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Trusting A God You can’t See
No matter what people say being a Christian can be difficult at times. Following a God that you can’t physically see, hear, or touch is difficult. I struggled with this for years in my young Christian days. I read in the Bible that we walk by faith & not by sight, but to actually make the switch was difficult.
Walking with God is difficult because you have to learn His ways without being able to see or hear Him. To the average person this task seems impossible, but I have learned about Him and that knowledge has changed my life DRAMATICALLY! How did I come to know a God I can’t see or hear you ask? Well the answer is through studying God’s activity in the Bible. While many people study the Bible for various reasons, I began studying the Bible to learn God’s ways. I wanted to know how He feels about certain things, how He responds to certain things, the way He goes about doing things, the way He goes about accomplishing His purposes in the earth. I have to tell you that without the Biblical foundation in understanding God, I would not be able to trust Him as I have learned to.
When learning about God in the Bible I came to discover that He has a VERY different way of bringing about His purposes. If I was God, I would vindicate those who believed in me all the time. I would always make sure my people won in EVERYTHING (lol). I would give those who belonged to me victory in everything they did. I would always make sure they knew that I was present wherever they went & in everything they did. But God doesn’t operate this way. Sometimes He allows things to happen to us. He allows us to experience setbacks, heartache, hardship, & loss. It’s precisely because of these things that make it difficult to trust God. The common idea is that if God loves me the way the Bible says then why doesn’t He make me win in all areas of my life? Why does it seem like He is not present in my circumstances even though I am supposed to believe that He is? These two things seem to constantly contradict each other & this is the major difficulty of not just Christians but for anyone who is trying to learn about God.
I want to point out to you that there are many cases of these contradictory situations in the Bible. I was amazed to read about the many people in the Bible who were vigorous followers of God yet endured extreme difficulty. I read about people who walked with God yet still endured challenging circumstances. Many of these opposing circumstances came about simply because they were doing what they believed God gave them the mission to do. While this is difficult to grasp, it does point to the fact that you can’t base your belief in God on your outside circumstances. I have found (through reading different stories in the Bible) that God often works through difficulty, not in the absence of it. What is even more baffling about the stories in the good book is that God is also revealed through the difficulties. I want to highlight that everyone who walked with God while they did endure hardship, they still managed to be in the right place at the right time to receive or accomplish what they had set out to accomplish.
My encouragement for you today is that you stop trying to follow God from the outside & start listening for Him to lead & guide you on the inside. You can’t base God’s activity on the things you see happening around you. My father once spoke to me during a period of turmoil & difficulty in my life. He said “it doesn’t have to feel good for God to be working it for your good.” Those words completely changed my perspective of God’s activity in my life. I was thinking that God only worked through the situations that looked pleasant, felt comfortable or seemed right. In reality my father’s words brought me back to a passage in the Bible that says God makes EVERYTHING work for my good. It doesn’t say that God only works through the good things.
From now on I want you to remind yourself that it doesn’t have to feel good for God to be working it for your good. God can use anything to bless you! Don’t let your situation fool you, God has a plan. He didn’t stop Daniel from going in the lion’s den, He worked through it. God didn’t stop Joseph from being sold into slavery, He worked through it. Consider that God broke Gideon’s army down to only 300 men & used those 300 to overcome an army of more than 50,000. If you were to judge those situations by what they looked like you might have given up. By looks alone success in each instance is otherwise impossible, until you add an unseen God into the equation. Keep the faith & ask God for guidance. Just because you can’t see Him doesn’t mean He is not there. He may be putting you on display to show you & those watching you that an unseen God can overcome a seen obstacle. Trust God’s power even when there is no apparent physical evidence of Him at the moment.