The Choice
“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.” (NIV, 1984)
Proverbs 3:5-6 assures us that life really isn’t that complicated. Ultimately, there’s only one basic decision we have to make. We must choose who to trust. Each of us must choose who gets to govern our life. Day by day, month by month, year by year—will you orient your thoughts and actions around God’s word and wisdom? Or, will you choose to be governed by your own impulses, your own understandings, and your own feelings? According to Proverbs 3:5-6, that one decision determines the outcome of your life. Proverbs 3:5-6 says,
“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.”
So what does it mean to “trust in the Lord…” and to “acknowledge him” in all your ways? First, trusting in the Lord and acknowledging him requires a true knowledge of God. It’s impossible to trust someone you don’t know! And you cannot know God apart from the Bible—which is His gracious self-revelation. There’s more. In Scripture, we discover not only who God is, but also who we are. In the Bible we discover our need for a Savior and the provision God has made for us by grace through faith in Jesus. At its most basic level, “trusting in the Lord” and “leaning not on our own understanding” is the act of repenting of our sin and trusting Christ as our Lord and Savior.
Charles Bridges’ commentary on Proverbs helps us understand the character of biblical trust as it relates to our daily walk with Christ. First, the trust spoken of in Proverbs 3 “is the trust of the heart, of all the heart. It is a childlike, unwavering confidence in our Father’s well-proved Wisdom, faithfulness, and love. …He is Truth itself. Therefore, He would have us take Him at His Word.” Second, Bridges writes, “But our trust must not only be entire: It must be exclusive. No other confidence, no confidence in the flesh, can exist in harmony with it. …Many bring God’s truth to their own judgment and find fault with it, as an excuse for rejecting it.” This, of course, is the very definition of “leaning on your own understanding”! Regarding the understanding of man, Bridges continues, “At one time, man’s understanding was reliable… That was man’s high and rightful power when he was created in the image of God. But now, degraded as it is by the fall, and darkened by the corruption of the heart, man’s own reason is certain to be a false guide.”
Finally, Bridges writes, “Next, let our confidence be uniform—in all your ways acknowledge Him. Take all your difficulties to Him to be resolved. Be in the habit of going to Him in the first place. Consider no circumstances so clear you do not need His direction. In all your ways, small as well as great; in all your concerns, personal or relative, temporal or eternal, let Him be supreme.”
And so, God’s promise is clear. If we will trust in Him entirely (like a child), exclusively (not leaning on our own understanding), and uniformly (in all our ways) “he will make our paths straight.” In short, when we trust in the Lord by believing and obeying his word, we escape unnecessary, self-inflicted, life-complicating confusion, anxiety, and pain. What could be better than that?