What does it mean to Trust in God?
Can you please explain to me the words Trust In God which were once said by
Blessed Mary MacKillop
Cassandra,
First, let me apologise for taking so long to get back to you; I went away and then was sick.
I’m afraid I don’t know much about Mary MacKillop, I do recall that she was once excommunicated by the Catholic Church, which just goes to show that we all make mistakes.
Without knowing the context of what Mary MacKillop was talking about when she said (or wrote) Trust in God, it’s hard for me to respond, but I can tell you what the Bible means by trust in God.
Firstly, the idea of trust can be a bit tricky to put your finger on. Essentially trust is something that you do or have in something else, it has to have an object. Did you play the trust game in school? It’s that one where you get a bunch of friends to stand behind you and you fall backwards and they catch you. I’m willing to bet that you haven’t thought of playing that game alone. You trust them to catch you, they keep you from falling, your trust is in them. Your friends are essential to your faith. Essentially trust is when we take someone at their word. In this case it is the implicit word of your friends that they will catch you. In the Bible, trust is the same word as faith, belief and reliance. These are all the same concepts.
When it comes to trusting in God, the concept is much the same. Christians trust in God’s word. So when God says things like:
Romans 10:13 “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
John 3:16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who trusts in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:36 “Whoever trusts in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”
Romans 5:8 “But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us!”
1 Peter 3:18 “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring you to God.”
they trust what he has said - that is if you call Jesus (God’s Son) your lord, God will give you eternal life. Some people think that this means that we need to work really hard at being good to please God. But the Romans 5:8 verse shows us that you can’t make God love us more, it was while we were sinners that Christ died for us. Jesus died so that our sin could be dealt with and we could be brought to God.
In the trust game, if you trust your friends, you’ll fall backwards and be caught. If you don’t trust them, you might turn back to see if they are going to catch you, you might put your arms out to stop yourself from falling, or you might not fall backwards at all. When we trust God; if we try to save ourselves, by doing good things, thinking that they will save us, we show that we aren’t really trusting in God.
If Mary MacKillop is a Christian, then she will trust in God in this way.
Answers are kindly provided by our friends at Christianity.net.au
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