Jesus, I trust you.

We're praying into this theme during our 24-7 Prayer week right now. It's also one of the biggest themes of my last year with Jesus. The prayer, "Jesus, I trust you" has become a constant refrain, a giant reset button, in my life as I seek to take this call to discipleship seriously. And early on, I learned that it's Tim's primary prayer, too. It's a powerful prayer. Tonight at TOW I'm going to explore this idea of trusting Jesus with the girls, too. I'm convinced of it's necessity. I am convinced that it brings freedom.

I was just revisiting the book Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning and would like to share this excerpt with you here:

The stakes here are enormous, for I have not said in my heart, "God exists," until I have said, "I trust you"... Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, "Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father."

Though we often disregard our need for an unfaltering trust in the love of God, that need is the most urgent we have. It is the remedy for much of our sickness, melancholy, and self-hatred. The heart converted from mistrust to trust in the irreversible forgiveness of Jesus Christ is redeemed from the corrosive power of fear...

The decisive (or what I call the second) conversion from mistrust to trust -- a conversion that must be renewed daily -- is the moment of sovereign deliverance from the warehouse of worry. So life-changing is this ultimate act of confidence in the acceptance of Jesus Christ that it can properly be called the hour of salvation...

The grace-laden ac of trust is the landmark decision of life outside of which nothing has value and inside of which every relationship and achievement, every success and failure derives its final meaning. Unbounded trust in the merciful love of the redeeming God deals a mortal blow to skepticism, cynicism, self-condemnation, and despair. It is our decisive YES to Christ's command, "Trust in God and trust in me."

The basic premise of biblical trust is the conviction that God wants us to grow, to unfold, and to experience fullness of life. However, this kind of trust is acquired only gradually and most often through a series of crises and trials. Abraham models the essence of trust in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures: to be convinced of the reliability of God.