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Our Christian life is a relationship with our Creator that begins through our trust in Him as the One who took the punishment for our sins through the sacrifice of His Son, forgave our sins and adopted us as His children. We know that this was through His love that we did not deserve. We can never do anything to earn this favour from God. When we enter into this relationship, we must not forget that it is not primarily a matter of understanding doctrines or accepting certain facts such as how Jesus was born, died and rose again from the dead. These facts helped us to know who God really is and how much He hates sin but loves us, and then we responded by putting our trust in Him.

Then we begin to face many types of situations that attack this trust in God. They can be painful situations in our life that make us wonder where God is, why He is not helping us, why He is not doing for us what He has done for others, why our sincere prayers are not being answered, etc. These are truly difficult challenges we are forced to face. We don't start with unbelief or lack of faith in God, but we may slowly find ourselves doubting God.

Another set of challenges to our faith is that we cannot find answers to genuine questions concerning God's nature, His word, His dealings with people, etc. Many intellectual people come on the scene and try to prove that we cannot rely on God or His word. We are genuinely perplexed even though we don't want to stop believing in God or even to question Him.

"Trust in the LORD with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding" (Pr.3:5). Let us realise that as created beings we cannot ever expect to understand everything, and that if we try to base our decisions of life on our limited understanding, we may go wrong completely and not even realise it. This happens to many Christians when they face difficult situations in life which they cannot figure out. They come to conclusions about God based on what they think, which seem to be perfectly reasonable to them, and give up their faith in God. To them it looks very clear that they cannot trust in God because of certain things that look wrong to them. What they don't realise is that if only they had sought God, without leaning on their own limited understanding, He would have taught them and given them understanding. But depending proudly on themselves takes them away from God.

God had told Adam and Eve that if they ate the forbidden fruit they would die. But instead of trusting Him and His word, they chose to lean on their own understanding which made them to imagine that the fruit would be good for them (Ge.3:6). They gave up their trust in God who had created them, and chose to depend on their own limited understanding.

We will remain unable to figure out many things, but let us not doubt God or what He has revealed. If we can take the position that God is trustworthy, we can run to Him as to a fortress and stay safe with Him.

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