The #1 Lie Keeping You from Trusting God — Ami Loper

What’s your trigger? What is it that keeps you worrying? It may be your finances, your career, your relationships. True confessions: for me, it’s my kids. It may sound cliché, but my heart is bound up with them. Now that they are all adults and living lives of their own, things have changed for them, but not so much for me. My heart is still connected to them – to how they are doing, what decisions they’re making, what befalls them.

I always say that if you refuse to learn something in one arena, the Lord brings the same lessons to another arena. And what I struggled with so much in my children’s childhood is turning into the lesson I’m fighting to learn in their adulthood: I can trust God with my children.

And when I say I can trust God, I’m not saying that nothing bad will ever happen to my children – this last year certainly proved that. But I am saying that trusting God means He will be with me and my children through whatever is going on and He will not allow it to overwhelm us. And although it is natural and compassionate for our hearts to break when our children are devastated by loss and grief, it isn’t trusting to allow their safety or choices to plague our minds and give us sleepless nights.

I fought throughout 2018 to learn this and accept this. I could just begin to see a glimmer of hope that I could overcome the constant and controlling worry when I began to sense a lie of the enemy being whispered to keep me trapped in worry.

I would pray and give my child to the Lord and tell Him I trusted Him, but then, as I would feel the burden lift from my shoulders, as strange sensation would needle me: guilt. I realized that I was feeling guilty for trusting God, for not being anxious and upset over the child and their situation! Was I simply being uncaring or even irresponsible, as the enemy was trying to tell me? Thankfully, the Holy Spirit was quick to point out that this was an attempt of the enemy to get me to stay under the influence of anxious thoughts and not fully trust the Lord. My mind, which was accustomed to trying to figure everything out while crying, “God, Help!!” was unaccustomed to the peace that passes understanding.

How about you? Are there times you try to relinquish something to the Lord’s hands only to have guilt or the accusation that you aren’t behaving responsibly coerce you into picking that burden back up? Has the enemy told you those common lies of, “If you don’t take care of this, nothing will change” or “Maybe if you think about this (aka worry) long enough and hard enough, you’ll come up with the answer.” Maybe you feel like the problem is partly your fault, so you must be responsible for the answer.

I’m not advocating irresponsibility, callous indifference or apathy. But I think we all know that, even as we are being responsibly obedient, we need to maintain a heart that is at peace. I don’t need to get uptight and anxious in order to “figure it out.” In fact, being uptight and anxious is counterproductive to hearing the direction and wisdom that the Holy Spirit is probably trying to communicate to me!

Therefore, it is essential that when I have determined to cast my burdens on the Lord (as I’m instructed in Psalm 55:22), I must also prepare myself to combat any lie that the enemy may raise in order to tempt me back into worry. It is then that the rest of Psalm 55:22 can be realized in my life. It says, “Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.” It is in the casting of my burden that the Lord is given access to my heart to sustain me and to help me to stand firm.

“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” Isaiah 26:3

For more on “Is God as Generous as You Think?” click HERE!