Lydia Brownback - Trust: A Godly Womans Adornment

Trust

Copyright 2008 by Lydia Brownback

Published by Crossway Books
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jon McGrath

Cover illustration: iStock

First printing, 2008

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible:English Standard Version. Copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NKJV are from The Holy Bible: The New King JamesVersion. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NIV are from The Holy Bible: New InternationalVersion. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brownback, Lydia, 1963

Trust : a godly womans adornment / Lydia Brownback.

p. cm. (On-the-go devotionals ; #1)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-58134-957-3 (tpb)

1. Trust in God. 2. Christian womenReligious life. I. Title. II. Series.

BV4637.B825

2008

248.8'43dc22

2007037924

VP 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

With gratitude to God
for Russ,
the rock of our family,
and
for Lisa,
who sacrifices much
for all of us

Contents

Tornado rips through Kansas town... four dead in campusshooting... suicide bomber blows up school bussuch news stories flash across the ticker tapes on our television screens. Day or night, we are bombarded with breaking news alerts of triple homicides, abused children, and the steady march toward moral collapse in Western civilization. And then there are the painful realities of our own livesabandonment, disappointment, sickness, sorrow. Will the stream of death, loss, and destruction never end? The good news is that these heartbreaks will indeed cease. The end will come with the return of Jesus Christ. God has promised this, and he always fulfills his promises. In the meantime, all the horrors we witness on our television screens are not catching God off-guard. He has everything under the control of his mighty hand, which means that we have no reason to be afraid. So why do so many of us who profess to know Jesus Christ go about our lives in fear? Although Gods Word tells us we have nothing to fear, the fact remains that many of us are afraid or anxious much of the time.

Do you struggle with fear? Have you felt its icy grip immobilizing your heart? Perhaps you arent afraid exactly, but you are anxious. Stress is your constant companion, and you are nagged by worries over issues large and small. From restless thoughts to heart-racing panic attacks, we all struggle with fearful emotions to one degree or another, because fear is a fact in a fallen world. But according to Scripture, anxious fear doesnt have to be a fact for a daughter of God. In fact, the Bible tells us that there is no place for such fear for those who are in Christ Jesus. The Bible has a lot to teach us about what underlies our fears, and it also reveals the means to overcome them. I hope that as we look at Gods Word together in this book, we will uncover great truths that will strengthen our faith and diminish our fears.

Overcoming anxiety begins with the realization that each one of our fears has a spiritual root. They are all directly linked to our view of God. It doesnt seem that way much of the time. Our overbooked agendaseven our preschoolers need scheduling calendars todayare natural stress generators. Most of us have too much to do with not enough time or money or energy to do it all, and trying to keep up brings stress to our marriages and worry lines to our faces. Nevertheless, our busy lives arent the root cause of our anxiety. The root cause is our failure to understand who God is and how he is working in our lives. When we are rightly related to God, when we understand who he isto and for us in Christwe will realize we have no need to be anxious.

He is the God who numbers every hair on our heads (Matt. 10:30) and the one who has promised to supply all our needs (Phil. 4:19). He is the Father who gives us all things for our enjoyment (1 Tim. 6:17). He is the God who has promised to fulfill the heart desires of all who seek their happiness in him (Ps. 37:4). He is the one who tells us to be anxious for nothing and to cast all our anxieties on him because he cares for us (1 Pet. 5:7). He is the one who has already given us the besthis Sonand tells us that therefore we can certainly expect his intervention in all lesser things (Rom. 8:32).

If that is true, and it is because his Word says so, then why are we still fearful women? We are fearful because we dont really trust him. And we dont really trust him because at some level we dont really believe he is good. We simply dont take him at his word.

The only way we will learn to trust God is by getting to know God. When our understanding of him is deficient, we are going to view him wrongly. We are going to have a low view of him. If God is low in our estimation, then the things of this world are going to rate too high, which will snow us under. If we believe that somehow it is up to us to take control of our lives and the lives of those we love, fear is inevitable, because we simply arent in control of anything. Many of us are quick to dismiss a link between our stress and our view of God. I dont hold God in low regard, we object. I live a Christian life and attend worship each Sunday, and I spend lots of time with other believers. But if we suffer from chronic anxiety and fear, we are kidding ourselves. Our view of God isnt as majestic as we think. A right view of God is the only thing that will dispel our illusion that we have to control our lives and that everything depends on us.

Additionally, our anxiety-producing, wrong view of God leads us to place too much value on the wrong things. If we dont know God very well, we cant see that he is the only thing ultimately worth living for, and we wind up living for ourselves instead. Our problems, our familieseverything in our worldbecomes supremely important. We put off the gentle and easy yoke of Christ that we are called to wear and instead attempt to harness God to a yoke of our own devising. Many of our anxieties and fears spring from dragging this self-made yoke. The foolishness of a man twists his way, and his heart frets against the LORD (Prov. 19:3 NKJV).

Some of us dont realize that we are trying to pull the wrong yoke. We reach toward dreams and goals designed to further Gods kingdom and to bring blessing, and our prayer requests are for good things. But how do we react when things dont go according to plan? If, when our plans dont work out or our prayers arent answered in the way or time we think best, we get frustrated and impatient and worried and fearful, thats a tip-off that something is off-kilter. All wrong views about God result in anxieties and fears about life. The health of our vertical relationshipour relationship with Godwill always determine the health of our horizontal relationshipsthose we have with people, with life, and with ourselves. So the first thing to get straight is our view of God.