'Trust Our God'

Monday February 13 2023

In this month's youth column, Lee Whitecross describes his faith journey

Back in 2020 I was offered the role of Youth Pastor at Gillespie Memorial Church in Dunfermline.

One year before, around the beginning of 2019, I came to a place as a disciple where I began to ask of myself some forthright questions that required an honest answer. I began to do just as Paul taught us to do, I began to ‘examine myself’ (2 Corinthians 13:5). God was challenging me, God was asking me to look deeper into my thoughts and my convictions.

Why do I think God might have been doing this? Well, in 2019, winter time marked eight years following Christ and throughout those eight years a whole lot of growth had happened but similarly there was much backsliding and sinfulness as I navigated the life of a disciple to Christ. But at this time what stuck out to me was how there can be such differing opinions and feelings within the church – it set me on a path of unsettling questioning of faith and the church and it led me to ask the question…“What is ultimately true of Christianity?”

How do we know ‘truth’? Where are the answers to my questions? This season of questioning was, I believe, ordained by God. He was calling me to search in order that I may find grounding, foundations and pillars to the faith I had in him. Isn’t it wonderful that God is so gentle but yet can be oh so abrupt. Praise God.

I found myself on a walk, alone, in a wonderful place in Edinburgh called the Balerno Reservoir. Whilst I was there, as I prayed and called upon God for answers – the calling upon God often looked more like a confused shouting at God – I began to think about the bible and in a moment, what I initially believed the bible to be had changed. It changed from being a helpful tool that aided my faith in devotional times to becoming the bread that sustains my life.

Since 2019, since that change of perception that I was asking God for occurred, my understanding of who Christ is has brought me around to a place of devotion as a follower, rather than a label I had stitched to my every item of clothing. You see, how does a disciple live purposefully and devoted without the bread that sustains us? We eat and drink daily because if we do not the repercussions are deadly. The same goes for our souls. Christ said that “if we find our lives we will lose it but if we lose our lives ‘for his sake’ we will find it.” Christ’s church in Scotland, I believe, must lose its life for his sake in order that we might gain him.

There is a call to devotion today for each and every disciple. God’s word is the lamp to our feet. It is definitive, it is final, it is glorious and it is ever true. May we trust our God in his word in that what he has promised to be will come to fruition. May we, his disciples lean on Christ in total devotion to his word and upon prayer in order that we might see him be glorified in Scotland in 2023!