God is OUTSIDE Creation – Lean on Him
Posted by Sandy in Christian Living, God's ways, Trusting God, tags: Proverbs5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
6 in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will direct your paths
Proverbs 3:5-6
“Trust in the Lord with All Your Heart”
“There is no panic in trust” Bertha Munro said. Trusting God means a panic-free life. I like that. But in order to be able to trust Him, I need to get to know Him better, and then I actually need to make the decision to give my situations to Him – I need to actually trust Him. These thoughts were the subject of the first two blogs in this series.
Today, we switch gears a little to find that the action of trusting God has a partner. That partner is not leaning on your own understanding.
“Do Not Lean on Your Own Understanding”
The word “lean” means to support yourself – so don’t support yourself with your own understanding. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use your own understanding. God has given us intelligence and reasoning for a purpose – he wants us to use them. But He doesn’t want us to “lean” on them. He wants us to lean on Him.
Have you ever broken a leg or ankle or foot? You probably used a pair of crutches for while. You leaned on them and they supported you. Let it be the same with God. Lean on Him and let Him support you. Don’t support yourself with your own understanding.
In America we don’t like the word “crutch” – we admire independence. But independence is inconsistent with Christian maturity. As we mature as Christians, we learn to rely on, to support ourselves with, to trust God, not our own understanding.
If Noah had leaned on his own understanding, he wouldn’t have survived the flood. It had never rained before God told Noah to build a boat. The land had been watered from underground streams. When God told Noah He was going to cover the entire earth with a flood, He was telling Noah that He was going to do something He had never done before. Relying on his own understanding would have been disastrous for Noah. He couldn’t possible have had full understanding of the situation. The same is always true with us. We never know the whole picture. But God does.
In my last blog, I wrote that “God IS the most trustworthy person in all of creation.” That’s true. Let me change the emphasis for this lesson: God is the most trustworthy person IN all of creation. Yet, what’s even more important for this lesson, is that God is the most trustworthy person OUTSIDE of all creation. God knows it all. We don’t. If Noah had relied upon his own understanding, He would have drowned with the rest of the earth. Instead, he trusted in the One who created the earth and so when God said “build an ark”, he began to build an ark.
Notice that Noah’s trust of God lead to an action – he built the ark. Action demonstrates the trust we have. Trust isn’t trust if we don’t act upon it. Stay tuned for more on that in the next blog.
Entries (RSS)