22I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from enemies on the road, because we had told the king, “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him.”
It can be very hard to trust the Lord. Sometimes our words of faith are ahead of our heart. We know intellectually that the Lord is able to protect us, but it can be hard to trust him in the moment. Ezra is accepting God’s challenge of faith. They know He is able to protect them, but they have to work on their own fears in the middle of the trust journey. We can often have this same struggle in our lives. We can have head knowledge of God’s provision. We can read the Scriptures and discover how He came through for others in the past. But it can be a very hard thing to trust Him in the middle of our journey, especially when we see all the obstacles in our way. When we focus on the difficulties rather than on the Lord, we will stumble and fall. Our focus must be on the Lord. It can be easy when the enemies are right in our faces to try to solve this in our own strength, but that is exactly the moment we must continue to trust the Lord. The battle between trusting self and trusting the Lord really gets won when we face the impossible. We can trust or we can fall. Ezra has to trust the Lord to live up to Ezra’s own words, his own statement of faith. Ezra has boasted to the King that the Lord is able to protect them on their long journey back to Jerusalem. Now Ezra has to walk out that trust. What is God calling you to trust Him about today? How is the Lord stretching you? What are the battlegrounds in your life into which you need the Lord to intervene? It is often in the struggle areas, the areas where our own strength has failed, that the Lord wants us to trust Him. So trust Him.
The Arnold Journey 