How can we learn to trust when it seems the world is spiraling into chaos?
In this week’s episode of “The Daron Earlewine Podcast,” Daron delves deep into the complex question many have grappled with: “Why Is It Sometimes Hard To Trust God?”
Join us as he explores the challenges, doubts, and uncertainties that can arise on our spiritual journeys. Drawing from personal experiences, wisdom, and insights, Daron offers comforting perspectives on faith, resilience, and finding hope even in the midst of doubt.
Tune in and discover the profound insights that will resonate with believers and seekers alike.
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They would put up monuments and altars you know, and Ebenezer and all these different things throughout the Old Testament. They’re like, why’d they go there and build an altar of stone? So that as they came past it, they could go past it and go, Hey, listen guys, things are getting in dicey again. It’s getting difficult to trust God is, and isn’t it difficult to trust God? It is. Do we have any waypoints? Do you have any markers in the past that would say that God can’t be oh, yep. Back. Remember he showed up there and he showed up there and he showed up there,
Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose.
Hey, welcome back to the episode of The Daron Earlewine Podcast, Daron Earlewine, your host. And I don’t know why I said the name like that, that was weird. Anyway, hey, so glad to have you guys or girls, anyone, all people with us for another episode. And we’re in the middle of this frequently asked question series, and I’m really enjoying getting a chance to jump into some of the questions that you guys have all sent in and meet your right where you are, right where you’re thinking, right, where you’re wrestling with these questions about finding purpose and meaning and faith in your life. And so thanks so much for downloading this episode. Whether you watch it on YouTube if you haven’t gone over and subscribed to the YouTube channel and you’re a faithful podcast audio listener even if you don’t ever wanna go watch the podcast, would you do me a personal favor?
Just go over there and click subscribe on the YouTube channel. Help us get our numbers up. It helps get the, the s-s-e-a-o up, our SEO whatever, whatever the words are, all the stuff that lets people know this podcast is out there. And allow them to, to get a little more faith and hope and love in their lives. So if you don’t even wanna watch it on YouTube, you wanna just pay it forward to somebody else, you’re a part of spreading the good news, just head over there and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And would love to hear from you. I say it all the time, but I mean it, you can email me, you can reach out through social medias, or you can always text 317-550-5070. Let’s jump into the question this week. Okay, let’s jump into the question. Difficult question. Great question. You guys didn’t send any, any slouch-type questions? Okay? Which is great. I didn’t want you to send some softball pitches. And this one’s, this one’s big. Here’s this next question for the frequently asked question series, why is it sometimes hard to trust God?
I could just say, I mean, simply here’s, here’s the outline for this podcast. ’cause He’s invisible. You’ve never actually seen him face-to-face. You have to walk in faith and life sucks a lot, right? I mean, honestly like that, that’s what it comes down to. Like, why is it hard to trust God? ’cause It’s really hard to trust God. Like you really think about it. If you break down this right, and I’m not trying to challenge your faith, or maybe I am, but like we, what we believe is that there’s an actual unseen God that created all the things that we see. And he’s, that he actually, his character, he is loving and he’s kind and, and he’s gracious and he’s forgiving all the things the Bible tells about it. But at the same time, we watch the world absolutely spiral into chaos.
And we see hate and we see unforgiveness and we see violence, and we see poverty, and we see all these things all around us in the world. And we go, how can I bring together what I know of God and what I see often in the world? And guess what? That’s not easy. And so if you, if if you sent this in, or maybe I, I, I read the question, you were like, praise God, that was gonna be the question I was gonna send in. And maybe you’re feeling guilty, like it seems like a wrestling match for me to, to really trust God, listen, welcome to the party, because it’s hard to trust God. Why is it sometimes hard? Because it is, it’s hard to trust God if you’re honest. If you’re honest. It’s really hard to trust God. And I hadn’t thought about this till I said it.
I love it when the Holy Spirit gives me little drops, right? My counselor calls there, there, there’s something that I observe in I think I observe it in people who have grown up in very Christian environments their whole life. And my counselor calls it spiritual bypassing. And spiritual bypassing happens when you have something that’s gone on in your life that is challenging your ability to trust God. It’s something that’s, it’s painful. It’s something where maybe you’ve been betrayed. It’s something that, that is you know, requires all of the emotional things to happen in you. A very, very, very difficult thing. You have to walk through, but you don’t walk through it because you basically spiritualized the situation and do your best to walk around it, which you can lie to yourself and say, I’m really learning to trust God. What you’re doing is actually a lot of times, and this is, this is complicated, and I don’t wanna sound sacrilegious when I say this because I, I, I don’t mean it at all.
