"When perplexities arise, and difficulties confront you, look not for help to humanity. Trust all with God. The practice of telling our difficulties to others only makes us weak, and brings no strength to them. It lays upon them the burden of our spiritual infirmities, which they cannot relieve. We seek the strength of erring, finite man, when we might have the strength of the unerring, infinite God.
You need not go to the ends of the earth for wisdom, for God is near. It is not the capabilities you now possess or ever will have that will give you success. It is that which the Lord can do for you. We need to have far less confidence in what man can do and far more confidence in what God can do for every believing soul. He longs to have you reach after Him by faith. He longs to have you expect great things from Him. He longs to give you understanding in temporal as well as in spiritual matters. He can sharpen the intellect. He can give tact and skill. Put your talents into the work, ask God for wisdom, and it will be given you." {COL 146}

You have been, and you are, thankful that you have confidence [trust or faith] in God. This is well; for it is a great thing to have doubt and uncertainty removed, and confidence in God established in the mind and heart. It is, therefore, a thing really to be thankful for, that you have confidence in God.

Yet there is a greater thing than this to be thankful for, and that is that God has confidence in you. Indeed, it is God's confidence in us that is all the ground of our confidence in Him. Considered solely upon the merit of the question, it is indeed a very little thing that we should have confidence in Him; while it is a thing great beyond all comparison that He should have confidence in us.

Just think what we were--a people laden with iniquity, alienated from God, and enemies in our minds, by wicked works. Yet when we were all this, God deliberately invested in us all that He had--the great price of His dear Son, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of God. This is a marvelous display of confidence.

He had such confidence in us that He would invest in us--aliens and enemies--all that He had, and all that He is--even Himself--expecting that His confidence in us would destroy the alienation, break down the enmity, and win us to confidence in Him. And this fairly reckless confidence in us did actually win us from alienation and enmity to confidence in Him. This is the only thing that ever did or that ever could so win us

Thus His confidence in us is all the ground of our confidence in Him. And thus is established and illustrated the divine principle that confidence begets confidence; yea, that confidence to the extent of what seems recklessness will beget confidence even to what seems recklessness; for no person can fairly and seriously contemplate the marvelous confidence that God has shown in us, without being won to a confidence in God that is a perfect abandon of trust--a trust that holds them firm and steady through every vicissitude--fire, flood, suffering, persecution, death itself--that this world can possibly know.

Nor did the Lord's marvelous display of confidence cease with only this investment to win us to confidence in Him; but when it had won us to confidence in Him, He then confided to our keeping His own honor in the world. He did not stay here in person to guard His honor and His character. No; He left the world, and left His disciples here in His stead, entrusting altogether to us the guardianship of His honor and His character. “As my Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” John 20:21

Are you true to the trust, or are you betraying His boundless confidence? Yes, for us to have confidence in God is indeed a great thing; but O! great beyond all measure it is that God has confidence in us--and such confidence! May this perfect abandon of the confidence of God in us hold us from proving recreant to the trust and from ever betraying that confidence. --

i've been gently reminded yesterday and today of past leadings. and aren't we told to remember how God has led us in our past?? that's so we can keep that confidence inspite of not being able to "see" where we are going now.

In every command or injunction that God gives there is a promise, the most positive, underlying the command. God has made provision that we may become like unto Him, and He will accomplish this for all who do not interpose a perverse will and thus frustrate His grace. {MB 76.2}

With untold love our God has loved us, and our love awakens toward Him as we comprehend something of the length and breadth and depth and height of this love that passeth knowledge. By the revelation of the attractive loveliness of Christ, by the knowledge of His love expressed to us while we were yet sinners, the stubborn heart is melted and subdued, and the sinner is transformed and becomes a child of heaven. God does not employ compulsory measures; love is the agent which He uses to expel sin from the heart. By it He changes pride into humility, and enmity and unbelief into love and faith. {MB 76.3} ...

God is love. Like rays of light from the sun, love and light and joy flow out from Him to all His creatures. It is His nature to give. His very life is the outflow of unselfish love...

If you are the children of God you are partakers of His nature, and you cannot but be like Him. Every child lives by the life of his father. If you are God's children, begotten by His Spirit, you live by the life of God... That life in you will produce the same character and manifest the same works as it did in Him. {MB 77.3}

COL 318
In heaven it is said by the ministering angels:

The ministry which we have been commissioned to perform we have done. We pressed back the army of evil angels. We sent brightness and light into the souls of men, quickening their memory of the love of God expressed in Jesus. We attracted their eyes to the cross of Christ.

Their hearts were deeply moved by a sense of the sin that crucified the Son of God. They were convicted. They saw the steps to be taken in conversion; they felt the power of the gospel; their hearts were made tender as they saw the sweetness of the love of God. They beheld the beauty of the character of Christ.

But with the many it was all in vain. They would not surrender their own habits and character. They would not put off the garments of earth in order to be clothed with the robe of heaven. Their hearts were given to covetousness. They loved the associations of the world more than they loved their God. {COL 318.1}

Tom wrote:

I believe that being born again involves the surrendering of one's life to Christ, accepting Him as personal Savior, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, who reveals the love of God shining from the cross, moving one to repents of one's sins and give one's self to Christ. This process brings the repentant sinner into harmony with God, and necessarily into harmony with His law, which is a transcript of His character. A converted person may fall into sin (although he need not), but he will not, as long as he is converted, rebelliously pursue sin.