Devotion #1: Trust Your Stuff

Growing up, I loved to play baseball. I spent many evenings on the baseball field practicing and playing games. With all the time I spent on the field over the years, I made many friends playing on various baseball teams. One phrase that both coaches and friends would say to me, especially while pitching in various baseball games, is “Trust your stuff.” Now, if you never watched or played baseball, you might ask yourself, “What in the world does that mean?” To give a quick explanation, “Trust your stuff,” as a pitcher, means to believe that your pitches are good enough to challenge the opposing batter. Those who told me this saying were encouraging me to simply throw my pitches to the best of my ability and not worry about what would happen next. As a pitcher, I had a choice each time that I pitched. Would I follow the advice of my coaches, who trusted me, or would I let my nerves get the best of me?  

Over the years, each time I followed and trusted this advice, my pitching would go so much better than when I would not. In each game I pitched, I had a choice to trust my ability to get batters on the other team to strike out.  

My experience in baseball reminds me of Romans 4:13 (NLT), which shares, “Clearly, God’s promise to give the whole earth to Abraham and his descendants was based not on his obedience to God’s law, but on a right relationship with God that comes by faith.”  

Abraham was given both commands and a covenant by God throughout the book of Genesis. God commands Abraham to leave his homeland and to go where God leads him to go (Genesis 12). Later on in Genesis 17:4, Abraham is promised that he and his family would be “the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4 NLT). Abraham obeyed God’s commands in faith when they were given, but it was not just his obedience that made Abraham justified, but when he responded in faith. Because Abraham trusted God, he was justified.  

As a baseball pitcher, I was encouraged to trust in my own ability to throw different pitches. Many times in life, we get similar advice to trust in our own abilities. However, we cannot trust in our own abilities only or point to the times when we have been obedient out of a sense of duty to be made righteous. No matter what, we have all fallen short of God’s glorious standard. We have to place our trust in Jesus and believe by faith that Jesus died on the cross and rose again three days later. Through this, He made the way for us to go to Heaven. Abraham was justified by his faith; we, too, can be justified through faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection.