715 Trusting Through Fear - Psalm 56:3

How confident are you about God? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. If you hear this on the day, it airs, we're in the middle of a marketplace mission trip, and on day three, we talk about knowing what we believe. This year as I record this 2022, my word for the year has been trust, and so I wanna spend a few episodes talking about trust and I thought it would be good to begin that on the day where we talk about knowing what we believe. Our passage today is Psalm 56:3, and I'm reading from the New American Standard Bible. But this is very common in all of them. It says "when I am afraid, I will put my trust in you."

The Psalmist is talking to God and he's asking God to be gracious to him, and he's asking God to guide him and direct him in this Psalm. Psalm 56, I'm studying more today, especially because he references trust in here three times. It says it again in verse four and in verse 11. The Psalmist is learning to trust God and he says, "when I am afraid, I will put my trust in you." I don't know about you, but I don't often think of myself as being afraid. Sometimes my fear shows up as anger. Many of us, I think have learned to deflect our fear into something else. We call it anxiety or panic, or we'll worry about things that we don't control. We think about them over and over and over again.

"When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you, Lord." I wanna put my trust in you. I wanna physically take the insides of me and say, "Nope, I'm sorry. We're not gonna burn any calories on that today. We're going to relax instead and focus on God." That's what I hope we do in our daily life.

And the reason why I believe that comes back around to this third daily activity in the marketplace mission trip about knowing what we believe, this all relates to the confidence we have in God. I believe it's so easy to put our trust in money, to put our trust in things, to put our trust in the number of people that were connected to online or the people we know that we could call if we had a problem, or to put our trust in our savings account, or in the things that are going on in the world.

But our trust really doesn't belong there. Our trust belongs on God. He's the one who provides for us. God is the one who's in charge, and He's who we should fear. Our fear should be of God. I don't wanna let Him down. I don't want to live a life that comes any shorter than necessary. I wanna live a life that measures up to what God intends for me to do.

I wanna take part in the actions that he has for me. And that means that I don't worry about my circumstances nearly as much as I look forward to opportunities to use my time and my energy and my resources to be a blessing to others. We're called to serve people. When I know what I believe I can state in one or two sentences, how I trust God. There are limitations to my trust, we all have places where we are afraid. But when I am afraid, I want to then deliberately put my trust in God.

And so today my challenge for us is let's work on our two-sentence statement, one or two-sentence statement about why we're different. That's the whole point of knowing what we believe, even if you're not on the marketplace mission trip, take a moment and just think about how you would answer someone else if they said, "Hey, why are you doing this? Why are you going out of your way to help me. Why are you being so generous?" Any of those kinds of questions, be able to answer those because you trust Jesus. Answer that by how your motives originated. I wanna put my trust in God, and then I'm free to give more than what might seem reasonable, to work harder than what might others might expect.

Let's live in such a way that we're giving our things away and trusting God. In God we trust. "When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you." That's my action for today. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thanks for joining us on the Follower of One podcast. And if you're taking part in it on the follower of one marketplace, mission trip.

You can check out all of the resources that we have with Follower of One by joining our online community at https://community.followerofone.org.

Thanks very much.

How confident are you about God? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. If you hear this on the day, it airs, we're in the middle of a marketplace mission trip, and on day three, we talk about knowing what we believe. This year as I record this 2022, my word for the year has been trust, and so I wanna spend a few episodes talking about trust and I thought it would be good to begin that on the day where we talk about knowing what we believe. Our passage today is Psalm 56:3, and I'm reading from the New American Standard Bible. But this is very common in all of them. It says "when I am afraid, I will put my trust in you."

The Psalmist is talking to God and he's asking God to be gracious to him, and he's asking God to guide him and direct him in this Psalm. Psalm 56, I'm studying more today, especially because he references trust in here three times. It says it again in verse four and in verse 11. The Psalmist is learning to trust God and he says, "when I am afraid, I will put my trust in you." I don't know about you, but I don't often think of myself as being afraid. Sometimes my fear shows up as anger. Many of us, I think have learned to deflect our fear into something else. We call it anxiety or panic, or we'll worry about things that we don't control. We think about them over and over and over again.

"When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you, Lord." I wanna put my trust in you. I wanna physically take the insides of me and say, "Nope, I'm sorry. We're not gonna burn any calories on that today. We're going to relax instead and focus on God." That's what I hope we do in our daily life.

And the reason why I believe that comes back around to this third daily activity in the marketplace mission trip about knowing what we believe, this all relates to the confidence we have in God. I believe it's so easy to put our trust in money, to put our trust in things, to put our trust in the number of people that were connected to online or the people we know that we could call if we had a problem, or to put our trust in our savings account, or in the things that are going on in the world.

But our trust really doesn't belong there. Our trust belongs on God. He's the one who provides for us. God is the one who's in charge, and He's who we should fear. Our fear should be of God. I don't wanna let Him down. I don't want to live a life that comes any shorter than necessary. I wanna live a life that measures up to what God intends for me to do.

I wanna take part in the actions that he has for me. And that means that I don't worry about my circumstances nearly as much as I look forward to opportunities to use my time and my energy and my resources to be a blessing to others. We're called to serve people. When I know what I believe I can state in one or two sentences, how I trust God. There are limitations to my trust, we all have places where we are afraid. But when I am afraid, I want to then deliberately put my trust in God.

And so today my challenge for us is let's work on our two-sentence statement, one or two-sentence statement about why we're different. That's the whole point of knowing what we believe, even if you're not on the marketplace mission trip, take a moment and just think about how you would answer someone else if they said, "Hey, why are you doing this? Why are you going out of your way to help me. Why are you being so generous?" Any of those kinds of questions, be able to answer those because you trust Jesus. Answer that by how your motives originated. I wanna put my trust in God, and then I'm free to give more than what might seem reasonable, to work harder than what might others might expect.

Let's live in such a way that we're giving our things away and trusting God. In God we trust. "When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you." That's my action for today. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thanks for joining us on the Follower of One podcast. And if you're taking part in it on the follower of one marketplace, mission trip.

You can check out all of the resources that we have with Follower of One by joining our online community at https://community.followerofone.org.

Thanks very much.