Trusting Versus Responsibility

Let's talk some more about trusting.  Trusting is one thing.  Responsibility is another.  I have learned that what I deem as my responsibility is often my excuse for not trusting.  What I count as my responsibility may really be an attempt to be in someone else's business instead of dealing with my own stuff.  Love, joy, peace are the first three fruit of the spirit.  Notice the order.  It contains a principle that gives us insight into trusting.  Trusting has at it's core love.  This means that we start with love. 

God is love.  God so loved that He gave His Son.  You see, love is other-centered.  God shows us what that looks like and feels like.  We love because He first loved us.  To try to understand love by looking anywhere but God is useless.  Only He has pure motives, and it is to this deep level (even subconscious level) that we want to search out all we can know about love.  When you know that you are loved first, it really changes things.  There is nothing you can do to add to "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the earth."  God's love is not a business transaction.  We cannot buy anything.  We can only respond.  When you are loved in this way...so freely and purely...you can have the second fruit.  Joy.   

When you know and believe that you are a loving and lovable child of God, you can have joy.  It is so freeing to live from the place of love.  You recognize that God delights in you and you can learn to delight in Him.  In the meantime, your response to this truth that you don't have to prove anything to God is a peaceful place to be.  Joy allows you to be thankful from a place that is response instead of buying something...my work instead of His.  This love/joy response colors each day with promise and potential.  Even the hard days are better because we are loved and the joy response helps us with everything. 

The next fruit is peace.  This is amazing.  You see, when you know you are a loving and lovable child of God, you start seeing other people that way, too.   When you can really trust God with your own journey, you can trust Him with the journey of others.  The journey responsibility is God's...for me and others.  Trusting from this standpoint is done from a God-centered motive.  Responsibility is a matter of listening to God about how you help Him.   It is not about getting on your self-righteous high horse in judgment.  Intercession is your given role as a work with God in the heavenlies.   Judgment and criticism are  counterfeits for intercession.  What we see in others that we judge is because it is in ourselves...the mote and beam concept in the Bible.  If you spot it, you've got it.                                                              

Intercession does not mean that you take your punch list with everything that is wrong with people to God...a subtle way of judging.  It means that first of all you get before God and see why it is that you recognize this stuff in someone else.  You see, the recognition of their faults is an invitation to do your own personal healing so that from a pure heart you can pray for others.  This healing process gives you much insight into what to pray.  This role of intercession is really an amazing process and a wonderful opportunity.  Again, we must trust God with the work of this intercession rather than turn it into a real big responsibility.  He is God.  We are not. 

Trusting God versus assuming God's responsibility is a big issue of respect.  Respect to God, others, and self.  This place of vulnerability takes courage.  It is a place of willingness to put down the self-agendas that we have for others...invested in outcome because we think our way is the best or right way.  When we value others as God does, we will stop playing God in their lives.