But you, you may quote a scripture or two that you feel like is some kind of, you know, and we, we hold, I’m not saying we don’t hold on to scriptures. I’m just saying there’s times where we can just quote a scripture. We don’t actually engage in this situation. We don’t actually wrestle this down with God. We don’t actually get honest about the doubts and the questions and the fears and everything that we really need to, to work through so that we can learn to trust God. And we just say, well, here’s the scripture and that’s principle. Here’s my spiritual principle. So I can just walk around this difficult thing and I never actually engage it. And we don’t actually learn to trust God. We almost just learn to play religion.
And I don’t want that life for you. And here’s the reality. Neither does God, I don’t know the illustration. It, it would be, maybe it’s something like this, right? Like you, a major situation comes up in your marriage, right? Or, or the best friend, maybe a family member, and there’s some real trust issues, right? Right. And you’re like, we really need to talk through this. It’s gonna be a difficult conversation. This may take us a couple days to walk through this valley and someone goes, Hey, I love you. Don’t question it. We, you and me we’re locked in and they walk away, right? Maybe they give you a poem, Hey, roses are red violets of blue. Don’t you know that I love you? All right? We’ll just go get some popcorn. And they try to completely bypass the difficult conversation. And, and, and the true wrestling match to learn to trust each other that needs to happen.
And you would go, whoa, whoa. Wait. Whoa, no, no, I I need a relationship, not a poem, right? Like, we need to learn to trust each other. We gotta go do some trust falls back on the back, you know, the monkey bars or something. I don’t know. We’ve gotta work this out so that I know that I can trust you ’cause I know who you are and you can allow, I can be able to see a track record of your faithfulness. So I wanna encourage you, if you’re at this place where you say, man, this is really hard to trust, God, that’s great. Guess where you’re at right now? You’re at your next place to level up your maturity and your trust in God. This is an opportunity. Well, I’ve got doubt jar. I’ve got these fears I’ve got. Awesome, wonderful. That’s where God wants to meet you because he wants to show you that he’s faithful, that he can show up, that he does show up. Don’t quote a couple scriptures and walk through it or walk around it and, and, and, and don’t dive through. I love what, what Robert Frost said, right? The only way out is through. The only way out is through. If you had a place right now where you trust in God is being challenged, don’t try to walk around it. Walk through it. ’cause It’s, as you walk through it, you will see that he will meet you in it.
You know, I end every podcast the same way. And it’s not ’cause I can’t figure out something else to say, but it’s because I want it to get so ingrained in yours and in my brain that it convinces my heart that it’s true at all times. When circumstances try to argue otherwise that God is near me and can be trusted, that God is for me so I can trust him that God has created me on purpose and for purpose. And even if the situation and circumstances that I am walking in right now make zero sense to me, and my imagination has no understanding of how this could ever actually be woven together to find me in the place of peace and purpose and passion that you say God has for me, I will choose to trust him. The principle in, in one of the chapters in my book, probably my second favorite, maybe my favorite, I don’t know, second, first or second favorite chapter in, in my book is called Woven Not Wasted.
And it’s all about this idea of, of when it’s difficult to trust God, right? And, and the concept there is that you get all loose ends in your life. These things that they, they haven’t come back around. They don’t make sense. I had this thing, I lost this job, I had this relationship. I lost this. I wanted to have a baby. I didn’t, I wanted to have whatever it is, I have all these different things in my life that just seem like they don’t make any sense, starts and stops and near misses and all this stuff. And my life just looks like a bunch of just loose end threads everywhere. And when everything looks like a loose-end thread, it’s tough to actually have faith in that moment, right? That God is actually weaving together the tapestry of your future. But I promise you he is, one of the things I’m fond of saying, right? Is we don’t serve a God of what if we serve a God of what is.
And we get to those moments where it’s tough to trust God. We say, well, what if this would happen? What if this would happen? What if this would happen? And he think there’s so many different stories throughout the Bible where people have those questions. Think about Mary Martha, right? When they’re there and like, they’re like, Hey Jesus, could you come help out our brother? He is dying. You know, I know you love him. Would, would you please come heal as we’re sin? He doesn’t. And then Jesus shows up and they’re like, Hey, if you’d have been here, you could have saved him. Which was true, right? Like, what if, what if you’d have came here two days ago? Jesus, what about this? It’s so difficult for me to trust when I know you’re only like a five-minute walk away from where I’m at. And you didn’t come down, you waited there two days and then all of a sudden you’re, you’re, you’re supposed to love him. We love him. We are all friends and now he’s dead.
