CC Image courtesy of Kevin Marsh on Flickr.

Proverbs 3
Author: Luke Anderson

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3.5 NIV)

I love the books people write.
“How to…”
“Something for Dummies”
“Fixing Your…”

People buy these books because they need something. Something that needs to be done right now. They need to learn how to do something, so they watch a video on YouTube or go to a seminar. They want to get something in their lives fixed.

Verse 5 says:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

Lean not on your understanding, but on the Lord’s. Sometimes we think we can do it. We can be the heroes. We can save the world. We think we can fix our problems. Something is going wrong in our lives and we HAVE to fix what’s wrong with it. We think we know it all, but we don’t. The problems in our lives are not going to be fixed unless we have God. We can read book after book, watch video after video, but this won’t do it.

We are impatient people. We want it done now. We have been this way since the Old Testament. When Moses was on the mountain getting the 10 Commandments, the people didn’t want to wait and built an idol. Moses hits the rock to get water instead of talking to it. Saul sacrifices before Samuel gets to him. God is too “slow” for us so we take a shortcut. We go to the books or YouTube. We might learn some information but this isn’t going to fix it.

In the book Gods at War, Kyle Idleman talks about a man going to the doctor. The man has been coughing a lot and feels sick so the doctor runs some tests and gives him medicine. The man goes home and feels a lot better. The tests come back and the man has lung cancer. But the doctor doesn’t tell the man because he is on medicine and feels fine. On the inside, he is really being eaten alive by the cancer. The medicine fixes the symptoms, but not the disease.

God fixes the disease. We can’t fix it. When we rely on ourselves, things don’t work out. This is why we just have to trust and rely on God to do it. I love this proverb, but a lot of times we just forget to trust him because it’s in our instincts to fix things ourselves. Hopefully this reminds us not to do it ourselves and to let God into our lives and to use his understanding and help.