Trust in the LORD with All Your Heart!

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.Proverbs 3: 5-6

God has been constantly reminding me of this verse over the last several months. I know it’s a verse that we’ve all heard before, but as I’ve begun to meditate on it (like most scriptures) it means so much more than I used to give it credit for. How many of us really trust in the LORD? It is such an easy thing to say, and such a hard thing to do. We say that we trust God with our finances, but how many of us start to sweat around the 23^rd of the month as our bank account gets tighter? We have been so trained to be individuals, to be self sufficient, that we try to make things happen in our own power, and when that happens we start trusting ourselves and stop trusting in God.

I think the next part of this verse is so profound: “and lean not on your own understanding.” What that means is that sometimes trusting God defies logic. We don’t have to understand how God will come through, we just have to trust that he will. I love that the verse doesn’t say, ‘lean not on your own power,’ it says to lean not on our understanding. Sometimes it’s easy to read this verse and think, “we’ll I just need to sit back, trust God, and wait for him to do it.” Sometimes God will work in our circumstances without our effort, but sometimes He does require action from us. I love the story in Matthew chapter 17 when Jesus and Peter are asked to pay a tax. Jesus tells Peter to go to the lake, catch a fish, and in the fish’s mouth will be a coin to cover the tax. Jesus could have just made a coin materialize out of thin air, or made it appear in his pocket, and paid the tax. I love that he didn’t do that. He required Peter to go catch a fish to get the coin. He required faith and action from Peter. I’m sure that all the way to the lake Peter was thinking, “this is the silliest thing I’ve ever done.” But Peter still went. He trusted in the LORD, and not his own understanding, and Christ made his path straight.

I encourage you to meditate on this verse. Ask yourself, and God, what areas of your life you need to start really trusting. When you do trust, guard yourself from asking the how and why questions. You don’t have to understand the how and the why, just trust and He will make our paths straight.