Your fears can keep you from trusting God. “God won’t care for me.” “I’ll never be married.” “I won’t survive the cancer.” “I won’t make enough to provide or to get us out of debt.” Your worries roll around in your heart and mind, telling you to trust in yourself and in “your own understanding,” because God must not be enough.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. (Prov. 3:5)

Trusting God is something that Christians talk about a lot, and yet we tend to view it as optional. There are times when we trust God and times when we don’t, and we think that this is okay. But distrust is more serious than that; it positions us to trust in other things (see Ps. 20:7)—none of which deserve our trust. Distrust in God also makes us much more anxious. Like a ship in a storm without an anchor, we have a hard time weathering treacherous circumstances, because we’re not centering our lives on Christ.

A better understanding of trust will help us here. Proverbs 3:5 points us to a robust biblical trust that helps us to fight our fears.

Trust is external (“in the Lord”). By calling it external, I mean that the foundation of trust is not inside us. Biblical trust is based on something—Someone—outside ourselves. Trusting God is not psyching ourselves up to believe the impossible. It involves resting on God’s character.

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