Trust & Obey or Obey & Trust

 

That is a question in which motive as a Christian one lives under is determined by rahter one is pleasing God or trusting God. Those are two very different motives. 

Being a God pleaser is simply obeying. Trusting God in every part of your life is much more desirable and can lead to obedience. So, are you a God pleaser or a God truster?

Are you in the motivational land of pleasing God (Obeying) or Trusting God? The result of being in the land of pleasing God is feeling like we can never do enough to please Him. It's a hard place to be. We even sometimes put on mask in this endeavor. Mask that don't show our true selves. We must face our weaknesses (our true selves) and trust God to help us through our challenges (weaknesses) in trying to be obedient towards God. That is where trusting God comes in. He knows us better than anyone else. If we can't trust Him to help us in our weakness, then obeying him only creates a false sense of trusting Him. It's kinda like saying obey then trust. It doesn't work. We must first trust God with our true selves, our weaknesses in every part of our being in order to obey. When we first trust God, He will add to our being a desire to obey Him. He will show us our weaknesses and give us strength to work through them in the endeavor of obeying Him. No, it is not easy to see our true selves (our weaknesses), and it can even be painful, but that is also where trust in Him comes as a rescuing strength. It is more about who we are, than out of what we do. God created us as we are. Facing who we are and our weaknesses requires that we trust God with who we are; weaknesses and all. When we can face who we are, we can see ourselves as God sees us, without self-disgust, fear, and desperate proving of oneself to God. God loves us as we are; after all, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.." (Jeremiah 1:5). We don't need to prove to God who we are by desperately pleasing Him. We don't need to put on mask as performers to God. We sometimes put on mask in the public to prove to others how good a Christian we are, and then those people never really get to know our true selves. Our true selves in all our weaknesses. Don't try so hard in pleasing God, because one will be bogged down in that land of never completely fulfilling God's plan for our life, simply out of never letting Him see our weaknesses so He can mature us to where we need to be to fulfill His plan for us. Trust that He knows and loves us as we are, and in this maruity will bring the obedience needed to fulfill His plan for us. Trust Him with your true face, your true self without the mask of desperate obedience. You can become a God Pleasure Christian and adorn the mask of hiding behind obedience, or you can become a God Truster and adorn the maturity of a Christ like being. Your choice, of course. But, I do believe God is more pleased with one trusting Him with one's total being and one's life, more so than just obeying Him without that sense of trusting Him with one's being and life. Additionally, just obeying Him without trusting Him, puts our sin at the forefront. God already knows how sinful we are from the event of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He wants us to trust that, even so, He still loves us and can forgive us if we can trust that He is able to do just that. He is and has been willing to help us see our sin and trust that He can move us past our weaknesses if we do not hide our weaknesses from Him in fear of what He may see. Adam and Eve hid their weakness from God when they realized they were naked. We have been hiding our sinful selves behind a mask of obedience since. Why is it man can not trust that, even as sinners, God still loves us as we are? It is where in trusting Him in showing Him our weak sinful selves that the strength to obey Him comes. We cannot expect simply obeying will wipe away our sinful nature. It will not. One must trust God to help us in maturing our being to be more Christ like. And that first starts with trusting God with our sinful nature. We will always be sinners. Living in the land of pleasing God, can not and will not cleanse us of that; it's impossible. That's why we must trust God to love us no matter. Don't wear the mask of a God pleaser, take it off and let God see the real you; He already knows you. God will work with our true selves, sinners, if we can first Trust Him to do so. 

Trust that God Loves You no matter your sinful nature! And, the desire to obey will follow!

~Doris