Miracle Cure #4—Trust
The most obvious of the miracle cures for anxiety is trust. Faith in God will calm your troubled heart.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1). 
“You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you” (Isaiah 26:3). 
We calm our hearts by trusting God. But trusting him to do what? To make our troubles go away? To make life easy? To do our will?
When you’re racked with anxiety and someone says, “Just trust God,” it can sound like a platitude. Indeed, it is a platitude if they don’t complete the sentence. Trust God … to do what? That’s crucial because counting on God to do something he hasn’t promised will result in disappointment and even worse anxiety.
What’s the rest of the sentence? Trust God to … be what he describes himself to be in Scripture. Your anxiety will fade when you trust God to exhibit his attributes. 
If you are worried, that is usually a sign that you have shifted your attention from God to your troubles—like Peter, who walked on water until he turned his eyes from Jesus to the storm. In that moment, he developed an instant anxiety disorder and sank (Matthew 14:30). More accurately, it was a faith disorder (verse 31) that gave the storm the power to swallow him up. 
But what does it mean to fix your gaze on someone who is invisible? It means to turn your attention to God’s characteristics (attributes).
There are some who find comfort only in God’s love. Those are usually people who still struggle with anxiety because one attribute of God is not enough to satisfy the human craving for God. The deeper and wider our understanding of God, the greater the peace.
When I was in the deepest pit of despair in my life, I turned to the Psalms to learn what God is like. I found well over a hundred attributes of God, and that study changed my life. 
For the sake of space, I will focus on six of God’s attributes that are especially helpful in times of anxiety—sovereignty, goodness, power, wisdom, faithfulness, and love. We will explore each of these in the chapters ahead. But first, let’s look at what Scripture says about how to prepare your heart to trust God more. 

Part 28
How to Strengthen Your Faith
“I want to trust God, but my heart won’t cooperate.” How do you bring yourself to believe something you don’t already believe? There is much more to faith than simply deciding to believe. Thankfully, God’s Word provides guidance on how to attain stronger faith.
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Faith Comes Through Hearing
The most straightforward instruction in Scripture on how to increase your faith is in Romans 10.
“Faith comes from hearing the message” (Romans 10:17).
In context, hearing the message refers to listening to preaching.
“How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Romans 10:14). 
The importance of teaching and preaching cannot be overstated. Jesus devoted most of his ministry to preaching and teaching. He even said it was the reason he came to the earth.
“The people … tried to keep him from leaving them. But he said, ‘I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.’ And he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea” (Luke 4:42-44).
There are a lot of forms of ministry—helping the poor, visiting prisoners, feeding the hungry, weeping with those who weep, writing books, building projects, caring for widows—countless forms. Jesus did some of those, but the great majority of his time went into preaching. Why?
It's because no form of ministry has more power to reach the human heart than preaching. Psalms 19:7-8 says the law of the Lord is perfect, giving light to the eyes, giving joy to the heart, reviving the soul. You can tell yourself things all day long, but the only tool we have that has the power to fundamentally change your heart is the Word. And God’s favored way of applying that balm—getting his truths to penetrate the heart, is through preaching and teaching. 
"I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace." (John 16:33).
Preaching was how John the Baptist prepared people’s hearts for Jesus, every summary of Jesus’ ministry places teaching and preaching as his primary activity, and Jesus taught his disciples to follow that example. God’s primary way of sparking faith in the human heart is through the preaching of his Word.
Use Sermons to Build Your Faith
On whichever promises or truths about God you’re struggling to believe, listen to as many expository sermons on that topic as you can find. Listen with an eager, receptive attitude, and it will build your faith.
But here’s the catch—it must be expository preaching. The word “expository” is related to the word “expose.” Expository preaching is preaching that exposes the truths of Scripture. And it’s not always easy to find. Too often, preachers quote the Bible, but the points they are making in their sermons don’t come from the Bible. They come from other books, human wisdom, or the preacher’s own ideas. That kind of preaching has no power. Find a preacher who preaches in such a way that the main point of the passage is the main point of his sermon.
For a list of websites where you can find solid expository preaching, see the blog post, “The Seven Best Websites for Good Sermons.”
Be Careful How You Listen
It’s not enough merely to listen to sermons. The way you listen makes a big difference. In Luke 8:18 Jesus said, “Consider carefully how you listen.” Listen the wrong way, and it can do more harm than good.
For one thing, you must listen with a submissive, receptive attitude. There is one category of people God has chosen to be rich in faith. The humble.
“Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith” (James 2:5).
Pride will short-circuit the faith-building process work of God’s Word in your heart. Many people read the Bible with an attitude that says, “I will consider what it says, and if it sounds plausible to me, I’ll accept it.” That’s the proper way to read any other book, but not God’s Word. The heart that sits in judgment on what God will come away from reading the Bible with more doubts, not greater faith.
You don’t really trust God unless you trust him more than you trust yourself. If you following God’s way when it seems right, but stop short when his way doesn’t seem like the best path, that’s not trust. Faith begins at that intersection where God points one way and your own judgment points another. That’s the moment you discover the true object of your trust. 
The prideful heart doesn’t trust God because it can’t accept that which it doesn’t understand. Scripture assures us that trials are sent by God for our good. Pride says, “I can’t see how this trial is for my good, so I refuse to believe it.” 
Hearing Yourself
Your faith is strengthened not only by hearing others preach the Word, but by hearing the sermons you preach to yourself. As we found in Chapter 9, your self-talk has a powerful influence on both your brain and your spirit. 
Sometimes our struggle to believe comes because we shoot ourselves in the foot with our own faith-destroying thoughts. 