Right? God weaves that situation through Jesus, weaves that situation through, brings risers back from the dead. And, and, and He’s not a God of what could be. He’s a God of what is. And we’ve God of what he’s doing, we can trust him. But it’s difficult, the story of Joseph that we unpack and you know, in the book, he’s betrayed, he’s arrested, he’s forgotten, he goes to prison, he’s missing his family for years and years and years. I mean, all these things that happen where it’s like at every turn, the, the easy and and maybe sometimes obvious answer right off the bat would be well yeah, I don’t think that I can trust God. Like I thought, you know, God had this plan for me and then my brothers betrayed me. I thought God had this plan for me then I was, I had, there’s lots of evidence wrapping up in that as this incidents happened, that Joseph would’ve been like, yeah, why would I trust God?
It just keeps going wrong for me. Except he did keep trusting God. And guess what? God kept showing up and redeeming and weaving together the purpose he had for Joseph’s life. You know, do the same for you. Think about the disciples. Think about the disciples on Good Friday. How about that one you think is Son of God, you’re the Messiah, this is great. We’re following you to the end, man. We’ll die with you. Oh, wait a second, you just died. Like, why is it difficult to trust God? Because sometimes God dies in front of you. , think about that. Think about Saturday after Good Friday, how difficult it was to trust God for the disciples. And I say this often, but you realize they didn’t know they were in the Bible, right? Right. They were just like Andrew and Peter and James and John and like they were just dudes and they followed this guy named Jesus that they really believed.
They’re like, I think he’s the son of God. And that may be exactly where you’re at and your faith right now, your name is Bill or Stacy or Daron or Coop or whatever your name is. And you’re like, you know what? I’m really beginning to think, I’m really beginning to have faith that Jesus is actually the son of God and that he has actually come to save the world. And I, I think, I think Jesus loves me. And then something happens equivalent to seeing God die in front of you. And then the next day you’re like, nothing in my life makes sense. I don’t think I can trust God. Why is this so hard? Because it is what happens with the disciples Sunday morning. They discover they can trust Jesus, but not totally. Because int that, for that next week, it’s a little bit dicey.
It takes ’em a while to really figure it out. They still don’t totally understand it. They got a little bit better, actually got a lot, bit better when God sent his Holy Spirit to actually indwell them to guide and direct to comfort them. And I will tell you that’s a big part of what you might be missing and what I wanna encourage you to seek. If you’re at a place where you’re saying it’s really hard to trust God, then, then I, I I would ask you to, to begin to ask God to fill you more with His Holy Spirit, to continue to hide the word of God within you, to remain in him as he remains in you. And the closer that you can begin to understand that God is, I think the more the, the, the easier it begins to trust or, or the gaps between feeling lonely or isolated. They close up, they get shorter. But this is, this is a, a tale as old as end of time, as long as time, right? As far as not trusting God, we go back to the very first story of humanity. And what is the essence? What’s the essence of the devil’s temptation? His original temptation that created the fall of humanity, that created sin itself. The essence of the temptation is you can’t trust God.
The devil’s consistent, but he is not very creative, right? He’s basically been coming with the same exact temptation now for the history of humanity. He says it in different sentences. He presents it to you in different ways, but that’s how he’s been deceiving humanity to walk away from their relationship with God the Father from the beginning. Did God really say right? Can you really trust him? It’s difficult to trust God because it is the essence of sin and it’s the core temptation that the devil uses to get us to walk away from the relationship. And I think it’s one of the key reasons why throughout the Old Testament again and again, and again and again, God told his people to remember, remember my faithfulness. Remember my faithfulness, right? I’m the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Like they would say these things in this oral tradition, right?
So they could remind themself of the faithfulness of God. They would put up monuments, altars you know, and Ebenezer and all these different things throughout the Old Testament. You’re like, why’d they go there and build an altar of stone? So that as they came past it, they could go past it and go, Hey, listen guys, things are getting dicey again. It’s getting difficult to trust God is, and isn’t it difficult to trust God? It is. Do we have any waypoints? Do you have any markers in the past that would say that God can’t be oh, yep. Back. Remember he showed up there and he showed up there and he showed up there. It’s almost like, guys, these seem like loose sins, but as we further we look upon them, it seems like maybe God is weaving together some kind of plan to like set us apart as his people to maybe save all of the world to his son Jesus Christ, right?
But I guarantee you, as the Israelites are walking through the desert or they’re walking through the Red Sea, or all the different moments you have walking through the, the, the, the life of Israel through the Old Testament, that, that they didn’t know that exactly how that was gonna happen. So a lot of moments just seemed like this is really hard to trust God. So they had to look back and they had to remember, they had to encourage one another and talk about the stories of how God has showed up. That’s why I used to love. I dunno if you, if you didn’t grow up gonna church, I did. And it was a little church and we used to have testimony time and I think we need to bring testimony time back to the church. There was this old lady named Sister Snow. I don’t even know what her first name was.
