To Encourage You

Proverbs 3:5 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding”

The Bible says so much to us in its economy of words. That’s why we are to meditate on it. We aren’t to quickly pass by what it says. One such example is the verse above. It’s one of the most well-known verses in all the Bible, yet, how often do we really ponder what it says? Perhaps we’ve memorized it. Maybe it’s on a plaque somewhere on a wall in our home. But have we ever really heard it? More than that, have we obeyed it?

In this short verse we are told something that we ARE to do, and something else that we ARE NOT to do. Both instructions are important. Both are words spoken to us by God. As we obey one, we obey the other, and if we do not obey one, we are not obeying the other. It’s simple, but I can tell you in reference to myself, it can be so hard to really believe and obey.

You see, there are a lot of things in this life I just DO NOT understand. There are weaknesses in my life and character that bother me greatly. There are tragedies in life that have thrown me for a loop. There are problems that I’ve faced that I just could not figure out, and therefore, I didn’t know what to do about them. And when my thoughts dwell on such things, it can trouble me deep in my soul. I can go down the path of worry and fear pretty easily if I dwell on them. It’s easy to do, because it comes so naturally.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it, for what comes naturally to us is so often affected by sin. It’s when I do the very thing that God has told me NOT to do in the verse above, that I head down a very wrong path. He’s told me in black and white to NOT lean on my own understanding. He’s told me that there are things in this life that I won’t understand, can’t figure out, and because of that I will find myself in situations of not knowing what to do. But to this, God is telling me, “That’s OK. Don’t be surprised by this. Your understanding is lacking, but Mine never is!” It is exactly because of this that we are to trust in the Lord with ALL our heart. We aren’t to trust in what God has said as far as we can understand Him – and trust in ourselves for everything else. To do this is to disobey what He’s said. We aren’t to go through life with our emotional well-being dependent on our understanding of things, for if that’s how we approach life, every time we don’t understand what in the world is going on, we may find ourselves in an emotionally very dark place.

The apostle Paul eventually got to the place in his life where he got hold of this. It’s on that basis that he would say, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:11-13). One such instance where Paul learned this is found in the following passage from 2 Corinthians 1:8-10: “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.”

So, have you been there? Are you there right now? Are you in a situation that you just cannot understand, and are you tending toward despair because of it? If so, know that you are there for a reason, and that reason is to better learn the truth of Proverbs 3:5 above. You don’t HAVE TO understand it! There’s much in life that neither you nor I will ever understand. But it is in those times that God is teaching us to lean on HIS understanding and not our own. It is in exactly such times that we are to obey Solomon’s next admonition from Proverbs 3, that “in all (our) ways (we) acknowledge HIM,” and then trust that, in this, HE will “make straight (our) paths.” We may not understand it. We don’t have to. For even what we DO understand in life comes short of the perfect, supernatural way that God understands it.

May God help us to lean on what He knows and what He has told us in His Word, for to lean on what I know and understand is so often just the opposite.