How to Trust the Lord Part 3

Light of the World Today

"And the Lord, He is the One who goes before you. He will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be dismayed."

Deuteronomy 31:8 NKJV

Parts 1 and 2 of this series established what trust means in practical terms, why it is not blind and how it is exercised in the daily decisions and ordinary pressures of real life. We looked at Abraham and Florence Chadwick in Part 1, and in Part 2 we examined Nick Vujicic whose entire life is a documented testimony to what happens when a person shifts from asking why to asking what God intends to display through their circumstances. Today we arrive at the hardest question in the entire series. What happens when you have genuinely trusted God, when you have leaned on him and not on your own understanding, when you have acknowledged him in all your ways, and the worst still comes?

Not the worst because you ignored God. Not the worst because you ran ahead of him. The worst while you were following closely. The diving accident that changes everything. The diagnosis that arrives while you are on your knees. The loss that finds you in a season of genuine faithfulness. That is the question nobody enjoys raising and that far too few devotions answer honestly. And it is precisely the question that this final part of our series on trusting the Lord is designed to address.

The Part of the Promise Most People Miss

Proverbs 3:5-6 promises that God will direct your paths when you trust him with all your heart and acknowledge him in all your ways. But it does not promise that the path will be smooth. It does not promise that the path will be short. It does not promise that the path will feel like the one you would have chosen if you had been given the option. He shall direct your paths is a promise about navigation, not about comfort. The NLT puts it plainly. He will show you which path to take. Not which path is easiest. Not which path is free from pain. Which path to take. Because sometimes the path to the purpose God has prepared runs directly through the territory you would never have entered voluntarily. And the God who is directing that path is not surprised by a single step of it.

"Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me."

Psalm 23:4 NLT

David does not say the dark valley is not dark. He says I will not be afraid because you are close beside me. The protection is not the removal of the valley. It is the presence of the one who walks through it with you. That is a completely different promise from the one most people are expecting when they begin a life of trusting God. They expect the valleys to disappear. The promise is that they will not walk through them alone. And there is a profound difference between a valley walked alone and a valley walked beside the God who has already seen the other side of it. The outcome is the same. The experience is entirely different. And for the person who has genuinely learnt to trust, the presence of God in the valley becomes more real and more vivid than it ever was in the green pasture.

A Verified Real World Example: Joni Eareckson Tada

On 30 July 1967, a seventeen year old girl named Joni Eareckson dived into the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland on a hot summer afternoon. She misjudged the shallowness of the water. She suffered a fracture between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae and became a quadriplegic, paralysed from the shoulders down, in a moment that lasted less than a second. She was a committed Christian at the time. She had been praying in the weeks before the accident that God would change her life and turn it around. She later reflected with extraordinary honesty that she got far more of an answer to that prayer than she had bargained for.

What followed the accident was not immediate peace and victorious trust. Joni described the early years in her autobiography as a time of suicidal despair. She could not move her hands or her legs. She lay staring at the ceiling for months on end. She desperately wanted to end her life but had no means to do so. The mental and spiritual anguish, by her own account, was as unbearable as the physical reality. She had trusted God. She had prayed. And she was lying paralysed in a hospital bed wondering whether God had any idea what he was doing with her life.

The turning point came not through a miraculous healing but through a sentence. A friend studying the Bible with her shared ten words that she later described as setting the course for her entire life. God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves. That single sentence reframed the accident entirely. Not as a failure of divine protection. Not as evidence that God was absent or indifferent. But as a sovereign permission, something God hated, allowed for the sake of something he loves even more, the redemption and encouragement of people who would otherwise have no one who understood their suffering from the inside.

"And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them."

Romans 8:28 NLT

From that foundation of trust, rebuilt not through easy circumstances but through a truth about God's character that reached deeper than the pain, Joni Eareckson Tada went on to found Joni and Friends in 1979, a global ministry to people with disabilities that has delivered wheelchairs to people in need across more than forty countries. She has written over forty five books. She has spoken around the world. She has served on the National Council on Disability in the United States. She paints by holding the brush in her mouth. And she has said publicly on more than one occasion that she would not trade the wheelchair for anything, because of what she has learnt about God inside it. She said at a ministry event decades after the accident, when a young volunteer pointed to the crowded room around them and asked whether she ever thought that none of it would be happening without the diving accident, she smiled and said it is why I thank God every day for my wheelchair.

That is not the statement of someone who never struggled to trust God. That is the statement of someone who, having struggled all the way through to the other side of the deepest valley of their life, discovered that the God who directed their path was telling the truth. All of it. Including the parts that made no sense in the first dark years of staring at a hospital ceiling.

