Full Trust and Confidence
It’s important to know your “why.” This is a common self-help, motivational-speech sort of charge. And it’s true, knowing your why helps put wind behind your sails as you move in a direction. I want to spend a few minutes talking about reliance. What is it that you rely on in your day-to-day?
To rely on something, according to the dictionary, is to “depend on with full trust or confidence.” A practical example of reliance is what your body does when you sit in a chair. You are fully trusting that the chair will catch you and hold you at a comfortable position two and a half feet off the ground.
We have a set of four outdoor chairs in our back area. My morning time consists of setting two chairs across from each other so that I can lean back in one and put my legs up on the other. These chairs have been sitting in the sun for a number of years. Twice, now, I have been sitting and the taught mesh rips and I fall through the bottom, catching myself just before hitting the ground.
Now, sitting in one of our remaining chairs, I can feel hesitancy creep up. Suddenly, I’m thinking about things I never thought before when simply sitting. “Is the chair sagging,” “Is that a rip on the side about ready to give,” I’m trusting the chair enough to sit on it, but my confidence is wavering.
When we are no longer confident in the thing we are trusting, we begin to lose our peace and if that is allowed to continue long enough, there’s a good chance we’ll simply lose our trust.
Paul mentions an interesting point in his second letter to the Corinthians, he says this regarding the afflictions he and others were experiencing, “Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9).
Paul is acknowledging that he went through some afflictions that brought him to the end of himself. He could no longer rely on his own strength but needed to depend on the Lord. Now, I don’t want to get in the weeds here about whether or not God causes bad things to happen to us. I believe that God uses the hard things to bring about opportunities for good in our lives. Paul learned how to fully rely on the Lord.
He continues by saying this, “He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. On Him we have set our hope that He will deliver us again” (2 Corinthians 1:10). When things got challenging for Paul, he looked back and saw the faithfulness of the Lord and used those testimonies to usher him forward in not only depending on God, but in furthering his confidence in God’s character of being dependable.
So, let me ask you regarding your walk with the Lord, does “depending on with full trust and confidence” describe your relationship? If not, let’s take some queues from Paul, where you know the Lord has protected you in your past, remember those moments and use them as reasons for confidence. And when you’re ready, ask the Lord for further opportunities to trust Him. Would we be those who depend on the Lord not with flippancy but with full trust and confidence.
