When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, this short Psalm by Solomon was an inspiration, especially the first verse:
Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the guards stand watch in vain.
Some people who read the book, or didn’t, accused me of arguing that I could guarantee my children maintaining their faith throughout life. As I said in the book itself, we are in control of nothing and can’t guarantee anything, but what we can and must do is be the best builders we can be. Not to mention God holding us accountable for how we raise our children. It’s not a dice game, a shot in the dark, but as my subtitle says, it is God’s provision for building an enduring faith in us and our children. He has given us everything we need, as Peter says, for life and Godliness through our knowledge of Him.
We see in Solomon’s wisdom a profound biblical truth: God builds and we build. These are not mutually exclusive but complimentary truths. It is my responsibility to build the best house I can possibly build. If I build a crappy house and it collapses in the storm, that is not God’s fault. It is mine! Some Christians are under the impression if they pray big, mountain moving prayers to God, that gets them off the hook for working their tail off. It doesn’t!
A good example is my current occupation. When I started building my business from scratch (on 100% commission), I was told if I make 50 to 60 calls a day, every day, I could not fail. And that is exactly what I did. I also prayed fervently to God because I desperately needed him to bless my efforts and establish the work of my hands. Me and God did some serious wrestling the first couple years because it was scary. It caused me to build my trust muscle in ways I’d never experienced before in my life, and as miserable as it was at times, the blessings have been incredible. In fact, I can hear my wife and granddaughter in the other room now as I type these words, and she is able to watch Eleanor when it’s needed because she doesn’t need to have a job anymore. That is an answer to prayer, all God, even as I worked my ever-living guts out to get it. So it’s both all me and all God—I work as if it depends on me, and pray because it depends on God.
These words of David in I Chronicles 29 were incredibly important in this difficult journey. They were in the church bulletin in the first or second church service we attended when we moved to Florida in June of 2017. I kept the bulletin and decided I was going to commit them to memory. Little did I know how much I would come to depend on them in the next several years:
11 Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, Lord, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.
12 Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.
13 Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.
Wealth and honor come from Him even though we have to earn it, and knowing it is all him and all me makes it all the sweeter in fulfillment. It wasn’t God waving his magic wand, or me alone by the painful toil and the sweat of my brow. It has been real achievement in which I can take justifiable pride while at the same time giving God the glory because in a real way it all comes from him.
One of the practical applications for me is that I pray for things in the past I would just do without prayer in my business and daily life. So if I have a challenging situation I do everything within my power to do what I have to do. Then I commit the situation to the Lord and affirm whatever the results are, are up to him, and I trust him. It is this dynamic that has made Isaiah 26:3 one of my favorite verses:
You will keep in perfect peace him whose minds is steadfast, because he trusts in you.
Perfect peace is something I very much want and trusting in the sovereign Almighty God of the universe is the way to get it. Why is it that Jesus commands us not to worry? Because he wants us to experience perfect peace! Or why does Paul command us not to be anxious about anything? So that we can experience the peace of God “which transcends all understanding.” I want that! When I talk to friends and relatives who are worried and anxious about things I tell them: Repent!!! Worry and anxiety are sin. If we don’t have the peace Isaiah and Paul speak about, we are in sin. We are not trusting God, and we ought not to do that because God is worthy of our trust.
If it were only that simple, right? It actually is, but it takes practice like anything else. Deciding to trust God has to become the automatic reflex of our lives when “life happens.” And it happens all the time. We all know that “thorns and thistles” are a fact of existence, every single day, but every time they create challenges and adversities it’s an opportunity to trust God, or not. It doesn’t take long to realize the God David praises as the one who is “the ruler of all things,” is worthy of our trust in all things.
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