“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Romans 10:17

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, by the working of Your Holy Spirit, grant that we may gladly hear Your Word proclaimed among us and follow its directing. We pray this through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil.

Is there a worse feeling in life than the feeling of being lost? I don’t care if you are in the “middle of nowhere,” or in the middle of a huge city, the feeling of being lost is not fun. It can be disorienting and downright scary! Even if you’re not completely lost, just not knowing exactly how to get where you are going can be a very unsettling feeling.

Our lives, even as Christians, can feel a lot like this at times. As we travel through life we know our destination. It is our home in heaven. God has supplied the transportation for everyone in the world to get there: His Son, the crucified and risen Savior Jesus Christ. What we don’t always know is exactly where the roads of life will take us on our journey to heaven. And so we first need the right road to follow, and we need the proper “road map” to stay on the road that leads us home.

Maybe those who have recently graduated this spring can relate. Even in the midst of the excitement of their accomplishment, and the excitement of looking forward to the next level of schooling or next stage in their life, maybe they’ve also, at the same time, had some thoughts like this: “Where to next, God? Where do I go? What do I do?”

Well, let’s turn to the “road map” for life, the Bible, and look again at the words of our text. Pay attention to the three actions that the Lord encourages us to take when we are searching for direction in our lives: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him” (Proverbs 3:5-6). Did you catch the three actions? Trust. Lean. Acknowledge.

First, Solomon says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart.” Do you ever think about what all that entails? To trust in God with all your heart means to commit your life entirely to Him. It means you trust Him to provide for your earthly and physical needs and well-being. It means you trust Him to take care of your spiritual needs and well-being also. It means we take Him at His Word and believe what He says. Most importantly, it means trusting Him for salvation.

We can think of our salvation as our “car” on the road of life. God’s given us the “transportation” that will get us to our eternal home in heaven. He gave His Son to suffer and die for our sins, and He creates faith in our hearts to receive that salvation for ourselves. Jesus has forgiven your sins. This saves you from the wrath to come. We need to trust the “transportation” that the Lord has provided to get us where we are going. If you don’t trust your car to make it through a long trip, you’ll probably find another means of transportation. If we don’t fully trust that Jesus’ perfect life and death as our substitute will carry us all the way to our heavenly home, we will begin searching for other means of transportation and begin putting our trust in them. However, no other method of “transportation” will get us to heaven. Every other method “breaks down” and falls far short.

Second, Solomon tells us, “Lean not on your own understanding.” This is not an easy thing for us to do. Our natural tendency is to “lean” on ourselves, on our own reason and wisdom, even though, time and time again, we’ve proven to be poor directors of our own lives. We tend to trust and lean on what we can see and observe with our eyes or understand fully with our minds, even though what we can know and observe is extremely limited and flawed. God’s wisdom, on the other hand, is unlimited and perfect! Leaning on God means seeing life through eyes of faith; “walking by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). Trusting in the LORD with all your heart and leaning not on your own understanding means listening to God, even when His Word goes against what we might think is best.

You wouldn’t rely on an inaccurate map or GPS, and you certainly wouldn’t rely on just a small torn-out piece of a map to try and find your way around. You’d use the whole map! Why, then, would we want to lean only on our own understanding and reason, and not God’s? We are weak; God is strong! We don’t know everything. We don’t have the whole picture. God’s got the entire map in front of Him! He knows the “roads” because He made the “roads” of all our lives!

Jesus also reminds us that there are many “roads” that we can take in life. However, all of these other roads lead to destruction. He tells us in our Gospel reading from Matthew, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7:13-14) We need a roadmap, we need road signs, and we need someone giving us directions on how to stay on the road that leads to our destination.

Solomon points us to that road map and the third action we are to take in our text: He says, “In all your ways acknowledge Him.” The Hebrew word here for “acknowledge” literally means “to know” and the word for “way” here in this verse is the same word used for “road.” So, we could properly translate this verse “On all your roads know Him, and He shall direct your paths.” Sounds a lot like a road map, doesn’t it? By knowing the Lord, we will know where to go.

How do we get to know the Lord? The same way we get to know anyone: by what they tell us about themselves. We can only become well acquainted with God by hearing what He tells us about Himself in the Bible. We find out just how loving and trustworthy God is. We learn that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). We also learn that God is faithful; He has never broken a promise. Therefore, we can fully trust and lean on Him and His Word. His Word is our road map—our GPS—for life. It tells us which road to stay on, which roads to avoid, and the places where there are no roads altogether. Left to ourselves without His guidance, we would slide right off the road and into unbelief and destructive sins whose consequences may never be fully repaired. Solomon warns us in verse seven of our text, “Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil” (Proverbs 3:7). Left to ourselves we may decide to take a different road and “lean on our own understanding” or the philosophies or religions of man. This may provide us with a smooth and easy road for a while, but finally all other roads lead to an eternal dead end.

Trust. Lean. Acknowledge. These are the three actions that Solomon instructs us to take. But let’s not forget about the fourth action spoken of in our text. It is God’s action: “He shall direct your paths.” We cannot really seek the Lord’s direction in our life if we don’t ever look at the “map.” God has given us His road map—His Word. If we want to fully “Trust in the LORD with all our heart,” if we want to be free from only “leaning on our own understanding,” if we want to “know Him in all of our ways,” we must then constantly seek what the Lord has to say to us. This means 1) daily studying the Word with prayer, 2) daily comparing what God says to us in His Word with the decisions we are making in our life, and then 3) daily putting that wisdom from God into action and applying it to everything we do, say, and experience.

Well, what about those times when you’re not really deciding between a right or wrong answer in a moral sense—you know, those times in life where there isn’t a specific Word of Scripture that tells you exactly step for step what you’re supposed to do? Some of these situations are some of the most important decisions of our lives. For instance, when you’re making decisions about what school to attend, or job and career choices, or where to live, or what to live in.

Very simply, you Trust Him. Oftentimes He allows these difficult decision points and “unclear” situations to occur in our lives to test us, to see whether we will “Trust in the LORD with all [our] heart,” “lean not on [our] own understanding,” acknowledge that He knows best, and trust that “He shall direct our paths.”

Will we take wrong turns? Yes, we have and we will, because we still have our sinful flesh inside of us constantly trying to take the wheel and steer us off the course God has laid out for us. Because all of our actions are stained with sin, we can expect that even some of our most carefully placed steps may lead to disappointment, sorrow, and pain—but even these God will turn for our good. He’s promised! (see Romans 8:28)

Dear fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, let us earnestly and prayerfully seek the Lord’s direction at every turn on life’s journey. We have been given Christ—the “Way” and the means of “transportation” into heaven. We have been given God’s very own “GPS,” His road map for our lives—His Word. We have been given His sure promise: “He shall direct your paths”—through this life to our eternal home. Trust in the LORD’s strength and His sure promises; Lean on His wisdom and His grace; Acknowledge and know Him through His Word, and “He shall direct your paths!” Amen.

—Pastor Luke Bernthal

Messiah Lutheran Church Hales Corners, WI

---

Ministry by Mail is a weekly publication of the Church of the Lutheran Confession. Sermon archives, and subscription and staff information may be found online at www.clclutheran.org/ministrybymail. Audio Sermons are available at: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ministrybymail

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.