How to Trust God More

November 5, 2019

Which biblical figure showed the most trust in God? Dr. Sri makes a good case for a man from the Gospel of John whose son is dying and explains how we can use his example to trust God more.

Snippet from the Show

“We can’t experience God’s providence unless we let go, unless we have confidence in his promise, unless we are willing to jump.”

SHOWNOTES

An Example of Trust (4:55)

The centurion approaches Jesus in Cana and asks him to heal his son, who is dying in Caper’na-um, a long way off. His intention is to bring Jesus back to his son, but Jesus responds to the man by saying, “Go; your son will live.”

You might expect the man to protest, and even insist on Jesus accompanying him back to heal his son, but the man simply believes Jesus, and trusts that what he said was true. The miracle here is not only the healing of this man’s son, but also the faith and trust that this man had in Jesus.

So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Caper′na-um there was an official whose son was ill. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was living. So he asked them the hour when he began to mend, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live”; and he himself believed, and all his household. This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.
John 4:46-54

Jumping with a Parachute (11:58)

Fr. Jacques Philippe, author of Searching for and Maintaining Peace, compared trusting God to jumping out of a plane with a parachute—you don’t know that the parachute will work until after you jump.

As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God.
Fr. Jacques Philippe