Trust God and Do The Next Thing

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What do you do when you are feeling overwhelmed? I remember Oswald Chambers’ principle to, “Trust God and do the next thing”.

We all tend to over-worry when faced with troubles and challenges in life instead of turning to God for help. In fact, we oftentimes only turn to Him only after we have exhausted all avenues of help.

But the Bible tells us in the Sermon on the Mount:

Seek First His Righteousness

The solution to our worrying is there. It is found in verse 33 – seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.

But how?

It is as simple as the verse states it. – seek to put God and His things FIRST.

Order will flow from there. Usually, our priorities in life are misplaced. Our needs instinctively come first. But the Bible says God comes first.

So to do that, the first step is to go to God in prayer. Confess to Him for not putting Him first. And then pour out your woes to Him. He won’t laugh at us or mock us.

Paul tells us in Philippians 4:6-8 to pray continually and to meditate on things which are true and praiseworthy. And then the God of peace will be with us. And worry will have to flee from us.

Fix Eyes on Jesus

I worry a lot. And to top it off, I have an overactive imagination that often has my husband and children rolling their eyes at me. But thanks be to God, I have made some progress here.

Every time I want to worry about something, I give it to God. Big things, small things. I keep laying them all at the feet of Jesus. I pray,

“Here Lord, I refuse to worry about _____. I lay them at the feet of Your cross and just trust You.”

And then I fix my eyes on Jesus, remembering to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. Sometimes though, I have to pray this many times in the course of just one hour. Because I keep taking up the burden I just laid down at the foot of the cross. Sigh.

I am however, very grateful that:

Don’t get overwhelmed, don’t get worried, don’t get afraid. Just Trust God and do the next thing.

What is the Next Thing?

But you may be wondering: what exactly is the next thing you need to do?

It could be something as simple as putting down the phone and cleaning up the kitchen counter instead of moaning that the house is so messy.

Or putting a load of laundry into the washing machine instead of whining that you’ll never get caught up with it.

If it is children’s behaviour that is getting you down, then there’s an important need to pray about it. And then discipline consistently. You may have to sit them down to tell them that there are new rules in the house now.

Do a Brain Dump

But in my opinion, it would be way more productive if we were to start with a Brain Dump. I explain more about this in my post Do the Brain Dump and Get Out of the Overwhelm.

In summary, when you do a Brain Dump, you just dump everything that is swirling around inside your head out onto a list.

Get your FREE Brain Dump printable here.

Then prioritise what’s important and what’s urgent (has a deadline). Assign a time frame to the tasks and slowly work through them. Break down the big tasks into smaller ones (see post for more details) and then – tough love ahead – Just do what needs to be done.

Don’t get paralysed by our fears and worries.

TRUST GOD,
DO THE NEXT THING.

Related Posts

Trust God and Embrace Change
I am Not Being Super Spiritual
My God is More Than Able
Trust God, Not Methods and Methodologies

This post was originally posted on 10 February 2008 and has been updated.

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