Preacher: Joshua Harris
Text/title: Proverbs 3:5-6 – “Total Trust”
The most important decisions we make in life revolve around whom we choose to trust.
Think about the moments in your life when you have made an unwise choice. There is a very good chance that they have involved trusting the wrong person or the wrong people.
Maybe it is misplaced trust in a politician, friend or car salesman. Or maybe even who you married.
Who we trust determines the course of our life and the course of eternity.
Proverbs was written to help people gain wisdom. Proverbs communicates a vision of life from a heavenly perspective.
In Proverbs, the father is pointing His son to the one in whom he should place his trust.
1. Trust in the Lord with all your heart
What do we mean by trust? To trust someone is to have confidence in their reliability. To believe that they have your best interests in mind. God wants us to believe and to have a firm confidence in his intentions, that He has our best interests in mind.
Trusting in the Lord is a key aspect of fearing the Lord. Fear of the Lord is an awesome respect and reverence and it is deeply relational. It is a trusting fear. It is a reverence that draws near to God and believes that He is both holy and powerful and merciful and loving.
Trust is like the oil of an engine in every relationship. When there is a loss of trust, it is difficult to relate to another person because you are constantly questioning their motives. That is why lying is so damaging to a relationship. Lying causes you to lose your trust in a person.
Do you trust God? Do you interpret God’s actions in your life with suspicion? One of Satan’s biggest lies to us is that God can’t be trusted. That God can’t deliver you from the situation you are in. Don’t believe that lie.
God’s arm is not too short to save. And whatever your circumstances, God is working for your good. God has freely given His Son to save you from your sin. What more can God do to express His love for you? And God has promised to complete the good work that He has begun in you, conforming you to the image of Christ.
As you battle against sin, I encourage you to ask the question, “Where am I distrusting God in this situation?” As you battle against counterfeit gods, I exhort you to ask that question. Go to the heart of the matter.
A lot of us, when we think about trust, we think about God doing what we want on our timetable.
2. Do not lean on your understanding
Part of total trust is not leaning on your understanding. To trust in the Lord with all your heart is to not trust in your own understanding.
The idea of lean here might give us the picture of being propped against a wall. We are sort of leaning against the wall, but if the wall crumbled we would be okay because we aren’t leaning that hard. That is not the correct picture.
The correct picture is a lean that puts our full body weight on the thing on which we are leaning. If we were leaning on a wall in this way and the wall crumbled, you would fall on your face.
Too often, when you trust the Lord, your trust is like barely leaning against a wall, while your feet are firmly planted on the ground. If the wall fell away, you would be fine (or so you think) because you are standing on your two feet. That is really where your trust is.
People who are trusting the Lord are desperate. People who are trusting the Lord are aware that if the Lord does not come through then they will fall flat on their face. People who are trusting the Lord are often compelled to pray.
Are we living in a place of total trust in the Lord?
Or are we trusting in ourselves, even a little bit?
3. In all your ways, acknowledge God
In every situation, we should acknowledge the lordship over our life. When you are alone in your room with a computer and you are tempted to go to place on the Internet that you should not go, you acknowledge the lordship of God in your life, you trust in Him and you follow after Him.
When you are at work and your boss asks you to do something that is unethical, you acknowledge the Lord and you turn to your boss and you say no.
When you are in your home and you are tempted to act in such a way that you get your way, the best way in your mind, with your wife and kids, you acknowledge the Lord by realizing that there is Someone else in the room. You acknowledge the Lord by stopping and praying, holding your tongue, thinking before you speak and then speaking gracious words.
This is the heart of wisdom: living all of our life with the recognition that God matters the most.
Summary
Living a wise life requires total trust in the Lord of all wisdom. A whole-hearted trust in the Lord of all wisdom. For Christians, wisdom is not just a lifeless set of principles or memorizing a few insightful proverbs. At the heart of wisdom is a relationship with the Lord.
A relationship of trust. A relationship where you say, “May your will be done,” because you trust God and His promises. The heart of the relationship is a relationship of trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s trust Him. Every promise that He has made has proved true. Let’s trust Him with all our hearts.