Trust in the Lord with all your heart The call on the Christian is to have the sort of trust that makes us prepared to put our entire lives into Gods hands. Look at verse 5 of chapter 3, Trust in the Lord with all your heartref. Simply believing in God is no good to us. We are to have faith, and trust is the practical outworking of faith. Faith in God sometimes seems like a nebulous, airy-fairy concept, doesnt it? Its hard to pin down exactly what it means; its hard to know whether we really have faith. We can understand trust, though, cant we? After all we find ourselves having to trust people everyday. We trust whoever built our house that its not going to fall in on our heads. We trust the bank with our money. We trust whoever designed our video recorder that when we set the timer it will record the programme we wanted. Next week I shall be getting on a plane to Japan and investing a tremendous amount of trust in the pilot, the maintenance crews and the air-traffic control people. We exercise trust all the time, quite unthinkingly. We know what it means. Trust is the practical outworking of faith: it is when we trust God that we show that our faith in Him is real. The call here is not to a piecemeal trust in God. No, its to a complete trust in God: trusting him with our whole lives. We are not to pick and choose—OK, Lord, I will trust you with my marriage, but not with my career—, we are to trust him with our whole hearts and put our whole lives in his hands. The Christian, who has put his or her faith in God has to get into that wheelbarrow when God challenges us. We are to trust in the Lord with all our hearts. How can we make sure that we are trusting in God with all our hearts? The following verses show us. Lean not on your own understanding. One problem is that we all think we know better than God. All of us are tempted in the manner of verse 7, do not be wise in your own eyesref. We think we know better than God, but the reality is that, like Adam and Eve in the beginning, our wisdom and understanding is weak, crooked and unreliable. Like a worm-riddled walking-stick, if we lean on it were going to fall over. Nonetheless, we persist in trying to do things our own way, believing somehow that our ways are better than Gods ways. That we know better than him. In terms of our Blondin illustration trusting in our own understanding is like getting half-way accross the tightrope and then shouting Oi! Blondin! You dont want to do it like that . Then we leap out of the wheelbarrow and starting trying to push it ourselves. A hundred and sixty feet above Niagra Falls on a tightrope this is unlikely to be a good idea, is it. No, its madness. But thats what we try to do all the time. We believe we know better how to run our lives than God; we try to lean on our own understanding. We would do well let Solomon who wrote these very words were looking at be an example to us of the dangers of leaning on our own understanding. He started off brilliantly as king, didnt he, by asking God for wisdom and then building the temple for him. At first Solomon pleased God and was obedient to him, but then he began to think he knew better than God. He acquired an army for himself and imported horses from Egypt; he accumulated vast amounts of silver and gold and built himself a palace even more opulent than the temple hed just built. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He began to opress the people. All of this was in direct contravention of the laws for kings laid down in Deuteronomy 17 of which Solomon was well aware. He simply thought he knew better than God. He leant on his own understanding and the eventual result was the split in the kingdom of Isreal and effectively the end of Gods people as a whole nation. In the same way, if we persist in leaning on our own understanding rather than trusting in God with all our hearts then our lives will also end in ruin. What is the alternative to leaning on our own understanding? It is to lean instead on Gods truth. Gods ways are not our ways, so we need to learn them from somewhere. Just look back a little to Proverbs chapter 2 verse 6 where it says, the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.ref This is solid, reliable understanding that we can lean on, that we can build our lives upon. It is the understanding written for us in this book, the Bible: words from Gods mouth. Lean not on your own understanding. Lean instead on the wisdom of Gods word. As we daily read and understand his word we will be learning to think His thoughts after Him. And that will help us as we seek to trust in him with all our hearts.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:44:21 +0000
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