to follow His path, to begin your day to say, I'm going to start now to follow Jesus. You can do it day one as a child of God until your last day, and this principle, this truth of trusting God should never grow old, will never grow old, and it will be the most pivotal part of following God. And what I would like to do is break down what trusting God is all about and what it entails. First, trusting God entails giving everything to God. Trusting God entails giving absolutely everything to God. And second, it is to allow God to have his way in your life. Giving everything to God and then allowing God to have his way in your life. Let's first look at giving everything to God. Verse five of chapter three of Proverbs tells us, trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. Let me ask you something personal. It's scary, it's truly a scary thing to trust people, isn't it? It's a scary world out there. There are scary people and it's hurtful to put your trust in people or in someone. Because trusting someone can hurt you in many ways that you can't just put into words. It brings tears to your eyes and hurt in your life. To put complete trust with another is to be completely just vulnerable to that individual or for yourself is to be completely vulnerable. And this is especially the case when said person hasn't given you any indication to trust them. We must consider the source. Have you heard that saying, consider the source? If someone you loved and cared for lied to you again and again and again, That bridge of trust begins to sway, doesn't it? That bridge of trust begins to fall. When someone goes behind your back, it's hard to put your faith in that person. That true? We inherently don't trust people because all we have in common is this, we're all sinful. We're all sinful. Now, I don't want you to think you're walking out of here, you can't trust nobody and you're just like, don't touch me, I can't trust you. You can't look anybody in the eye anymore. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is this, that we are sinful people and we will always disappoint some way, somehow. We'll break promises, we'll hurt feelings, we'll say the wrong thing, we'll hurt each other, and it's hurt after hurt after hurt again. And Jesus says in Matthew 15 verse 19, for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, slanders. He's talking about our heart here. He said our hearts, consists of evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, lies, thefts. This is who we are. We see hurt all around the world because of us, because of our sins and things we do. Is it any wonder we don't trust each other? This is our nature and who we are, so we inevitably begin to isolate. from people and we begin to work independently. We are inherently just independent in our lives and isolate from people because we fashion our ways to think where we won't get hurt. And so we pick up our bootstraps and try to do things ourselves. But let me ask you this, and this is the point of what God wants us to see here, I believe, in verse five. Has God given us any reason not to trust him? Let me list the ways. Let me list the ways where God has given us every indication to answer this in the positive direction. First of all, God's love never fails. God's love never fails. In 1 John 4, 16, and we have known and believed the God that, or love that God had to us. God is love. And he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. God is love personified. And then because God is love personified, Romans 5, 8 tells us, but God commendeth his love, he demonstrated his love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And that perfect love he demonstrated on the cross, that love can never separate us from him. In Romans 8, 39, tells us we cannot separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. But not only that, God's love never fails, but God's mercy is new every morning. Not just on Sunday morning, not just on the good days, not just on the bad days, but every single morning, his mercies are new. Lamentations 3, 23, they are new every morning, great is thy faithfulness. And His faithfulness is of eternal value. God is forever faithful and always keeps His promises. In Psalm 119, 89, and 90, it tells us, forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto some generations? No, all generations. His faithfulness will last in eternity. There is no expiration date on His faithfulness and His promises. It abides for eternity. God is not even the antithesis of man. He's all alone in his own category as God. He stands alone. He transcends so high above man in every way. He tells us in Isaiah 58 and 9, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. So the answer to the question I asked earlier is an emphatic no. Because He's given us every reason to trust Him, which should compel us to trust Him. And God is descriptive about trust and what it entails. And this is a scary part for most of us. Because when God says, trust in the Lord with all thine heart, do you really know what that means? This means that He has an expectation for you to completely give everything to Him. He wants you to give every single part of your life, every part of you, and He wants you to completely lay it down to Him. We can't hold anything back from Him, but we have to allow God to have every part of our life without hesitation. And there will be inevitably those toys that we prefer to keep and those skeletons that we like to keep hidden. But God wants that too. We can't hide that. We can't hide anything from God. Doesn't God tell us that? We can't hide from God. And he knows those secret sins, or he knows those habitual sins, and he knows those pleasurable