Trust Sees God doing Things Here and Now when We Pray! Part I

Tip! If we, God's people expect to carry out the works of Christ that will glorify our Father, then we must believe in Him for the very work's sake, and pray fervently in His Name.

PRAYER does not stand alone. It is not an isolated duty or an independent principle. It lives in association with other Christian duties, prayer is married to other principles, and it is a partner with other graces. But to faith, prayer is unbreakably connected. Faith gives prayer its color and tone, shapes its character, and secures its results.

Trust is when our faith becomes unreserved, ratified and completed in our heart. There is, when all is said and done, a sort of serious and sincere effort in faith and its exercise. But trust is a firm belief; it is faith that grows into full flower. Trust is a conscious act, a fact of which we are aware of. According to the Holy Scriptures this idea of trust is the eye of the new-born soul, and the ear of the renewed soul. It is the feeling of the soul, the spiritual eye, the ear, the taste, the feeling -- all of these things have to do with trust.

How brilliant, how distinct, how conscious, how powerful, and more than all, how Scriptural is such a trust! How different from many forms of modern belief, so feeble, dry, and cold! These new phases of belief bring no consciousness of their presence, no "Joy unspeakable and full of glory" results from their exercise. They are, for the most part, adventures in the peradventures of the soul. There is no safe, sure trust in anything. The whole transaction takes place in the realm of "maybe and perhaps".

Trust like life, is a feeling, though much more than a feeling. An unfelt life is a contradiction; an unfelt trust is a misnomer, a delusion, a contradiction. Trust is the most felt of all attributes. It is all feeling, and it works only by love. An unfelt love is as impossible as an unfelt trust. The trust of which we are now speaking is a conviction: An unfelt conviction? How absurd!

Tip! Seeking God's will for our life - This type of prayer requires us to really open up our spirit and seek to hear what God is saying to us. We need to come humbly before him, asking him to use us as a tool for his work - and praying for guidance and wisdom as we seek to follow where his is leading us.

Trust sees God doing things here and now. Yes, and more. It rises to a high distinction, and looking into the invisible and the eternal, realizes that God has done things, and regards them as being already done. Trust brings eternity into the records and happenings of time, changes the substance of hope into the reality of completion, and transforms a promise into our present ownership. We know when we trust just as we know when we see, just as we are conscious of our sense of touch. Trust sees, receives, and holds. Trust is its own witness.

Yet, quite often, our faith is too weak to obtain God's greatest good, immediately; so it has to wait in loving, strong, prayerful, pressing obedience, until it grows in strength, and is able to bring down the eternal, into the realms of experience and time.

To this point, trust masses all its forces. Here it holds. And in the struggle, trust's grasp becomes mightier, and grasps, for itself, all that God has done for it in His eternal wisdom and abundance of grace.

In the matter of waiting in prayer, mightiest prayer, faith rises to its highest plane and becomes indeed the gift of God. It becomes the blessed nature and expression of our soul that is secured by a constant communication with, and continuing devotion to God.