Proverbs 3:5-6

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight."  Proverbs 3:5-6 (NASB)

These are typically pretty familiar verses.  The theme of trusting God is a common one in the Scriptures and one that I think we would all agree that we need to do.  We know that we need to trust God.  We know that we need to acknowledge that He is supreme ruler.  One big problem is how we view ourselves.  We think that God is the supreme ruler but that He has made us slightly less than supreme but rulers none-the-less.  We think that we should have control and say over our own life.  And so I thought it would be prudent (a good word in Proverbs) to examine the phrases of these verses in more detail.

"with all your heart"  - I am not going to address the phrase trust in the Lord as I think that most people know what that means at least on a basic level.  But this phrase gives us the extent we are to trust God.  We are to trust God with all.  Everything.  Nothing held back that we trust in other than God.  No part of our heart that we keep or give to anything except for God Himself.  God wants all of us.  The heart in the ancient near east was symbolic of the whole of life.  Without the heart there was no life, and so life is synonymous with heart.  The muscle that pumps blood is everything to us and so we are to give our everything to God in trust.  That is challenging on its own, but then the author strengthens his position in two ways.

"lean not on your own understanding" - this gives us the opposite of what it looks like to trust.  Note that for this text the opposite of trust is not distrust, but trusting in yourself. This is where I find the most challenge.  God does not simply want me to trust Him when I am at the end of myself.  He calls for my trust at the beginning, the middle, the end, and in all of who I am.  I am not at any moment to trust what I think, what my experience is, or what I believe.  In all of it I am to trust God.  I am to live for His glory and not my own.  My WHOLE LIFE belongs to Him and I am trust Him with all of it!  Despite this challenge there is a further clarification.

"In all your ways" - every path that we take.  Do you get the idea of what is being said?  In all of us, we are to trust none of us but all of God and everywhere we go and everything we do should exemplify our deep abiding trust in God and our complete surrender to Him.  When we do this the text tells us that He will make our paths straight.  So many people want direction, they want guidance, but they are unwilling to surrender.  We want a God who tells us what we want to hear and spend little time listening through His Word to what He would have us do.  When we trust and obey (there is no other way) we will find the joy that we seek.  But we have to submit and surrender to find this kind of serenity!