Getting Closer to Jesus: In his book, Ruthless Trust, Brennan Manning tells the story of ethicist John Kavanaugh, who traveled to India to work with Mother Teresa in “the house of the dying.” Kavanaugh was searching for what to do with the rest of his life, so he asked Mother Teresa to pray for him that God would grant him clarity. She refused, saying, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When Kavanaugh protested that Mother Teresa seemed to have such great clarity, she responded, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.”

Manning goes on to say it is trust—the simple but ruthless childlike trust that we place in God—that is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. I agree. That is what Jesus called his disciples to in the first century—to trust in God, to trust in him—and that is the challenge that Jesus lays down for his would-be followers in our age.

No matter how you slice it, the basic minimum requirement for following Jesus always comes down to this: Will you give him your total trust? If you will, you are on your way to the most exciting and rewarding experience of life a person will ever have—walking with Jesus. And from what Jesus said in John 14:1, we can deduce that one of the basic blessings of placing our trust in God is a trouble-free heart. Not a trouble-free life, mind you, but a heart (and a mind, Paul adds in Philippians 4:7) that is guarded by Jesus himself.

However, if you won’t give God your total trust, your Christian experience will never get out of the harbor to set sail on the rewarding voyage of risky discipleship. You will find yourself nursing a troubled heart and travelling a less-than-satisfying journey with God.

“Trust in God,” Jesus says, “and trust in me.” So, are you? When your faith is boiled down to its basic elements, will we find there, despite life’s circumstances and in scorn of the consequences of living out your faith, a simple but ruthless childlike trust in God? Or is trust something that merely gets talked about but never fleshed out?

A lot of people talk about trusting God, fewer people ever place the totality of their lives in the Father’s hands and unequivocally say, “into your hands, I commit my spirit. May your will be done.” If you are one of the courageous and committed few who do, you have given the greatest gift a human being can place before the God who has everything—the rare trifecta of extreme dependence, radical faith, and resolute obedience. Nothing brings a smile to the Father’s heart quite like that.

One of the best illustrations of this kind of ruthless trust came from the life of the famous tightrope walker, George Blondin. In the 1850s, for a publicity stunt, George decided he would walk across Niagara Falls on a rope that had been stretched from one side of the falls to the other. Crowds lined up on both the Canadian and American sides to watch this unbelievable feat. Blondin began to walk across, inch by inch, step by step, and everybody knew that if he’d make one mistake, he was a goner. He got to the other side, and the crowd went wild. Blondin said, “I’m going to do it again.” And to the crowd’s delight, he did. Then, to everybody’s amazement, he crossed again, this time pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He actually did this several times, and as he started to go across one last time, someone in the crowd said, “I believe you could do that all day.” To that, Blondin dumped out the dirt and said, “Then get into the wheelbarrow.”

In a very real sense, that is what God is saying to you and me. Our talk alone is cheap. At some point, we need to get in the wheelbarrow of trust and prove that our discipleship is real.

Take the Next Step : Pray this honest and humble prayer: “God, I trust in you. Help my lack of trust!”