When the Lord Himself Becomes Our Trust

Beyond trusting God to having nothing but God

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,

whose trust is the LORD.”

— Jeremiah 17:7

There is a difference between trusting in the Lord and having the Lord as our trust.

The difference is almost imperceptible at first. Yet it may contain the whole spiritual life.

We often say that we trust God when what we mean is that we trust Him for something.

We trust Him to guide us.

To protect us.

To heal what is wounded.

To resolve what is uncertain.

To preserve what we love.

To show us what comes next.

And this is not false. It is the beginning of faith.

But Jeremiah speaks of something more absolute:

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.

Eventually God begins to remove the for something.

The fathers understood this stripping.

There comes a point when prayer is no longer sustained by the expectation that circumstances will change. We discover that faith cannot finally rest upon an outcome, an explanation, a vocation, a community, a reputation, a future, or even upon our understanding of what God is doing.

All of these may disappear.

And God remains.

This is where trust becomes something deeper than confidence.

It becomes surrender.

The soul no longer says only:

I trust that God will provide.

It begins to say:

God is my provision.

Not merely:

I trust that God will show me the way.

But:

God is my way.

Not merely:

I trust that God will save me.

But:

The Lord Himself is my salvation.

The difference is immense.

One still secretly possesses the future. The other has surrendered it.

The desert fathers went into the wilderness precisely for this reason. The desert stripped away the thousand secondary things upon which the heart quietly depends. There was nowhere to hide from hunger, loneliness, temptation, uncertainty, weakness, or death.

And there, beneath everything else, remained God.

This is why the desert was not fundamentally a place of deprivation.

It was a place of revelation.

When everything else becomes uncertain, the soul discovers what it has actually trusted.

Jeremiah gives us the image of the tree planted beside the water. Its strength does not lie in the weather. The heat still comes. The drought still comes. The landscape may become barren.

Yet beneath the earth the roots have found the stream.

That hiddenness matters.

The tree does not argue with the drought.

It does not demand rain.

It does not anxiously inspect its leaves.

Its roots have gone somewhere deeper than the weather.

So too the life of prayer.

There are seasons when almost everything above ground seems uncertain. The familiar structures of life change. Identities fall away. Human assurances become fragile. The future refuses to disclose itself. Even prayer may become extraordinarily simple.

Perhaps only the Name remains.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

And slowly the roots descend.

Below explanations.

Below plans.

Below fear.

Below the need to know.

Until they touch the hidden stream.

Then something changes.

We cease asking God to make the world secure enough for us to trust Him.

We begin to discover that He is our security in an insecure world.

This does not make us invulnerable. The fathers never taught such a thing. We may tremble. We may grieve. We may experience dread. We may feel the full poverty of our humanity.

But beneath the trembling there can exist something deeper:

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.

Perhaps this is one of the final lessons of surrender: I am not Providence.

I do not have to hold together what only God can hold together.

I do not have to know where the path ends.

I do not have to preserve an image of myself.

I do not have to secure tomorrow.

I do not even have to understand what God is doing with my life.

I need only remain.

The tree remains beside the stream.

The roots descend.

The Name is spoken.

Christ is there.

And perhaps eventually even the word trust becomes unnecessary, because the soul possesses nothing separate from the One in whom it trusts.

The Lord is no longer merely the One upon whom I depend.

He has become my dependence.

He is no longer merely the One to whom I entrust my life.

He has become my life.

Nothing promised.

Nothing grasped.

Nothing demanded.

Only God.

And God is enough.