Bible Text: Proverbs 3:5-6 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths. Proverbs 3:5-6, NLT

Allister Begg tells of the time he and his wife saw a cyclist with—and they could hardly believe their eyes—with a rather large dog on his back. They noticed that the dog had his front paws crossed in front of the rider and his head resting on the shoulder of the cyclist who was bent over pedaling the bike. While dogs may be man’s best friend, the canines I have had wouldn’t have cooperated with me that way.

The Beggs commented about the training that dog must have received. Then, a short while later that morning, they encountered the same rider who had stopped to chat with a friend. Allister’s wife struck up a conversation with the cyclist telling him how impressed she was with the dog, commenting, “You must have trained him from the time he was a puppy.” “No,” replied the cyclist, explaining that he had found the dog at the pound where almost certain death awaited him. He added, “He trusted me ever since I rescued him from the pound.”

Then she asked, “What kind of dog is he?” And the young man replied, “A pit bull!” Wow! That breed isn’t exactly known for snuggling up to strangers. Pit bulls are like junkyard dogs starved for a piece of human flesh. They are about as ill-natured as they come, yet the dog trusted his master implicitly. “Ever since I rescued him from the pound” he explained.

You don’t need a dictionary’s definition of the word trust if you can picture a pit bull who so trusts his master as to cling to his back, resting his head on his shoulder as the cyclist weaves his way through traffic. That’s trust! The dog didn’t worry about where his master was taking him. There was a relationship between those two that overrode the uncertainty of the future.

Do you wish that you could have that same kind of trust when it comes to believing that God will take you where He wants you to be as opposed to where you want to be? You remember the words of Proverbs 3:5-6 which say, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he make your paths straight.”

Over 300 times the Bible speaks of trust, and most of those expressions talk about what people trust or distrust, as the case may be. If you take time to make a study of them, you will learn that trust is part of faith—it is the flip side of belief which is intellectual. Trust involves putting into practice what you believe in theory or intellectually.

You believe that a bridge is strong enough to hold you, right? But when you put your weight on it, you trust it to hold you up. That’s the way it is with trusting God. You know others have found Him to be more than sufficient, more than able to rescue you from spiritual darkness which leads to death, to give you a hope and a future, yet you are so hesitant to turn loose and let Him take you where He wants you to go.

Trust is the look of a little child learning to walk, whose eyes are focused on a dad with outstretched arms, saying, ”Come to daddy; I won’t let you fall!” And to that you can add the picture of a pit bull on the back of his master as he pedals through traffic.

OK, friend, if a dog can trust his master and a little child his father, can you not trust God just for today? Can you allow him to take you where He wants you to go? When you decide that you can, you get a free ride as you enjoy the scenery.

Resource reading: Exodus 14