How do we trust God's love?

HOW can we trust God's love when the evidence of chance, disease, lack, and so forth seems so overwhelming? Certainly a casual trust in His love can be washed away by the pounding tidesof disheartening mortal experience. We need something much more than surface faith if we're really to trust in God.

The Bible calls on us to cultivate a deep, firm reliance: ``Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.''1

If we give our heart to something,we give a maximum of time and effort tothat endeavor. It is seldom far from our thoughts. It is a cherished priority, a cultivated treasure. So if we seek to give all our heart to trusting God, we are engaged in a serious, daily endeavor. Genuine trust isn't something that just happens. This is not to suggest that having confidence in God is alien to us or extraordinary. God provides us with all that is worthy and good, and so the capacity to trust His love is natural. Fear or faithlessness is unnatural.

But we need to exercise trust, practice relying on God's love right in the midstof apparent discord. The Psalmist sang: ``Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.''2 And, ``What time I am afraid,I will trust in thee.''3

This is not a call for blind or dogmatic trust, but rather for the kind of reliance that Christ Jesus consistently showed. When the physical evidence of discord seemed unstoppable, Jesus firmly relied on God's love. He disbelieved in the supposed validity of sickness and age, and he proved that God's love is a law governing our being. He showed that God's love, when fully understood, is always superior to the claims of evil.

Was Jesus exemplifying a kind of trust impossible for us to emulate? Or was he marking the way for his followers in all generations? Christian Science teaches that Jesus is the Way-shower and that we can begin, in modest ways, to exercise Christlike trust.

Recently I had occasion to gain greater confidence in God's love. When I arrived home after completing several errands,I realized that my wallet was missing. Since our family was soon to take a trip, the wallet contained an unusually large amount of cash.

As I set out to retrace my steps, I also began to pray. For many years, as a follower of Christ Jesus and a student of Christian Science, I have been striving and praying to trust God's love. So it was natural for me to pray when facing any problem.

I prayed to see that God's law of love is ever active, not subject to interruption or exception. I affirmed the spiritual fact that God, good, has all power and that evil, including chance and dishonesty,can have no control over God and His creation.

As I continued to pray, I felt a deep, sure faith in God's law of love. I felt virtually no fear, even when the wallet didn't turn up at the first three locations I checked. I reasoned that God's love must either be omnipotent or impotent, and not somewhere in between.

Soon I found the wallet. It was in plain view about ten feet away from a busy sidewalk where I had been earlier in the day. The wallet's contents were intact. Gratitude for God's care filled my heart. To me this seemed something much more than luck.

God's law of love is dependable. We can discover this reality step by step. Each day we can learn, through faithful prayer and study of the Bible, to abandon faithlessness and to put full confidence in our omnipotent Father-Mother God. As Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has written, ``...our trust is in the Almighty God, who ruleth in heaven and upon earth, and none can stay His hand or say, `What doest thou?'''4

The more we trust God, the more we find that His love is not a faint, flickering ray of light but a universal brightness.

1Proverbs 3:5. 2Psalms 62:8. 3Psalms 56:3. 4The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 200.

You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up....Let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them. Psalms 5:3,11