12 Jun How God Builds Trust in Us
GOD WORKS INCREMENTALLY WITH US, TAKING US FROM SMALL FAITH TO GREATER FAITH
I’m fascinated with animal training when I see a parallel between how a trainer works with an animal and how God works with us.
The trainer’s goal is to get the animal to trust him and to be both willing and able to do whatever the trainer asks.
The same is true of God. God’s goal is to get us to trust Him, and to be both willing and able to do whatever He asks.
In both cases, when successful, the student is transformed from primitive, natural behavior into highly developed and sophisticated behavior that brings glory to the student and even more glory to the trainer.
It is never easy.
Growing Through Frustration
In an earlier blog post, I told the story of how the sit/stay command is the most difficult command to train a dog. The dog must sit and stay in place while the trainer goes behind a screen and stays out of sight for three minutes. In dog years, that is like a human sitting for 21 minutes doing absolutely nothing.
The reason it is so difficult is that (1) the dog feels that it is doing nothing, and (2) it feels that it has been abandoned. Neither is true, of course, but try telling that to the dog.
To learn this challenging command requires hours of incremental learning (sit/stay for 10 seconds, sit/stay for 30 seconds, sit/stay for 60 seconds, etc.) and endless boredom and frustration for the dog that must be overcome with promises of reward. The trick is to start with little obediences and progress to larger obediences, developing trust and skill through repetition.
Growing Through Fear
Then, there are lessons to be learned from horses. There is a significant difference, however, with horses over dogs. Fear. Dogs are predators, so they are usually not fearful, only frustrated.
Horses are prey animals, and are almost always fearful of anything new. So the trainer must deliberately do things that scare the horse, but do not harm it. And in the end, the horse learns not to fear.
An Australian horse trainer (clintonanderson.com), now living in Texas, captured a wild mustang and seven days later was riding it as a well trained and perfectly behaved horse to go catch other wild mustangs. That is unimaginable in that length of time, akin to teaching a pig to fly.
How did he do it? The same way as the dog trainer – he started with little steps and progressed to larger steps.
After some initial conditioning, the trainer tosses a short rope on the back of the wild horse. It does not hurt the horse, but frightens it. But as the trainer tosses the rope on the back of the horse over and over without hurting the horse, the horse eventually learns that the rope is nothing to fear, and calms down.
The trainer then ratchets things up a notch and tosses the rope around the legs of the horse. Again, the horse spooks until, through repetition, it learns that the rope is nothing to fear, and calms down again.
Next, the trainer takes white plastic bags tied to the end of a six-foot stick and shakes and rattles them at the horse, with spectacular results. To a wild horse, this harmless exercise seems death defying.
As the horse calms to the shaking and rattling, the trainer then rubs the bags on the back of the horse, progressing to the feet and eventually to the head as the horse calms with each stage.
Over and over again, the horse learns that things that seemed terrifying at first turn out to be harmless. It eventually not only begins to calm down, but also begins to trust the trainer. It eventually concludes that it is safe to do whatever the trainer asks of it. As a capstone to the training process, that horse is then taken into the wilderness to help round up other wild horses.
One of the most amazing demonstrations of equine trust and obedience was demonstrated in the 1940 movie version of The Mark of Zorro, starring Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone. In the film, Zorro is fleeing through the countryside on horseback in the middle of the night, hotly pursued by Spanish horse-soldiers.
He begins to gallup across a very long bridge perhaps fifty feet above a broad river, with a 4-foot handrail on both sides. Suddenly, other horse-soldiers appear near the opposite end of the bridge. He is trapped.
Zorro turns the horse toward the handrail and urges it to jump. Without hesitation, horse and rider go up over the handrail and fall fifty feet into the river below and make their escape.
It was unbelievable. An untrained horse would more likely do a back-flip before it would jump into empty darkness. How in the world did the rider get the horse to do that unimaginable feat?
Well, likely by starting with little obediences, graduating to greater obediences. Perhaps the rider asked the horse to walk into water, then graduated to stepping down three feet into water, then jumping 10 feet into water, and 20 feet and so on, eventually jumping off a bridge and falling 50 feet into a river.
When the horse learns to trust the rider, it will eventually do whatever the rider asks of it.
That’s what God does with us. He works incrementally with us. We see an example of this in Matthew 25 in which a master gave one slave five bags of money, another two bags, and another one. He asked them to invest the money while he went on a journey. When he returned, he rewarded the slaves who were faithful in these “small things” by praising them and giving them “greater things.”
When we are faithful in smaller things, God will give us greater things. And make no mistake. While very unpleasant, the trials God puts us through are opportunities… for greater fellowship, greater character, greater spiritual maturity, greater ministry, and greater eternal reward (James 1:2-4, Matthew 25:23, Romans 8:18).
All that we want out of life is found on the other side of trials.
I have had health challenges, financial reversals, professional upheavals and intimidating responsibilities, all of them unexpected, frightening and very much unwanted. Yet, after each of them, the Lord deepened my walk with Him so significantly that even I felt it was worth having gone through the unwanted experience.
The key to thriving in this context is to make your goals spiritual and eternal, rather then physical and temporal… to give up on this life and invest in the next (Colossians 3:1-3). As missionary Jim Elliot famously said, “He is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep in order to gain that which he cannot lose.”
It goes against every natural instinct, just as jumping off the bridge went against every natural instinct of Zorro’s horse. But God can take us to otherwise unattainable places in our walk with Him if we will just continue to trust Him and obey Him in all things.
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