You say you believe God is sovereign. But do you really?

Greetings,

I have been reading Jerry Bridges’ Trusting God. It has been exposing areas of my heart that although my head believes, my heart has not fully surrendered to, or moments when the surrender wavers. Over the next few reflections I want to pull on some of the threads it has surfaced, not as a summary of the book, but as a working through of what it is showing me about the character of God.

A man can affirm God’s sovereignty in his theology, say it in his prayers, and nod when it comes up in a sermon, and still not have fully surrendered to it in his heart. The length of time a man has walked with God does not determine how deeply he has grasped his sovereignty. That is more a question of how closely he walks with God and the depth of his spiritual maturity. Some men have walked with God for decades and still carry a reduced view of who he is, a God brought down to man’s level, more manageable, more predictable, more like us than Scripture ever suggests.

Psalm 50:21 is sobering. God says to his people: you thought I was altogether like you. We tend to view the interaction between God and man as if it operates on the same plane as the interaction between man and man. We think God can only act in the ways we can act. We understand persuasion, argument, negotiation. We do not understand a God who moves a person’s will in such a way that the person still acts freely and voluntarily. So we shrink him. We make him more comprehensible. And in doing so we lose the God who is actually there.

The gap between our head knowledge of God and our heart’s surrender to it is where the hypocrisy lies.

A good friend put it plainly recently. The gap between our head knowledge of God and our heart’s surrender to it is where the hypocrisy lies. And if we are to grow, that gap needs to be closing. What we understand about God and how we actually live it out, the closing of that distance is what spiritual maturity looks like. It is not just knowing more. It is surrendering more of what we already know.

Life rarely lets that gap stay theoretical. It has a way of exposing exactly how wide it still is.

And then something specific happens. A diagnosis. A job that ends without warning. A season of financial pressure that shows no sign of easing. The general belief in God’s sovereignty, so easy to hold in the abstract, suddenly has to meet a specific and painful reality.

And in that moment, the gap reveals itself. We get anxious. We try to take things into our own hands. We fight, we claw, we build idols, as if anything we do can negate what God is trying to accomplish. Because what God is often doing in the hard thing is exactly what he has always been doing. Exposing the distance between what we say we believe and what we actually trust. Pressing on the gap until we stop managing and start surrendering. The hard circumstance is not evidence that God has lost control. It is often his most direct invitation to give it up.

That is where believing God is sovereign and actually trusting him in a specific hard circumstance reveal themselves as two very different things. The head can assent to a truth the heart has not yet surrendered to. A man is often willing to trust God’s sovereignty over the good things, the promotion, the provision, the answered prayer. But when the circumstance is painful, when the outcome is unwanted, when the thing he feared most has actually happened, the sovereignty of God starts to feel like a threat rather than a comfort. If God is in control of this, then God chose this. And that is a hard thing to reconcile.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

So often we are trying to reconcile what God has kept a mystery. We are trying to understand a God who is infinite, and in the attempt we bring him down to our level. But Isaiah 55 answers that directly. The distance between God’s ways and ours is not a gap that study or intelligence can close. Basil Manly put it plainly, the Scriptures do not undertake to explain mysteries. They leave them unexplained. The tension between God’s sovereignty and human moral responsibility is one of those mysteries. Scripture asserts both without reconciling them, because some things are held together by God himself, not by our ability to understand them.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says to trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. All your heart. All your ways. Not some circumstances, not the manageable ones. All of them. A man’s view of God is one of the most formative things about him. What he believes about who God is shapes his fear of God, and his fear of God shapes his holiness. A man who has genuinely grasped that God governs all things lives differently. He prays differently. He holds his plans more loosely. He fears God more and fears everything else less.

Trusting God’s sovereignty does not mean passivity. The responsibility to pray, to be diligent, to do what God has asked remains. What changes is where a man places the outcome. He prays. He acts. He is faithful with what is in his hand. And then he rests, because the outcome belongs to a God who is sovereign over it, faithful in it, and working through it in ways that exceed what the man can see from where he is standing. A God who is not surprised, not absent, not scrambling. A God who was present in the circumstance before the man walked into it and who will be present in whatever comes after.

The question is not whether God is sovereign. The question is whether that belief has moved from the head into the actual circumstance currently being lived.

What specific hard thing in your life right now are you still managing on your own rather than entrusting to a sovereign God?