My parents probably do, let’s call her Martha ’cause she was old. I dunno, she had some kind of old lady’s name, but but we just called her sister Snow. And dude, she would get up and give these testimonies and she would get crying. But her cry was kind of like a laugh. So as a little kid, I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh ’cause she was laughing or cry ’cause she was crying. It was a very confusing time. But her stories. And she would always give these amazing testimonies of how God had been faithful. And, and that helped me and my faith as a kid, hearing other people talk about the faithfulness of God. That’s why it’s important for us to tell those stories. That’s why important for us to be in community and, and to encourage that. I know it’s tough right now.
I know that it looks bleak. I know it looks like that you’re walking through the valley shadow of death. Okay, listen, don’t spiritual bypass it. Don’t, don’t, don’t try to get around it. Walk through it. ’cause Listen, God, God showed up there and God showed up there and God showed up there and God showed, and he’s gonna show up now. And that’s when it comes down to faith. And faith is a challenge, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it, friend. And one of the paragraphs, I like in, in the book, if you haven’t read the book, you can go on Amazon to get it. Death of a Dream. Resurrecting purpose when life doesn’t go as planned. This is one of my favorite chapters when we talk about trusting God. And it says this, when I look at how Jesus wove the threads of my life together, I don’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity of it all or cry forever mistrusting God’s heart and vision for my life.
So listen, friend, if you’re at a place where you’re struggling to trust God and you just, you, you just barely have any faith left, I I wanna, I wanna pray for you right now that you, you hold on, that you don’t give up. And maybe right now you, you just need to borrow a little bit of my faith and that’s fine, right? Right now I got plenty of it. So I can let you borrow some of it to say, listen, I believe for you that God’s gonna show up. How? How’s he gonna show up during, I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s gonna happen. I don’t know when it’s gonna happen. What I know is that God always shows up at the break of day. He’s faithful. And when you’re having difficult times to, to believe that, find songs that declare that, find some old songs.
Go find some old hymns that were written like in the 18, 19, 17, 16 hundreds, like hundreds of your old song talking about God’s faithless. Get into the word of God and read and pray the Psalms, when David was saying, man, this is really hard to trust God because my best friend’s trying to chase me down to kill me, and his dad hates me. And like, this is really difficult to trust that God’s with me right now. And I trust him. And he read the words of, of David. Read the scriptures, read those stories of how God has shown up time and time again. And then stand on that truth and say, it doesn’t feel good right now. I feel like I’m walking through the f of shadow of death, but here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to go through it. I’m gonna try to bypass it. I’m gonna feel it. I’m gonna wrestle through it. I’m gonna stand on the promises of God. I’m gonna stand on the on on the character of God, and I’m gonna see him be faithful again. And then when he shows up, you tell someone that story because they may need that shot of faith like you do right now.
Hope that was helpful. It’s helpful to me. I kind of got inspired myself right now, so I’m about to stand up. Like Sister Stone will start crying and laughing at the same time, . Anyway, that’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I say ridiculous things like that. But listen, I’d love to hear from you. I appreciate you downloading this episode. I hope it was inspiring to you. If you’re right there, hold on, don’t give up. Let me pray for you. ’cause I told you I would gotta pray right now for specifically for the person who sent this question in and, and potentially the hundreds of other people that are listening to this episode that go, man, that’s where I’m at, Darren. It’s just really hard to trust God. God, I I pray that you would give them the confidence to know that yes it is, and you created them to do difficult things.
And God, I just pray that you would begin to remind them of the faithfulness that you have shown them, the times that you have shown up, the ways that you have come through for them, the way that you have come through for their family, that their family’s family, their friends, their neighbors the people throughout the Bible, other people in their church, I pray that they would begin to look for the faithfulness of God. There’s God can be so easy to have. The first thing we look at is the unfaithfulness of men or the things that confuse us. And we start racking up these things that say, here’s proof that this isn’t good and this isn’t good and this isn’t good. And, and, and we, we, we sometimes put on blinders or too easily, forget the ways you’ve been faithful. So I pray, God that you would open their eyes, the times that you’ve been faithful, pray that you would protect them.
Lead them not to the temptation that the enemy wants to bring them of this original temptation. You can’t trust God. Father, you can, we can and they can. So I pray they would stand on the truth of your word. I pray that they would stand strong in community. I pray they would stand on the track record of your faithfulness and you would give them strength to hold on. And the Father, I pray that as, as they begin to see you weaving together these threads of their purpose, of their future that they would not delay in declaring your faithfulness and telling the story to others that their life would fill up other people’s lives with more faith and hope and love. So we love you Jesus. Thank you for this. In your name, amen. Remember, that’s for not against you. He’s near you, not far. He’s created Jew on purpose and for purpose. Thanks for downloading this episode of The Daron Earlewine Podcast.