As we enter a new year, we are also closing out a decade. It was a decade riddled with war, terrorism, economic collapses, natural disasters, and increased moral decadence. While it was an apparent lost decade for many people, it is a good time at the end of a year to reflect on one’s own personal strengths and weakness. As a result we focus a lot on our setbacks and failures, and have made certain resolutions to improve our circumstances for the new year. And quite frankly there is nothing wrong with that. But what I find more often than not is that many of us will sit down and ponder our life situations, make assessments and determinations and yet continue to fail miserably. Why? Perhaps that is because we have missed the mark. In trying to get our lives in order and trying to make improvements our lives, we fail in our assessment year after year. The biggest failure we make is to improve our walks with God. There is nothing wrong with wanting materiel success. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve your life situation. (Getting a better job, Paying off debt, improving the overall quality of our lives, improving our health etc.) The Problem is when we put materiel comfort, personal success, and self improvement above God. When we make it our chief ambition in life, to improve our circumstance and our chief ambition to have materiel prosperity and to succeed, what we are actually doing is making idols of these goals and devoting ourselves to these goals instead of God. What we really need is to reorganize our priorities.
Proverbs 3:5-6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Let’s examine this text-
Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Here we have the first and most practical advice that any Christians can take. To Trust God with all our hearts. That is because trusting in God is the expression of faith in God. And the bible tells us very clearly: “Without Faith it is impossible to please God” Heb. 11:6 , and “The righteous shall walk by faith.” Rom. 1:17 Trusting in God is put in direct opposition to “Leaning on our own understanding” which teaches us that; there basically two ways we can perceive reality. We can perceive reality through mere human conjecture, or we can perceive reality through divine revelation. As humans we often take the road of trying to figure it out on our own. When we face a problem or want to achieve something, we try to find the solution based on our own understanding. That is when we base our decisions and opinions on what we observe and what we think.
The problem with such wisdom, is that it is tainted the corruption of our sinful nature and can be misleading us into a destructive course and to many unintended consequences. Take for example Lot. (Gen. 13:8-13) When given the choice by Abram to settle anywhere he wished, he chose the valley east of Jordan because it was well watered and was like the Garden of the Lord. His decision making was based purely on what he perceived would be the most lucrative choice. Abram on the other hand continued to Canaan because God told him to go there. While it may look like Lot made a better choice on the surface, in actuality Abram made the better choice. Why? Because Abram was trusting in God for his direction, not on his own understanding. In Heb. 11:8-10 the bible tells us, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” Abraham’s faith led him where God said to go, not where he wanted to go. His motivation was clear, his ambition and ultimate goal was not an earthly home but a heavenly. Human understanding only sees things from the temporal perspective and is governed by selfish impulses. Human understanding is also unstable. It changes from one situation to another. But when we trust in the Lord, we are looking at things from an eternal perspective.
On the other hand, when we trust in God, with all our hearts we can have confidence of a more specific direction. But can we trust God in all areas of our lives? Yes. This means that in everything we do in life we see the Lord in it. It means that we do not have to compartmentalize our lives, but we must see everything in our lives as belonging to God. When you acknowledge God in all that you do, you are essentially recognizing God’s sovereignty and God’s glory and God’s right to govern your life. “All things” goes beyond the scope of our religious life. Our jobs and careers, our families and homes, what we eat and what we purchase, and even what we do with our leisure time. When we acknowledge God in all things, we are saying that all areas of our life belong to him. And if that is so, are we pleasing and glorifying God in all things.
The Promise- God will make straight your paths- There is a wonderful promise here of the protection of God’s providence. When we are trusting in God and acknowledging him in all that we do, we can trust that God will lead us down the path where he wants us to be. Often the paths of our lives are crooked and zig-zagging through life never getting anywhere. That is because we are trying to do it on our own. Imagine trying to find your way through a forest without a compass, or trying to find your way in a foreign country, without the aid of a map, or advice or a GPS. Sadly this is how many of us live our lives. It is like the children of Israel who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years because they didn’t trust in the Lord when he told them to enter into Canaan. As a result of their unbelief, God punished that generation to 40 years of wandering. Why? Because the sin of unbelief was tantamount to “Despising God” (Num 14:11) However when we abandon our own reasoning, and do not lean on our own understanding, but trust in God totally we can have assurance that God will lead us to straight paths for 2010 and beyond.
