In Your Own Understanding?
Living a life of faith is a somewhat perplexing life at times. Much of what we do seems to be counter intuitive of what our natural tendencies would be. In the book of Proverbs Chapter 3 verses 5-10 we are reminded to:
“ Trust in the LORD with all your heart;
do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do,
and he will show you which path to take. Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom.
Instead, fear the LORD and turn away from evil. Then you will have healing for your body
and strength for your bones. Honor the LORD with your wealth
and with the best part of everything you produce. Then he will fill your barns with grain,
and your vats will overflow with good wine.” (NLT)
Here we are promised by God that if we live a life that is pleasing to Him, generous, reliant upon Him and trusting in Him for wisdom He will show us in which direction we should take our life. In James Chapter 1 we are also told that if we “lack wisdom” we should ask God for it who will give it to us generously and without blame.
Often times as they say, we ‘don’t even know what we don’t know’. Times like these cause us to be disheartened and strain our faith. It becomes easy to do things or set the wheels in motion under our own power and strength. Waiting on God to come through can be tortuous to many of us, especially if we have a choleric or sanguine type temperament where we want to see progress and when we don’t see it we know that we can make things happen in our own power.
I’ve found that personally not having clear direction from God can often lend itself to more stress and mess than not waiting on that direction and embarking on a plan of my own. What seemed to be a good plan in other words wasn’t necessarily a God plan.
As Christians, God naturally is in a lot of what we do in our daily lives due to the close relationship we have with Him and daily giving Him acknowledgment. Those plans outside of the scope of daily life, the ones that change the course of our lives sometimes forever are however subject to great blunder if we are not careful to submit them to Him. For instance, taking the right job, studying for the right career, picking our mate, buying a house, moving to a new location and the list can go on and on.
Trust sometimes doesn’t come easy. Even more so if we didn’t have a parent we could trust growing up. In an ideal family however even as a child learns to trust his parent for their daily needs so we must learn to trust our heavenly Father to meet our needs and give us guidance and direction. He will direct our path.
As a child learns over time that he can trust his caregiver to give food, shelter, and even guidance and direction as they obey and relinquish their own will to the one they trust, so we also must develop that type of trust. As God comes through more and more, it gets easier and easier. Matt 18:2
Our own understanding is limited, but His is limitless. The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God 1 Cor 1:20. Even the world’s most brilliant scholars and philosophers are as fools to him so how can we even assume that we know what true wisdom is outside of God?
1 Cor 1:25
This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength.
If you live a life that you do things only in your own understanding, without giving consideration to God I challenge you to begin relinquishing some things to Him. It may be a small thing at first but as you learn to trust your heavenly Father as a child would trust his parent, so you too will begin to trust God for understanding and direction in the big and small things of life.