Where is Your Trust?

Sometime earlier this year, we drove over a pot hole so deep we could’ve fallen through and landed in China. The thud was unmistakably damaging, and when we looked at the tire, it swelled like a blemish ready to explode. Knowing it needed to be replaced with a strong tire, I still drove on it. At times, I forgot. Other times, I was simply too busy to change it.

Once I saw the damage, I knew the truth. I knew it needed to be changed. I did nothing. Whether or not I admitted it, I trusted in that tire to hold on a little longer. I ignored the fact that a blowout could be dangerous. (While writing this, I watched tire blowout videos and scared myself—should have watched those way sooner!)

We do the same thing with much bigger and more important things in our life. As fleshly, earthly beings, we tend to put our trust in what we can see and touch. We trust our spouses to be faithful, our bosses to keep us employed, our friends to be loyal. We trust our health, our jobs, our income, our savings. Sometimes our ultimate trust goes to those things and not the Lord. This is dangerous and foolish, yet we do it anyway.

Isaiah 30:1-3 says,

“Ah, stubborn children,” declares the LORD, “who carry out a plan, but not mine, and who make an alliance, but not of my Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; who set out to go down to Egypt, without asking for my direction, to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the protection of Pharaoh turn to your shame, and the shelter in the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation.

Like the children of Israel who wanted to go back to Egypt because it was familiar and the reality of how bad it is was forgotten, we tend to want to go back to things because those things are familiar, and we have forgotten the reality of how bad it is. We want to put our trust in things and in people but not in the Lord. We build relationships that are dangerous. We do things without asking the Lord.

We get to where we don’t want to hear that our trust is in the wrong thing. We become “children unwilling to hear the instruction of the LORD; who say to the seers, ‘Do not see,’ and to the prophets, ‘Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things.…’” (Is. 30:9-10). We don’t want to be corrected. We like trusting in our spouses who are there for us, we like trusting the strength of our hard work, we like leaning on friends when they are kind, but Jeremiah 17:5 tells us, “Cursed is the man who puts his trust in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord.”

Now, back to my tire. When my mechanic saw it, he brought reality to my world. His face was alarmed and flat out said, "You cannot drive on this! It can blow anytime and has got to be changed!"

As for you, dear friend, it is the same and this is dangerous! Believe it or not, it’s like a car crash about to happen! Isaiah goes on to say, “it shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant; and its breaking is like that of a potter’s vessel that is smashed so ruthlessly….” You know where you are. The truth of what you’re trusting in is ringing in your heart. Listen to the Lord, and ask him to be your trust and your strength, nothing else. “In returning and in rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Is.30:15). Change where the breach of your trust is before you have a dangerously explosive blowout in your life!