sins, and he knows about the issues we have, he knows the things that we prefer and what we want, but he wants every single ounce of us. But if we are to trust the Lord with all thine heart, then we will have to give up those favorite toys and hidden skeletons, and we were all kids at one point in our lives, and You know, we've always had probably a favorite toy or favorite item that we just didn't want to share, right? I had two brothers and two sisters, and we would fight over toys. But if you wanted to keep your toy, you probably had to hide it somewhere where they can't find it. Or my brother, my older brother, was an expert at hiding candy. And if somehow, some way, I had somehow got access to it or found it, and I would put it back, to where it was. and perfectly place it back to the very square inch it was at, he would still know somebody got access to it. That's how, just how meticulous he was about hiding things. But that's like us, and this isn't Cassidy Spurgeon's brother, he's just really good at hiding stuff, but that's like us. We think we become expert at hiding our favorite sins and keep it hidden in a dark corner and say, God, we act like he can't see it. But God sees it. And if we keep those things hidden from God, then we can't ever get to the place where we can fully trust God. We have to give it all to God. There's a Casting Crowns song that the chorus sings, give it all to God, give it all to him. Trust him even with your darkest sins, your hidden sins, your painful sins, your comfort sins, and everything else. And we need to have this truth just seep to every single part of our lives, every nook and cranny of our soul. And if we pull back from God, if we fail to put everything on the table, then we're not fulfilling the trusting God factor. Romans 12 verse one tells us that, doesn't it? I believe that this text here in Romans 12 one, It coincides with what it says in Proverbs chapter 3, where it says, I beseech you, brethren, or I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. This graphic imagery of presenting our bodies as a sacrifice is an expression of how we need to give up ourselves completely to God. We need to give up ourselves completely to our Heavenly Father, and this is what God expects. This is what God desires. But we get in the way of trusting God, don't we? This is where I think God decides to tell us, lean not on your own understanding. Because whenever God says, trust me with all your heart, we begin to say, well, I see what you're saying, but, right? We start to negotiate with God. And what we begin to negotiate with God is that we come to him with our ideas of what trust is. And we begin to use our intellect, our statistics. Well, I know I'm supposed to trust you here, but the statistics tell me that I can't really trust you here. And we begin to think about our sinful obstacles in our life, that my sin and my struggle is too much for me to trust you. We think about the world's obstacles, we think about Satan's strategies to take us down, and we begin to put our trust in the issues, rather than putting our trust in God. But God tells us to not lean on our own understanding, and this word understanding here, doesn't refer to godly wisdom. This refers to humanistic wisdom. This word refers to a wisdom that's detached from God. It's a godless wisdom. But God tells us, and this is what is implied here and what God is saying, is that we need to detach from our wisdom, our godless wisdom, and attach ourselves to God's wisdom. So in other words, godly wisdom is where we attach ourselves to God and only care about what God thinks. That's trust. God says, I don't care what's going on in this world and in your life. All that matters is you trust me and I'll take care of it and I'll take care of you and I'll guide you and I'll direct you. We only care what God thinks. The more weight we put on God, the more we let go of our thoughts and ideas about what matters. We begin to only care about what God thinks. A simple phrase like, God is in control, had much more weight and significance when we actually trust God with all of our heart. You hear that phrase all the time, right? And whenever you're in a place in your life and somebody tells you, you know, don't worry, God's in control. Yeah, yeah, I heard that. But when you truly trust God, that means something because you know that's true. You know that God is in control in your life. I read this devotional this morning. How many times in your life when you're doing something and God just plops something on your lap and it's a God thing? And I was preparing this sermon and just finalizing my thoughts on it, and God just dropped this devotional on me. Just like, how about this? Have you thought about this? And God just does this. And I just want to read you this excerpt about this devotional that's entitled, Faith Over Reason. Hebrews 11 and verse six was the verse based off of this devotional. And it says, of course, we should know what this says in Hebrews 11, six, but without faith, it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. And let me just read the rest of this devotional for you. Author Marshall Shelley suffered the deaths of two of his children and grew in faith. As a child reading novels, he learned not to be confused by the introduction of many different characters, events, and subplots in early chapters. He learned that if the author was skilled, all the disparate parts would come together by the end of the book. Thus, he said about his life, I choose to trust that before the book closes, the author will make things clear. Capital A for author. Who can understand the death of one child? much less two. How far can human reasoning