What God Is Doing When the Worst Comes While You Are Trusting Him

Isaiah 48:10 in the NLT says I have refined you but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering. The furnace of suffering is not a place God sends people who have stopped trusting him. It is a place he specifically permits for people he is refining. Silver refined in a furnace comes out purer than it went in. The impurities that could not be removed any other way are removed by the heat. And the person who comes out of the furnace of a genuinely difficult season while holding onto God comes out carrying something that could not have been built in them any other way. A depth of trust. A quality of compassion. A credibility of testimony. An understanding of God's character that no amount of comfortable living could have produced.

"I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering."

Isaiah 48:10 NLT

The Amplified Bible's rendering of Romans 8:28 is worth returning to here in this context. It says God being a partner in their labor all things work together and are fitting into a plan for good. Fitting into a plan. That phrase describes an active, ongoing, purposeful assembly rather than a passive rearrangement. God is not tidying up after the damage has been done. He is actively fitting even the most painful and the most inexplicable pieces of your story into a plan that he has already seen completed from the other end. The wheelchair fits into the plan. The diagnosis fits into the plan. The loss fits into the plan. Not because those things are good in themselves. Because the God who is working is good. And his goodness is not defeated by the worst things that can happen to a person who trusts him.

A Deeper Look at What Leaning Not Means in Practice

The instruction to lean not unto your own understanding in Proverbs 3:5 takes on an entirely different weight when the situation you are facing is genuinely beyond explanation. Because in those moments your own understanding is not just limited. It is actively misleading. It is telling you that the God who allowed this cannot be trusted. That the evidence of the present moment overrides the testimony of all the previous moments when he proved faithful. That the valley means the shepherd has abandoned the sheep rather than that the shepherd is walking through it right alongside you.

Leaning not on your own understanding in those seasons does not mean pretending your understanding does not exist. It means actively choosing not to give it the final vote. You allow it to speak. You hear what it says. And then you turn to what God says about the same situation and you choose to give that the final authority. Joni did not pretend she could not see the hospital ceiling. She stared at it for months. But gradually, truth by truth and word by word, she chose to give God's perspective on her situation the final vote over the conclusions her own understanding was reaching from the ceiling of a ward in Maryland. And the person she became through that process became a gift to millions of people who needed exactly what she had learnt in exactly the place she learnt it.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight."

Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV

Three Things to Do When You Are in the Valley While Trusting God

1. Stay in the Word, especially the parts that feel the furthest from your current reality

The single most important decision Joni made in the early months was to keep reading the Bible even when it offered no immediate relief and made no immediate sense. The friend who came to her bedside and shared God's Word with her introduced the truth that eventually reframed her entire story. The Word reaches places that feelings cannot access and builds what no amount of positive thinking can sustain. Hebrews 4:12 in the NLT says the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit. In the valley you need something sharper than your own thoughts to cut through to what is actually true. The Word is that instrument. Stay in it. Read it aloud if necessary. Let it be the loudest voice in the room even when everything else is shouting.

2. Speak what God says rather than what you see

2 Corinthians 4:18 in the AMP says we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen; for the things which are visible are temporal, but the things which are invisible are eternal. In the valley the visible things are loudest. The pain is visible. The limitation is visible. The loss is visible. But Paul says the unseen things are more real than the seen ones because the seen ones are temporary and the unseen ones are eternal. Training yourself to speak the unseen realities aloud, to declare what God says about your situation over the top of what your circumstances are saying, is one of the most practical and most powerful acts of trust available to a person in the valley. Not denial. Declaration. There is a significant difference. Denial pretends the visible is not there. Declaration acknowledges the visible and then asserts the priority of the eternal over it.

"We don't look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever."

2 Corinthians 4:18 NLT

3. Look for the person the valley is preparing you to serve

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 in the NIV says God comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. The valley you are in right now is producing something in you that nobody who has not been through it can give to the people who will later need it. Joni's wheelchair qualified her to reach people that no amount of theological training could have qualified her to reach. The specific shape of your suffering is producing the specific shape of your ministry to people who are in the same valley and who desperately need someone who knows it from the inside. Do not waste what you are learning. The pain you are experiencing now is being converted, by the God who permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves, into a resource for someone else's healing. Start looking for who that person might be.

So the Light of the World word for today and for the close of this entire three part series is this. Trusting God does not mean the valley disappears. It means you do not walk through it alone. The path he directs may go through places you would never have chosen. But he is in every one of them, actively fitting every piece into a plan he has already seen completed. Stay in the Word. Speak what he says. Look for the person the valley is preparing you to serve. And one day, perhaps sooner than you think, you will look back at what you are walking through today and say with Joni that it is why you thank God every day for the very thing you once most wanted him to remove.

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