•	Allowing doubts to stand unanswered
•	Pessimistic projections
•	Godless interpretations of events
•	Allowing emotions like anger, self-pity, bitterness, or despair to control your thoughts

We all have thoughts like that. But if they are not corrected by the truth of God’s Word, they will damage your ability to trust God.
On the other hand, affirming biblical truth to yourself in your own self-talk, like the psalmists in Psalms 42 and 103, will strengthen your faith and increase your ability to trust God. What does the Bible say about the topic you’re stressing about? Put it into words and say it to yourself.
What you believe now is the product of your thoughts and attitudes in the past. Your beliefs in the future will be the product of your thoughts and attitudes right now. If you keep thinking the way you always have, your beliefs in the future won’t change. Whether you realize it or not, you preach sermons to yourself every day. And those sermons are either building or destroying your faith. 
Prayer
Another way to increase your faith is through prayer. If you want stronger faith, ask for it. The ability to believe is a gift from God. To make sure we remember that, God will withhold many of his gifts (including faith) until we ask for them.
“You do not have, because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). 
When Jesus gave a hard lesson on forgiveness, the disciples’ immediate response was, “Increase our faith” (Luke 17:5). They understood that righteousness requires faith, and faith comes from God. Like the man in Mark 9, use the little faith you have to cry out for more faith.
“Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:24).
My Prayers for Faith
I’ve always considered faith as one of my spiritual gifts. Trusting God has always come easily to me. But that ended in the winter of 2016.
After a hard meeting with a staff member at the church I was pastoring, I suspected a crime had been committed. I confronted him directly. He hung his head. I said, “You know what the Scriptures require of you now, right?” He nodded. In a matter of hours, going against the advice of his lawyer, he had made a full confession. 
His arrest made the news, and since I was the senior pastor of the church, so did I. The press made it sound like I had known about the crime and covered it up, or even that I was involved. Both were the opposite of the truth, but that didn’t stop the reporting.
My reputation was destroyed beyond repair, humanly speaking, and I realized my presence at the church was a detriment, so I resigned. Since online lies never go away, I soon discovered my 25 year career as a pastor had come to an abrupt, painful end. In the eight years since then, I’ve made a living in traffic control.
Losing my ministry and having many of my closest friends turn against me overnight was excruciating. But even more painful was what happened to the church. The fellowship I had planted and poured blood, sweat, and tears into for ten years fell apart. 
The pastor who committed the crime confessed publicly and repented. I thought I had preached clearly in those ten years about forgiveness and restoration, but for a shockingly high percentage of the congregation, all that preaching evidently fell on deaf ears. To this day, there are many who refuse to forgive him.
That devastated me. It made me think my whole life’s work had been wasted. And for the first time in my life, my faith was stretched to the breaking point.
This was mainly due to the fact that I had been trusting in something God never promised. I believed that if a church was faithful to the preaching of God’s Word, prayer, and pursuing God’s glory, God would bless that church and never allow it to be destroyed. When it didn’t work out that way, it felt like God had failed to deliver on a promise.
The Lord quickly showed me in his Word that he made no such promise. But even after I realized that, still, the damage to my faith had been done. For a time, nothing I read in the Bible seemed true. Doubts about Christianity and Scripture plagued my mind constantly. From my seminary training, I knew the answers to those doubts. But no sooner would I shoot one down than it would resurface in my heart moments later.
I could feel my faith disintegrating, and it terrified me. So I made it my first prayer every morning, “God, please restore my faith.” I prayed for nothing more than that. And every time anyone at church asked for a prayer request, it was always the same. “Ask God to restore my faith.”
Get as many people praying for your faith as possible. That’s one way God wants to build your faith. Jesus even prayed for Peter’s faith (Luke 22:32).
A couple years of praying like that and listening to at least one sermon each day brought me back to a place of trusting God. God will answer prayers for faith, but sometimes it takes long term, fervent, earnest pleading.
Let Perseverance Finish
A third way to strengthen your faith is through your response to trials. Whenever you suffer, one purpose of that suffering is to test your faith (James 1:3). But just as when gold is tested by fire, the testing process improves the quality—if you let it.
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4). 
Notice the command in verse 4. Let steadfastness have its full effect. Let it bring you to maturity. Instead of squirming against the hardship, or responding in an ungodly way, let it do its work. It’s like lifting weights. Use whatever strength you have to persevere through hardships, and that will strengthen your faith. 
When Your Faith Is Weak
What if it does take a long time to strengthen your faith? Where does that leave you today?
It leaves you in the hands of a loving Heavenly Father. When Jesus tells his hearers they don’t have to worry, in Matthew 6:25-34, have you ever noticed who the people are who need not worry?
“Why do you worry? … If that is how God clothes the grass of the field … will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:28-30). 
Even people who are rebuked for having little faith have nothing to fear. He doesn’t say, “Until you can get your faith going, you do have cause to worry because God may or may not take care of you.” He says just the opposite. Even though you do not trust God, God will still care for you because of how precious you are to him. 
Little faith does not negate God’s promise to meet your needs, but it does destroy your peace. When the disciples panicked in the storm at sea ,their little faith didn’t make the boat sink. But it did make for a terrifying trip.

Godliness Training Exercises

•	Identify the areas where your faith is the weakest. In the chapters to come, each time you find an attribute of God or a promise that you struggle to trust, jot it down. Organize the list with the most urgent items at the top.

•	As soon as you wake up each day, plead with God to give you more faith to believe the top three points on your list. 

•	Ask the people close to you to pray for your faith in those areas.

•	Use the websites from “The Seven Best Websites for Good Sermons” blog post to find sermons on your top three items. Set a time in your schedule that will allow you to listen to as many as possible.

•	Whenever you face a hardship—anything from misplacing your keys to losing a loved one—consider how persevering through that trial can help strengthen your faith in your top three areas.