go in explaining the facts, much less in healing the hurting heart? Because we possess strong minds, as those created in the image of God, our natural tendency is to seek solutions first in reason. But reason is not all the mind is good for. The spiritually minded have the mind of Christ, which is first and foremost a mind of faith. Our challenge in this spiritual life is to be faithful first and reasonable second. The author of the story of your life has a plot in progress that will leave no question unanswered. Faith first, reason second. Trust God and leave everything else to God. Now, when you do come to the place, and when we do, when we do come to the place of trusting God with all of our heart, it becomes much easier to trust God in all your ways. This is where we come to verse six, where God tells us here, in all thy ways, acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths. Now, the word ways here, or I'm sorry, the word paths here is translated also as ways because from the Hebrew word derek, meaning places to tread or to walk or a path. And the word acknowledge here denotes a seeking or looking to as a guide. So another way of saying this verse is that all your thoughts and your ways and your decision making is to seek Him and He will lead us into a path that leads to Him. You allow God to make the pathways for you. You make Him the way maker in your life. You make Him the decision maker in all facets of your life. You not only involve God in your life, but he is your life. You see the difference? What we like to do is we like to just peg God in certain parts of our life that we think we can give God. Sometimes that's on Sunday, maybe on Wednesday. Some days that's Monday or Wednesday and Sunday and days that we feel up. when we're not going through struggles, or when we're going through struggles and we don't wanna allow God into our life because we know that we cannot give that up to God because we like what we're doing or we wanna hold on to this thing that we don't wanna let go of our lives. But God says he wants to be your life, the Lord of your life. He wants us to follow him and make him the master of our life. where nothing is left in our inventory, in our house, in our body, in our bank accounts, in our families, in our emotions, everything belongs to God. Every part of our life belongs to Him. Just as giving to God all our trust will mean you only care what God has to say, giving to God all your ways and all your paths means that you only care where He wants you to go. You only care where He wants you to go. And, you know, I've met people over the years and they made big decisions in their life and transitions in their life. And some of the things that I find difficult is when somebody makes a decision in their life and church is an afterthought. They make an economic decision, a professional decision to move elsewhere for a job opportunity. And it seems as though church is an afterthought. I think that's an example of what happens when you don't surrender to God your ways. That you're truly not trusting God with all of your heart. What's that hymn that we sing, I'll go where you want me to go? Did we sing that or did we mean it? Do we just sing that because we know the words and we can sing it off the screen, or do we actually live it and mean it in our life? Boy, when you do trust God, it has meaning, doesn't it? It has significance. And you know what? It's kind of scary, isn't it? It's scary. And Brother Darren, I know he shared stories about when he moved to Temple, And when you're making big decisions like that, boy, you're not making that decision because you don't trust God. Let me tell you, you're making those decisions because you do trust God and you know he'll take care of it. But of course, there's still a human component where you feel vulnerable, right? But I'd rather be vulnerable with God than without him, right? I'd rather be vulnerable with God than without him because I know he has my best interests at heart. We're not really vulnerable at all. when we have him and he has us. But I know dad shared stories about when God was calling him to Japan, Japan of all places. And I know dad was fighting it at times and thinking that God couldn't be calling me there, but he was dealing with them. But to be able to make a trip to Asia and surrender your life for years there, that's not a decision you make unless you trust God with all your heart. And you allow Him to pave the path for you. He makes that decision for you, not you. When we fully trust God and His paths become ours, the beauty is this. It's no longer ours. The path is no longer ours. And the beauty is also is we're not alone in that path. He helps us walk this path. Isn't it a beautiful thing that when Christ told his disciples that he was going to ascend to the Father and the Holy Spirit was going to do the ministry work, It's the Greek word periclete, I believe. