CCEF’s David Powlison:
The phrase “Trust the Lord” is the deepest of all wise counsels. (The Scriptures call, invite, and command us to trust God in a hundred different ways. And God’s show-and-tell gives innumerable reasons to trust him. And the sins and sorrows of life are such that trust in God is our only hope.) But these words can be misused by “proof-texting” with a person who is struggling. Most of us have heard or overheard someone saying to a struggler, “You just need to trust the Lord,” as if that were all that needs to be said or can be said. Usually, more needs to be said for the relevance of this sweetest of counsels to be understood. Consider how this call, command, and exhortation can be used in a richer way that avoids the pitfall of “proof-texting.”
For example, scores of psalms call us to trust the Lord. As they do so, they always “locate” that call, so that it does not hang in a vacuum. They portray life’s troubles, inviting us to map our experience onto the psalmist’s experience. They recognize our temptation to forget God, to sin, or to be crushed under awareness of suffering or guilt. They reveal things about God that invite our heartfelt trust. They walk out how trusting God thinks, feels, talks, and acts. These details of how God meets us in our internal struggles and external troubles give the command a context. This makes the call to “trust the Lord” directly relevant and life-rearranging.
Or consider how Proverbs 29:25 puts things: “The fear of man lays a snare, but he who trusts the Lord is safe.” This sentence orients us to one of the heart’s instinctive disloyalties (we tend to take our cues from the opinions of other people). It orients us to the negative consequences of a false trust (life gets very complicated, tangled, and confused). It orients us to the Lord as the person in whom we will find flourishing and safety (the backdrop of promises and revelations of God in the rest of Scripture). And, by implication, many other significant factors can be reckoned with in learning how to take this passage to heart, e.g.,
- the particular people or situations that you find difficult or intimidating,
- the particular destructive emotions, thoughts, words, and actions that come forth when you misplace your core loyalty,
- the particular ways that faith can now respond constructively to intimidating people and situations,
- an understanding of your past that illumines when, how, and where patterns of fear of man became fixed characteristics,
- an ability to anticipate future situations so that you can wisely and prayerfully plan how you want to respond,
- the reasons for exceeding joy and gratitude as your Savior and Lord works to set you free of crippling patterns of fear.
The application of this call to trust the Lord becomes meaningfully located in your entire life context.
Read the full thing, which contains definitions of both positive and negative proof-texting and how we should think about this.
