Charles Stanley, of all people.

When God began to call me out of Egypt/ Los Angeles, He used the radio preaching ministry of Charles Stanley in a profound way. After I returned to Athens, and with my memory of Egypt still fresh, I listened to Dr. Stanley as often as I could find him on the radio. As my faith grew, and as my focus shifted to books from which to be instructed in God's ways and in knowing Him, I turned from the radio preachers because I perceived them to be less thoughtful and less powerful than what I was finding in books.

Today, however, as I stumbled onto a broadcast of Dr. Stanley, I was reminded that the Holy Spirit uses what He wants in reaching us, even Dr. Stanley.

I typed as much as I could into my phone while driving (and avoiding a wreck) because I want to share with y'all the sum of what He was saying, and it is this: If you don't trust Him, it's because you don't love Him; and if you don't love Him, it's because you don't know Him.

That is both true and extremely powerful.

If you loved Him, you would trust Him without questioning Him at all. If I asked any of y'all to do some task that required some personal sacrifice, and if I asked you to commit to doing it without telling you what it is that I wanted you to do, I would expect some or all of you to be suspicious and cautious before agreeing to do what I asked you to do. You can't fully trust that I know what is best for you, nor can you trust that I know you well enough to know what is best for you. My request, in some part if not all, will be selfish.

But God's requests are always fully selfish, asking us to do and be what benefits Him the most. And here's the kicker: He has eternally fused His own good with our good. Can you even wrap your head around that? I try to. By making our good line up with His good, everything He requires of us is for the good of us both. Given His perfect knowledge of us and our definite future, we can trust Him like we can trust no other. He knows what is best for us because He knows who we are (He created us) and what we need. He knows what we need to do because only He knows the path that is set before us, the path that we cannot avoid.

So we have no reason not to trust Him, except through hatred. If we don't love Him, we hate Him. That may not be true when it refers to other humans, but it is true when it refers to Jehovah God.

So the second point is similar: to know Him is to love Him. For a being of His nature and character, there is no other rational response. If you knew His goodness, if you felt His love, if you breathed in His mercy, and if you knew what it took for Him to do all of the above, then you would love Him with a fire that would make you look truly foolish in this world. You would talk of Him all day long, and you would run to your prayer room to spend time with Him. We ought to feel the deepest shame that this is not true of us. Yes, He has shown us mercy; but we have done much that ought to awaken our shame at not loving Him with our whole mind, heart, and body.

Praise God for His great mercy! He has provided a lamb, and He loves a whore of a bride.

But it will not always be so, and He knows it. His bride will one day love him with an intensity and devotion that has never been seen since the creation of the world. He Himself will recreate her and place this new thing within her.

Sorry: that's a tangent. My point is just this: God spoke to me today in my car through Charles Stanley, and He reminded me of some things that I had not paid attention to in a while.

To know Him is to love Him, and to love Him is to trust Him.