But Do You Trust Him? Part 1

Do you ever feel like you're wrestling with God?

It's possible to have faith in the payment He made for your sin-debt but still feel like it's not quite safe to fully trust Him. After all, His agenda is pretty radical. 

If fully trusting God scares you, your heart might pull back from Him in a short-sighted attempt at what feels like self-protection. 

You've given your life to the Lord in faith and repentance, but now the particulars of surrender are getting down to the fine print nitty gritty.

• Maybe God's calling you to forgive someone who's really hurt you, and maybe you need forgive Him for not preventing it.

• Maybe God's calling you to give up something you'd rather not give up.

• Maybe you feel like God let you down, doesn't care about what you've been through or doesn't really care about what's got you worried.

• Maybe you or your loved ones have suffered inexplicable, inexcusable harm or loss. 

If you're pulling back from fully trusting Him, you'll struggle to have faith in His provision, His transformation, and His healing touch. In fact, you'll struggle to have real faith in Him for anything.

Satan has a lot of tricks and traps that he uses against Believers. Today, I'm focusing on just one: Not Trusting God.

Make no mistake. If fear is hanging around your heart and you don't fully trust God,

• You're missing out on the deep spiritual intimacy He wants to have with you,

• Your Christian growth and ability to receive from Him is stunted, and

• Your Kingdom usefulness is limited.

Let's diagnose the issue. The Bible recognises that you're a three part being: spirit, soul, and body. All three parts were corrupted, fallen and alienated from the life of God by the effects of sin.

But God loves you, wants you, and has a really good plan. It's wondrous beyond all imagination. It starts and ends with Jesus.

Jesus came to give us a way out of the corruption of this life. He paid our sin-debt, opening the door for us to turn to God through Him in repentance and surrender.

Let's take a few moments to go over the physics of salvation.

Your Body

Your current physical body--aka your earth suit--is temporary. It feels like the permanent you, but it's not. It's only what your spirit and soul are wearing while you're here. Like a cheap suit, it has an expiration date.

In God's timing, He'll replace it with a perfect body fit for eternity in Heaven. But that topic isn't our focus in this message. So let's get back to what is.

Your Spirit

If you've sincerely accepted Jesus' payment and turned your life over to Him, your dead-to-God spirit has in an instant been replaced, born-again from above.

Your new, supernaturally reborn spirit is permanently attached to the Holy Spirit. It is now destined for Heaven.

Bible truth: Your new spirit...let me call it the new permanent you...is incorruptibly pure, clean and unblemished. It is connected to Jesus because it is joined in a very real way to the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 3:16 NKJV

Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

1 Corinthians 6:17, NKJV

But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.

Ephesians 1:13-14 ESV

In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it...

Your Soul

Here's where the difference between your spirit and your soul becomes clear. Your spirit has been reborn showroom clean, but as long as you're wearing your earth suit, your soul...your mind, will, and emotions...still needs a lot of work. This is where the question about trusting Him comes into focus.

The Bible uses the term "the old man" to describe your soul's old ungodly, fallen ways of thinking, choosing and feeling.

Your "old man" is a warehouse full of attitudes and behaviours that are incompatible with the life God desires for you.

As long as you're wearing this earth suit, there are "old man" habits in your mind, will and emotions that don't want to let go. God wants to remove and replace them.

• Not just tweak.

• Not just reform.

• Not just lipstick on a pig.

The old man's contamination will be fully and finally removed when you leave your earth suit behind. But for now, cleaning out the old man's leftovers in your soul is a work in progress. It's a bit here, a bit there and a bit more over that-away. Sometimes it happens in small pieces, other times in big chunks.

This concept is primarily discussed in Romans 6:6, Ephesians 4:22-24, and Colossians 3:9-10. I'll get to Colossians 3 again in a few moments. These passages emphasise the need to put off this old self and embrace a new life in Christ.

This is the soul-level work Paul is talking about in Philippians 2:12-13 when he says

...work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.

Stay with me. I'm about to step on a few toes. As the man once grumbled about the Preacher, "Today he stopped preachin' and started meddlin'."

Well, I'm about to meddle. Don't get mad at me. Take it up with the Bible. I'm just telling you what it says.

Romans 12:1-2 NIV

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Colossians 1:13 NKJV

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.

That's a really powerful verse, but it doesn't mean everything in your life is peachy keen, at least not yet. If you've been born-again, you've been rescued but you're not quite home yet. The remaining journey will be much harder if you don't fully trust Him.

Here is a longer passage, but it says what needs to be said.

Colossians 3:2-10 NIV

Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.

Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.

You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived.

But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.

Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices

and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

The Holy Spirit in you is working ever deeper and wider to transform your soul's old ways of thinking, choosing and feeling. He's a persistent sort. He'll keep challenging those soul areas that need to be challenged. Trust His heart, His plans, and His process.

Now finish up with "But Do You Trust Him? Part 2". It's really good.