TRUST GOD THROUGH IT ALL, part 2

The first clause in Part 1 told us to Trust in the Lord with all your heart.  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 eyes.  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, we’re going to fall over.

Nonetheless, we persist in trying to do things our own way, believing somehow that our ways are better than God’s ways. That we know better than He does.  Don’t act like I’m not talking about or to you.  We are ALL guilty.

In terms of our Blondin illustration, in Part 1, trusting in our own understanding is like getting half-way across the tightrope and then shouting “Oh! Blondin! You don’t want to do it like that”. Then, we leap out of the wheelbarrow and start trying to push it ourselves. A hundred and sixty feet above Niagara Falls on a tightrope! Isn’t this is unlikely to be a good idea?  No, it’s madness! But that’s 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. Help me, Jesus!

We would do well to let Solomon, who wrote these very words we’re looking at, be an example to us of the dangers of leaning on our own understanding. He started off brilliantly as king by asking God for wisdom and then building the temple for him. Didn’t he? 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 he’d just built. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He began to oppress 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 leaned on his own understanding and the eventual result was the split in the kingdom of Israel and effectively the end of God’s 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 on God’s truth. God’s 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. 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 God’s mouth.

Lean not on your own understanding. Lean instead on the wisdom of God’s 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.  Stay with me.  I know it’s a lot to digest.

Come back for Part 3, In all thy ways acknowledge him. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

See you next Tuesday…