Light of the World Today
"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him."
Job 13:15 KJV
In Part 1, we built the architecture of a successful daily life. Seven disciplines. Trust, meditation, prayer, fasting, active faith, positive confession, and daily obedience. We looked at the angelic dimension of daily success and how a life fully surrendered to God positions you to receive the full measure of heaven's resources. If you applied those disciplines faithfully, you will have already noticed something shifting in the quality of your days.
But there is a conversation that Part 1 did not have. It is the one that happens after the disciplines are in place. After you have been meditating on the Word, praying continually, fasting, acting in faith, and confessing positively. And the breakthrough has not yet come. The diagnosis has not changed. The marriage is still struggling. The business has not turned around. The prodigal has not come home. You are doing everything right, and the circumstances are still saying something that contradicts what God has promised. What do you do with trust then? That is the conversation Part 2 is for.
The Trust That Costs Nothing Is Worth Nothing
Job was a man who had done everything right. The very first verse of his book tells us so. He was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. He was wealthy, respected, deeply loved by his family, and covered in prayer. He prayed for his children every morning in case they had sinned inadvertently. He was, by every measurement that the ancient world and the modern world would both recognise, a success. And then in a single day, he lost everything. His children, his livestock, his wealth, and eventually his health. Everything that the seven disciplines were supposed to produce had been stripped away from a man who was practising them faithfully.
His wife told him to curse God and die. His friends told him his suffering was the result of hidden sin. The theological explanations available to him were either blasphemy or false accusation. And in the middle of all of it, Job said something that is one of the most extraordinary statements of trust in all of human literature. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. That is not the trust of a man who is doing well. That is the trust of a man who has decided that God is worth trusting regardless of what the current circumstances are reporting. That is the trust that costs everything. And it is the only kind of trust that is genuinely unshakeable.
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
Romans 8:28 NIV
Romans 8:28 is one of the most quoted verses in the Bible and one of the most misunderstood. Paul does not say God works all things together for good for those who love him. He does not say all things are good. He says God works all things together for good. The word together is the key word. The loss alone is not good. The betrayal alone is not good. The delay alone is not good. But God is a weaver, and he is working all of those threads simultaneously into something that, seen from the right distance, produces a pattern that could not have been created any other way. The loom is not broken. The weaver has not left the room. He is still working. That is what trust looks like in the waiting season.
The Hidden Dimension of Trust: What God Is Building While You Are Waiting
There is an insight about the waiting seasons of life that is rarely taught with the depth it deserves. Most people treat waiting as an interruption to the real work of building their life. But Scripture consistently presents waiting as the most productive part of the process. Not because nothing is happening. But because the most important things that need to happen are happening underground, where you cannot see them.
An oak tree spends more time and energy building its root system before it puts on visible growth than it does at any other stage of its life. The root grows first because the root determines everything. The depth of the root is the ceiling of the height. A tree with shallow roots cannot grow tall without becoming a danger to everything around it. And a person whose character has not been rooted to the same depth as their gifting is one of the most dangerous things in any community, in any marriage, in any organisation. The waiting season, when properly understood, is the root-building season. God is not delaying your breakthrough. He is ensuring that what he is building in you is deep enough to hold what he is about to give you.
"But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."
Isaiah 40:31 KJV
The Hebrew word for wait in Isaiah 40:31 is qavah. It does not mean sitting passively and doing nothing. It means to twist together, to intertwine, like threads being wound tightly around each other to form a cord that is stronger than any single thread could be alone. Waiting on the Lord is the active process of intertwining your life with his so completely that the resulting cord cannot be broken by whatever comes against it. You come out of genuine waiting stronger than you went in. Not despite the waiting. Because of it.
Joseph waited thirteen years from the dream to the throne. Abraham waited twenty-five years from the promise to the birth of Isaac. David waited approximately fifteen years from his anointing by Samuel to his actual coronation as king of all Israel. Every one of those waiting seasons was not empty time. It was preparation time. The specific experiences of each waiting season produced the exact character qualities that the eventual assignment would require. Joseph could not have managed the famine or reconciled with his brothers without the patience and perspective that years of injustice had built in him. The waiting was not a detour from the destination. It was the preparation for it.
The Three Enemies of Daily Trust and How to Defeat Them
Trust does not fail suddenly. It erodes gradually through three consistent enemies that every believer faces in daily life. Naming them honestly is the first step to defeating them because an enemy you can see is an enemy you can resist.
The first enemy is comparison. Nothing erodes trust in God's individual plan for your life faster than watching someone else's plan appear to be working better and faster than yours. When Abraham's nephew Lot chose the well-watered plains of Jordan for himself and left Abraham with the less attractive land, it would have been entirely natural for Abraham to feel short-changed. But God immediately spoke to him and said, "Lift your eyes and look." What God showed Abraham in that moment was a view of what was already his that Lot's choice could not diminish, and that Abraham's feelings about the deal could not change. The promise of God for your life is not in competition with the promise of God for anyone else's life. Stop measuring your chapter four against someone else's chapter fourteen.
"Lift now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever."
Genesis 13:14-15 KJV
The second enemy is explanation. When things are not going the way we expected, the human mind immediately reaches for an explanation. Why is this happening? What did I do wrong? Is this a punishment? Is this a test? Is this a sign that I misheard God? The search for an explanation is not wrong in itself. But it becomes dangerous when it leads you to make conclusions about God's character or his commitment to you based on the current state of your circumstances. Job's friends had an explanation for everything that was happening to Job. They were completely and utterly wrong. Not every difficult season has an explanation that is available to you in the middle of it. Sometimes the only right response to a season you cannot explain is the one Job eventually arrived at a posture of trust before a God whose ways are higher than yours.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Isaiah 55:8-9 KJV
The third enemy is premature conclusion. This is the enemy that causes more people to abandon their trust at the worst possible moment than any other. It is the tendency to decide that because the answer has not come by a certain point in time, it is not coming at all. Elijah prayed for rain on Mount Carmel and sent his servant to look at the sky seven times before a cloud the size of a man's hand appeared. If the servant had stopped at six and reported nothing to see, and Elijah had concluded that the prayer was not working, the most dramatic answer to prayer in the Old Testament would never have arrived. The cloud that became the storm was already forming. The answer was already in motion. The timing was not yet visible from where the servant was standing.
"And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not."
1 Kings 18:44 KJV
Your answer may currently be the size of a man's hand. Small. Barely visible. Easy to dismiss as nothing significant. Do not dismiss it. Do not conclude that nothing is happening because what is happening has not yet grown large enough for you to see clearly. The storm that Elijah had been trusting God for began with a cloud so small that it would have been entirely reasonable to say it was nothing. Keep trusting. Keep watching. Keep praying. The rain is already on its way.
Learn more from Part 3, which is the next devotion.