Today this verse in Psalm 37 spoke to me: “Commit your way to the Lord – roll and repose [each care of] your load on Him; trust (lean on, rely on and be confident) also in Him, and He will bring it to pass.” (Psalm 37:5 AMPLIFIED)
This is my husband Len’s favorite verse of the entire Bible. He has leaned on this passage in recent years while making the switch from editing a magazine to publishing Christian books.
There is much in Scripture stressing our need to have faith in God. The above verse takes us a step further. It not only admonishes us to trust, it promises that when we do, God will act in a supernatural way to answer our need. Dwell on that for a moment. We trust, God acts. A mind-blowing premise.
Yet total, all-out trust in our part is not as easy as it first seems. There are periods when God’s face is shrouded, when His dealings with us will appear as if He does not care, when He seems not to be acting like a true Father. Can we then hang onto the fact of His love and His faithfulness and that He is a prayer-answering God?
Can we get to the point Habakkuk reached: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vines…Yet I will rejoice in the Lord…!” (Habakkuk 3:17-18 AMPLIFIED)
Can we, at the moment when His face is hidden, exult in the God of our salvation? “The Lord God is my strength, my personal bravery and my invincible army.” (v. 19)
Last Saturday morning Len had a chance to demonstrate the principle of trust in a difficult situation. He awoke with a very bad throat condition; could hardly speak. Yet he was supposed to give a talk that morning at a men’s breakfast in the local Lutheran church.
Before he left for the church I anointed him with oil, placed my hand on his throat, and asked the Lord to do a healing work in Len for the glory of God.
During the breakfast preceding Len’s speech, however, he told me later, his voice got worse and worse until there was little left but a croak. The Lutheran pastor suggested turning the gathering into a discussion group, giving Len the chance to bow out. But no, my husband would at least try.
So Len stood up and uttered a rasping, halting first sentence, literally plunging ahead on faith. Suddenly, he reported afterwards, his voice cleared. From then on, for thirty-odd minutes, the message poured out with no cough, hardly even a clearing of the throat. The Holy Spirit had simply taken over. In the question period afterwards, still no problem with his throat.
But when he returned home, Len’s voice was again a painful whisper.
What fascinated me in this episode is how biblical it is: as the symptoms get worse, the temptation is there to “give up” and not to trust Jesus. We must resist that temptation in the midst of our very real human helplessness, “roll” the entire burden onto His shoulders, as He bade us do, step out and take the first step with bare, no-evidence-at-all, faith.
And lo, He does take over gloriously, doing what we literally cannot do for ourselves.
This article is excerpted with permission from A Closer Walk, Chosen Books, 1986.
You can read this article and more like it when you subscribe to our magazine, The Breakthrough Intercessor. Subscribe at https://www.intercessors.org/magazine_sub.php
Is something on your heart?
Six intercessors will pray for your request for 21 days.
