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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

God's Will for My Life

I memorized this one when I was young.
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. (Prov 3:5-6)
Funny how it never really sank in.

Look at the components of this passage. Trust and don't lean. Acknowledge and He will. Simple, right? But there is so much more in there. For instance, the trust we are urged to place in YHWH is "all your heart." That is not trivial. It is absolute. Do you? For instance, do we even consider "do not lean on your own understanding"? No, of course not. We're pretty confident in our own understanding. For instance, acknowledge Him to what extent? "In all your ways." Without exception. Can you claim that you do that? (None of us can.) Is it your aim? Do you even acknowledge the concept? For instance, "He will make your paths straight." What does that even mean? The older translations say He will direct your paths, but the language is "straight." It doesn't appear to be as much "direct" as in "command" but "straight" as "clear indication." So if we acknowledge Him in everything, our direction is clear. How clear is yours?

The passage is full of promise. God will tell us which way to go. That's good ... very good. The God of the universe wishes to point out the right way for us. All we have to do is trust Him absolutely, not our own faulty understanding, and acknowledge Him in everything. It is quite a promise. "What does God want for me? What does God want from me? What is God's will for my life?" He'll tell you. Trust Him fully and not yourself and acknowledge Him in everything and He will make His will known. We, of course, aren't very good at our end of that promise.

1 comment:

Craig said...

Whenever I hear people talking about wanting to know God's will for their lives, I think of Jonah. He was told clearly and unambiguously by YHWH what His will was, and promptly ran the other direction. I think that all of us know, to some degree, what YHWH's will for us is and tend to ignore it or try to avoid going all in and trust Him. I agree that we trust ourselves much more than we trust YHWH, which is why things probably don't go as well as we'd like them to.