We should deal with God personally, intimately and habitually, with a perfect confidence that He is everything which a father or mother could be and infinitely more. There are certain epochs in our spiritual life when we get visions of faith, or great openings of light as to how to trust ourselves into the hands of the Lord. We reproach ourselves for lack of faith, and feel like saying, “What fools we have been, for having any uneasiness about the fulfillment of God’s promises, and for not reposing in Him to the uttermost.”  

Beside these sudden little epochs in our experiences, there ought to be a constant increase of trust in God. Our confidence in our Heavenly Father is to grow in intensity and in minuteness in every detail of life, and a wideness extending over an ever-increasing area of creation. It is also to grow in velocity of action so that our trust acts speedily, without taking time to reason. We are to believe first and do our reasoning afterward. There are different ways to increase trust.  

1. By putting God to a test. He often challenges us in His Word to prove Him. But in putting the Lord to a test, we must be sure to do it in the spirit of loving obedience. If we merely experiment with the Lord, and have a reserve in our hearts that if the thing does not turn out just as we plan it, we are going to distrust Him, it shows to His loving eye that we are stubborn and petulant. But if we test His promises in humility and utter resignation, He will astonish us by His responses, confirm all our past faith and sweetly entice us to venture out on Him more and more. We can put God to a test.  

(a). In times of trouble. When we are well-nigh overwhelmed with multiplied calamities, by turning our attention to the poor and the sick and doing what we can for their relief, shall we find that in relieving the sorrows of others, the Holy Spirit will lift us up into victorious prayer and deliverance. The Lord challenges us to put Him to a test in this manner: “Blessed is he that considereth the poor, the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble, and deliver him from his enemies, and make his bed in his sickness” (Psa. 41).  

(b). In financial stress. Let us give God one-tenth of all we receive, and see if He will not rebuke those things that devour our temporal welfare, and abundantly bless us both physically and spiritually.  

If anyone is disposed to distrust in these matters, God challenges him to bring his tithes and prove Him, (Mal. 3:10). I never found a case where people gave their tenth to the Lord, that He did not fulfill this Scripture.  

(c). In times of sickness. Let us comply with James 5:14: “Is any sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”  

These are a few instances in which we can put God to a test, just as truly in the supernatural world as by any scientific test in the physical world. In numberless ways, in the practical details of life, we can prove God until we grow into a bold, sweet, yet reverential familiarity with Him, which increases our trust into a sort of a living atmosphere and our very lives seem constantly bathed with the presence of God.  

When Eliezer was seeking a wife for Isaac, he put certain tests to God which the Lord accepted and complied with. This confirmed and strengthened his trust, Gen. 24. Gideon also by his fleece put God to a test, which confirmed his faith beyond a doubt of his being called to deliver Israel. If we put God to a proof in the spirit of deep humility and loving obedience, in the little practical things of life, it will rapidly increase our trust, and this enlargement of trust will always kindle a fresh degree of love.  

2. By enduring trials and temptations. Sore trials sift us, and weigh us, and measure the size of our faith.  

Men who are sorely tried are men of boundless faith. Storms at sea not only find out who the good captains are, but also by a stern necessity call into exercise all the latent abilities and skill of the good captains; and in like manner the storms of life prove who the real Christians are and give opportunities for the display of the principle of faith in a way that nothing else could.  

Our real trust in God is increased by getting rid of a lot of intellectual or sentimental, ecclesiastical or fleshly chaff, which looks like religion, but is only rubbish. We waste time by building on sand, and when a cyclone destroys the structure, we are compelled to dig down to bedrock. This is how severe trials purify our faith. A mere grain of pure faith, that can endure the furnace heat of any trial, is better than a large amount of something that looks like faith, but which is found in the end to be a depending on the creature.  

Christ compared faith to a grain of mustard seed, because though small, it had in it the principle of an irresistible life. The living roots of plants and trees have been known to split rocks in sunder. Of course trials are hard to bear, or else they are not worth calling trials, but in the enduring of them, fictitious kinds of faith are swept away, and pure faith is enlarged and intensified.  

3. By watching His providences. This includes His merciful and punishing providences. A clear discernment of God’s judgments, whether on individuals, or on certain lines of conduct, or on communities and nations, is enough to mature a boundless faith in God in any serious, thoughtful mind.  

If God is perfectly true in His judgment, and displays a perfect accuracy and fitness in the way He punishes people as to the time and manner and amount of punishment He deals out, it proves His character, His minute personal knowledge, and His veracity. If He does these things in judgment, how much more will He manifest Himself in favor and blessing to those who love and obey Him. He, Himself, has declared that “judgment is His strange work,” as if He had no taste for it, and was slow, unpracticed at the business. “Mercy is His delight”—a work of predilection, agreeable to His taste and in which He is fond of manifesting His knowledge, personality, minuteness, promptness and abundance of goodness.  

All persons of great faith in God have invariably been constant readers of pages of special providence, a protest to the infidelity of their times. Strange to say that the rapid increase of the knowledge of nature, inventions, arts, and sciences in modern years has brought a flood of materialistic skepticism. Instead of “looking through nature up to nature’s God,” men look downward and see no God at all, and never think of reverting to God any more than if He did not exist.  

And many professing Christians never think of recognizing God the way the Bible reveals Him, as being in the little details of life, and exercising His jurisdiction over every agent, great or small, from the affairs of an empire, to the steps of a little child or the fall of a little sparrow. No thoughtful person can watch God’s providences without growing in faith. “He who notes a providence, will never lack a providence to note.” The more we trust God, the more we put ourselves out of harmony with all those who do not trust Him, and the true believer is an everlasting protest against the majority of the people among whom he lives.  

4. By having no creature-dependencies. In many ways we are compelled to trust in creatures, but such faith must always have allowances. It is not absolute, not solid, for it is never God’s will that we should trust a creature in the same way we trust Him. Scientists claim that though atoms of matter are held together by the law of cohesion, yet in reality the ultimate particles of matter never touch each other. There is a little space between them, which accounts for the porousness of things and the other accountable phenomena of matter.  

The same principle is true between creature and creature with regard to trust in each other. Our Creator has so constituted us, that we never can get as close to a fellow-creature as we can to our blessed God. Our Creator is always and forever our nearest relative. In trusting a creature we must always leave room for disappointment, and if we do not make allowance, when the disappointment comes, it is a sore hurt. Satan will use it as a temptation to distrust God. This is why multitudes who have trusted creatures in the place of God have turned out skeptics.  

The only right kind of faith to have in our fellow-creatures, is that which grows out of our faith in God, and then it will not be an idolatrous faith, but a charitable faith that makes allowances. People sometimes say they can trust God, but they cannot trust their fellows. When we really have perfect trust in God, His agency and omnipotent presence so fills our vision, that we can trust Him to manage and overrule all creatures, in such a way, that the conduct of our fellows never interferes with our life of trust.  

And so it turns out that the man who knows most perfectly the weakness and untrustworthiness of his fellow-creatures is the one who practically has the most sensible and discriminate confidence in his fellows, because he is not banking on them. The bed-rock of his faith is in the living God, Who created and overrules all creatures. The holiest persons run enormous risks with bad characters, and confide in certain instances in the lowest and most treacherous people, because they have their eye on God, and not on the frail creature. Thus to deal directly with God alone, is the pathway to the mountain-top of a bold, boundless trust. As every grace of holiness is the offspring of trust, whatever increases our faith must surely increase the life of holiness.