to lean not on your own understanding is by pursuing wisdom over knowledge the Bible tells us that wisdom comes from God and knowledge from the world so the only way to get wisdom is to get God and to get going with God proverbs 4 7 reminds us wisdom is supreme therefore get wisdom though it costs you all you have get understanding Solomon David’s son could have asked for anything from God but he asked him for wisdom

in First Kings chapter 3. How much of your life and your decision making in life is made off of knowledge and how much of your decision-making is based off of his wisdom when we lean not on our own understanding when we when we seek him for the answers this is where wisdom begins to surface and be made known to us and this leads us to the third point of how we can lean not on our own understanding one last way for this is that when we

listen to the Holy Spirit and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to our heart and guide us in the ways that we should go job 32 8 says but it is the spirit and a man the breath of the almighty that gives him understanding breath in the Bible is known as the spirit of God and so we see all the way back in the in the Old Testament before the Holy Spirit was ever given that understanding comes from the spirit of God but then in the

New Testament when you talk to and hear from Jesus in John chapter 14 verses 15 through 17. Jesus says if you love me you will obey what I command and I will ask the father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever the spirit of Truth and what is this Spirit of Truth like and how do we experience The Guiding of Jesus and the Holy Spirit In Our Lives well in John chapter 10 verses 3 through 5 which is a few chapters

a few chapters earlier it shares with us and paints a picture for us of Jesus being Our Shepherd and our guide and it says concerning Jesus the Watchman opens the gate for him for Jesus and the Sheep listen to his voice he calls his own sheep thy name and leads them out when he has brought out all of his own he goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice but they will never follow a stranger in fact they will

run away from him because they do not recognize the stranger’s voice it’s just a reminder that the longer that we know Jesus the more that we should grow accustomed to his voice and it’s easy to lean not on your own understanding and to trust God when the voice that you’re following is familiar so will you familiarize yourself with God’s voice now a little bit more about my story one of the things that God has been teaching me in regards to trusting him these last 10 years

was that there were some lies that I was believing that were actually keeping me from trusting in Him one of these lies was that I was not good enough another one of these lies was that I was not worthy and another one of these lies that I’ve already shared with you was that I was unsafe but over time God Auto only helped me uncover these lies that I had believing up to this point and that it actually kept me from trusting in Him but God was

also helping me realize the truth about how he saw me and how he sees me that I am good enough that I am worthy that I am safe and yes I still get triggered with these lies from time to time and until sometimes until I can put my finger on it I still get anxiety over these things but now I’m beginning to speak the truth over myself about who he says that I am and what he sees in me and I’m leaning on him and his

understanding and his wisdom it’s been a wonderful thing but I’m not out of the woods yet okay I didn’t get into this overnight I’ve been living this way for many years speaking these lives over myself for many years and so it’s going to take many years before I can get Beyond this and even even like subconsciously for a long time I was living this way so but I know that the more that I begin to speak the truth over myself the more that we begin to

speak the truth over ourselves about who God says that we are the moral that those lies lose their power amen and I just want to ask you this morning what lies might you be believing about yourself that God would want to reveal to you and replaced with the truth about how he sees you and you might not know right this moment but would you be willing to trust that he will reveal this to you and that as you continue to seek him about it and leave

the results to him that he will show you you see it changes everything at least it has for me and it has grown my trust in God and revealed to me how I can trust him and how he sees me now moving on to one final way to trust God from this passage it says in all your ways acknowledge Him now obviously this means to go to him to ask him for his advice to acknowledge Him in our decision-making process but another translation for acknowledge and

some of the the ways that other Bible translations translate this part of Hebrew or one of my Proverbs 5 3 6 is it says in all your ways submit to him and James 4 starting in verse 7 tells us selves then to God resist the devil and he will flee from you come near to God and he will come near to you and later on it says humble yourself before the Lord and He will lift you up what this passage is reminding us is the importance

of submitting to God as well as coming to him in humility and that this is exactly what we need to do when we’re striving to trust God one other passage that I want to bring to your attention in line with submitting to and acknowledging God is Hosea 6. The passage Begins by saying let us return to God because it’s showing us in the first couple verses that they had fallen away from him but in verse 3 it goes on to say and I quote let us

acknowledge the Lord let us press on to acknowledge Him as surely as the sun rises he will appear he will come to us like the winter rains like the spring rains that water the Earth end of Passage and and when we acknowledge God and submit to God in this way there’s a promise that from this passage I don’t know if you caught it it says and and God will appear and he will return to us so if you’ve been far from God lately or if maybe

you’ve been farther from him than you would like just return to him and know that when you acknowledge Him he will appear he promises to and it’s part of trusting him one other last way to acknowledge Him is to recognize who he really is Jeremiah 10 12-13 says but God made the Earth by his power he founded the World by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding when he Thunders Waters in the heavens Roar he makes clouds rise from the ends of the

Earth he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses man and and Psalm 147 5 5 says great is the Lord and mighty Empower his understanding has no limit one of the ways to acknowledge Him is to recognize who he really is because sometimes we tend to forget but in his gentle way he is faithful to remind us and maybe you’ve never trusted Christ before as your savior and Lord the one that takes away your sin and trades it for heaven

and then gives you the gift of the Holy Spirit and if you’ve never done this before and would like to I just want to encourage you just to get a hold of me this week I would love to be able to talk to you more about how to make this kind of a decision but also just how to trust him with your life because this is the most important decision that you could ever make well we’ve talked about three ways to trust God that are brought

up in Proverbs three five and six but there is also a promise at the end of this verse and that promise is that he will make your path straight but in line with our Series today I want to State it another way for you this morning and leave the results to him but this can be hard to do sometimes can it especially if you’re in a situation right now where you don’t know what you’re supposed to do or you need an answer from God in something

right now and you’re having a hard time trusting him and what he would have you do trusting about a decision and leave the results to God or trusting about a broken relationship and leave the results to God or trusting about a health problem and leave the results to God or trusting about a storm in your life and leave the results to God there will be many times in our life where we feel like we’re living the words of Jeremiah 6 16 like we’re standing at a

Crossroads where we don’t have the answers Jeremiah 6 16 says stand at the crossroads and look ask for the ancient past ask where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls and maybe you’re at a Crossroads this morning and you just need to release it to God and trust him for the results and I feel led to pray for anyone this morning that’s in this place right now and just needs to release something to the Lord and fully

trust him with it and fully surrender to him here and now or maybe in this week ahead so as I pray give it to him surrender to him trust him in it with your whole heart Lord there might be people in this room right now who truly need help from you trusting you and I just pray right now somehow by the power of your Holy Spirit that you would just help them to truly surrender that whatever it is to you and truly just picture themselves laying

it at your feet and giving it fully to you because you are a big God and you are a good God and that they would relieve they would leave the results to you but I pray that Lord because of their faithfulness this morning that they would see you showing them the answer and leading them and guiding them and giving them the next steps as they rely on you pray and faith believing that they would see you b

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