Appendix: Offering our Trust to God

I wanted to write a note at the end of this book about the difficulty and unpredictability of life.  So much of what happens to us is outside of our control, in my case a freak accident sent me into the most difficult 4 months of my life.  I contended for my healing in faith from a desire to please the Lord and He answered my prayer.

I believe the Scripture teaches that it is always God’s Will to heal the sick and I do not believe that God is the author of sickness of pain.  This largely revolves around the Biblical records of Jesus’ life.  Everywhere He went He healed the sick and there was never a sick person that was brought to Him that He did not heal.  Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus Christ is the “exact representation of the Father’s Nature”.  Which in short states that the way Jesus lived shows us who God the Father is and how He thinks.

Sickness and pain are the result of the Fall and will not exist in Heaven (Revelation 21:4).  The prayer that Jesus taught us to pray was that the Will of God would be done on earth “as it is in Heaven” (Matthew 6:10).  Since there is no sickness in Heaven then we pray that the will of God would be done on the earth and banish the sickness in our lives just like He has already banished it in Heaven.

But we also recognize that in this world we will have trouble (John 16:33) and that there are many things that we don’t understand in life that happen to us.  Rather than stumbling over what we don’t understand, we take up belief that no matter what we face in life that God will carry us through, and we offer that faith to Him as a sacrifice of worship.

~

I was confronted with this reality when a couple of months after I had recovered a member of my church (which is a smallish church where everybody knows each other) was in a car accident and ended up losing a leg.

When I first saw the message about this on our Church’s social media thread, I was so taken aback that I was literally sick to my stomach for about 3 hours.  I was devastated. In fact, I had started writing this book and had to stop because I struggled so much with what had happened to him.

I went to visit him in the hospital hoping to be a friendly face and hoping to encourage him in some way.  But when I went there, I saw him in such an optimistic mood that it really lifted me up.  He was determined that this was not going to hold him back and he is still determined to this day.  His will to overcome this situation is of Divine origin.  And there is nothing better to teach to kids (or really anybody) than his testimony – which is that sometimes things happen in life that we can’t control but no matter what we lift up our heads to the Lord and trust that He will help us and bring us through.

I was able to see that though I don’t understand why this happened, that he now gets to offer the Lord a sacrifice of trust to give him the ability to walk (and even run with a prosthetic) and carry out whatever the tasks of the day require.  This offering is something that is precious to God and very compelling to witness.

He offers to the Lord an overcoming faith (1 John 5:4-5).  A trust that God will make it so he can still do the things he did before and that even more so that He will open up doors for him supernaturally that would have never been opened before.

The God-pleasing approach to every difficultly in life will always be to offer our trust to God as a sacrifice of worship.  It was true in my situation and also is true now in his.  No matter what we go through in this life we can always touch the heart of God by believing that He can deliver us and that He will carry us through.

May we always offer this to You Lord. 

Amen.

Previous Chapter