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that word. But that Greek word denotes that he comes alongside us, right? Of course, the Holy Spirit resides with us, but it denotes that there's a comfort there, that he's within our midst, he's in our presence, and he guides us. And as Christ talked about, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to convict, but also to comfort, right? He convicts us to look at the path, stay on the path, but he also comforts us. How good is that? That he doesn't leave us alone. He just says, well, here's the roadmap. Good luck. Or he texts you directions to go and how to find your way. Good luck, hope you make it there. He's with us. He never leaves us nor forsakes us. This journey that we have to follow God, we're not alone. You might feel alone, but you're not alone. He's there in your midst. He helps us walk the path and you know who's at the end of that path? It's God too. He helps us. to stick on that path, guides us, and he's there waiting, waiting to say, well done, my good and faithful servant. Don't you want that said to you? God's way isn't always easy with that said. It's really, really hard. It's really burdensome. It's difficult. And there's a reason why Jesus told us that following him will require taking up the cross. What Satan wants you to believe is that following Christ is a walk in the park. He wants you to think that because once you hit a bump, you freak out and say, I can't do this. Christ has never indicated to us that following God is easy. It's actually difficult. It requires struggle. It requires suffering. It requires pain, temptation, and more because he says, no, No servant is greater than his master, right? And he suffered all of that. He suffered temptation, struggles, pain, suffering, and more, and he overcame all of that. He overcame the world. But I'd rather be on the path where God is than on my miserable, lonesome path. The difference in my path and in God's path or in our path and God's path is his peace that he provides even in the midst of trouble. Proverbs 3, 17 tells us, her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace. The difference in my path and his path that God's glory and power can be clearly seen through His path. We will deprive ourselves of not only life, but God's work in us if we don't fully trust God and follow His ways. You ever wonder, why am I not being used? Why do I just feel just zapped of of just being used of God and seeing God's glory and I'm just so miserable in my life. Are you trusting God in the truest sense? Everyone have an iPhone in here or a smartphone? How do they work when they're not charged? When it's fully dead. Fully dead. Has anyone ever encountered your iPhone, a smartphone, when it's fully dead, just absolutely dead? How much does that thing really worth to you at that moment? Paperweight. I mean, it's great paper. I got a huge, huge iPhone. I mean, but it's been dead several times before. It doesn't seem to hold a charge very well, but it just becomes a huge paperweight. What's really worth it to you when your iPhone's dead? It becomes just junk. But when the iPhone is charged, there is a world of possibilities, isn't there? When your iPhone is fully charged, no telling all the things you can do with it. I know without an iPhone in Houston a lot of times I'm lost, because I need it to direct me and guide me and to lead me where to go. When we tap into God's power, We have a world of potential and possibilities in how God can use us. If we don't fully trust God and surrender to his ways, we're like a dead iPhone. It's not serving any purpose. You're just kind of just there. You're just kind of, he just plopped here. And you know, the sad thing is a lot of us, a lot of Christians plop on the pew and we're like dead iPhones. just zapped of power. You know that grieves God because He knows the potential that we have if we surrender to Him. So the question is, where are we today in our lives? Don't you want to be part of this? Don't you want to allow God to work in your life? Don't you want to see God's glory and power in your life? Then we must trust God, and that means we give up everything to God. We don't hold back. Don't hold back from God. When we do this, we must allow God to have his way in our lives. We must surrender all of our thoughts and decisions to Him. His path becomes ours and we follow Him wherever He goes. He won't steer us wrong because all His paths lead to one destination, to Him. And yes, there's struggle. Yes, there's burdens. But He gives us a peace knowing that He's there. And no matter what difficulty that you've encountered in your life, I can speak for times in my life where in difficulty, I felt closer to God than I've ever had. I felt the presence of God even closer when I've had those troubled times. And I wouldn't trade that for the world. You can't put a price on that. It's called, fellowship with God. It's priceless. He's able to provide us peace and glory to his name. Let's pray. Lord, I just thank you so much. Thank you so much that you give me stability and strength to get through this message. Without you, I couldn't do it. And I just pray that we truly just allow this to penetrate our hearts. This is such a vital truth that if we don't put our faith in you and surrender and put our trust in you, you tell us that it's impossible to please you. And we just be, we're just at a point in our lives, if we don't, then we just are just here and we're just absolutely miserable. Father, you have so much more for us. You have so much more for each and every one of us. No matter where we are in our lives, it's never too late for us to say, you know what? I want to trust you today. And I just pray, Father, if there's anybody here today that doesn't even know what that means to have this close fellowship with you and to allow you to just guide in our lives and have that peace and knowing that we can follow you. And if they don't know what that means, maybe it's because they're lost. And there just is this divide of their sin and their sin hasn't been paid for. and they haven't trusted in your Son to be saved. And I pray that they get that settled today, where they can today put their trust in your Son, Jesus Christ, so that they can be eternally secure, and that they can also experience this close fellowship that we talked about today. Thank you, Lord, for all that you've done, and yet what you continue to do in our lives. I pray in Jesus' name.