PROVERBS: WHO WILL YOU TRUST?
by Ivan Maddox
Atlanta, GA


Proverbs 3:5-6.
5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;
6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

This is a critically important passage of scripture. If you read it quickly, without much thought, it looks like a beautiful reminder to "put your trust in God," and not much more. But in fact this passage makes crystal clear what it means to trust God, and draws a line in the sand between true trust in God and mere lip service to Him. Trusting God, as described here, comes with a high price tag, but it pays exceedingly richly.

Proverbs 3:5a.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart...

The first thing this passage points out to us is the standard God sets for trust in Himself. We are to trust Him totally, absolutely, completely. Nothing is to be held back. There is to be no second line of defense, no "Plan B," no ace in the hole. God wants "all your heart" -- everything that is in you -- to trust in Him.

It is important that we recognize that this is God's long term goal for us; this is not our starting point. God has laid open for us the lives of many men and women who walked with Him. Rarely do they start their journey with Him with this kind of trust. Yet they do trust Him, as best they know how, relying on their own wisdom, their own resources, strategic help from other people in addition to trusting in God. Yet God does not forsake them. With gentleness and lovingkindness He directs them, trains them, till they learn the depths of His faithfulness and His love for them, and learn to trust Him with their all -- the way God wanted them to all along.

Consider Abram. God called him out of Ur of the Chaldees, directing him to leave his country and his kindred, and to come to the land He would show him (Acts 7:2-3). Abram obeyed, but only in part. He left Ur, but took with him his father and his nephew. It took death to separate him from his father, and strife between their herdsmen to separate him from Lot. On the way he stopped for a few years in Haran, in obedience to his father. When he did get to the Land, there was a famine there. What did Abram do? He used his head. Since he had already obeyed God by coming to Canaan, he felt free to keep on going, right into Egypt, where there was food. He ended up coming back with much more than he bargained for.

Yet this same man, years later, took his son to a place specified by God and would have sacrificed him on an altar to God in obedience to a commandment of God that made no sense to him, had God not stopped him. Why? Because he KNEW that, no matter how bad things looked, God was going to make it right. He KNEW that God would keep every single promise He had made concerning Isaac, even if that required raising him from the dead.

It is this Abraham that God sets before us as an example, calling him "the father of faith." Yet he did not begin by trusting in the Lord with all his heart. God, in His love and patience and faithfulness, helped him to get to that place -- just as He will help us.

This commandment (and it is a commandment; there is nothing optional about it!) to trust in the Lord with all your heart reminds us of another commandment, given earlier.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

God called for His people to love Him even more intensely than He called for them to trust Him, with every fibre of their beings, holding nothing back. What goal could be loftier? What purpose could be worthier? Yet look at what precedes this greatest of all commandments.

Deuteronomy 6:1-3.
These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess,
so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all His decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life.
Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.

Do you see it? This is "Trust in the Lord with all your heart" in different words! This passage drives home an important truth: Trust in the Lord with your whole heart on the inside results in complete and absolute obedience from the heart to all God has said to do.

Proverbs 6:5b.
...and lean not on your own understanding.

That's the catch. Right here is the price tag for trusting in the Lord with all your heart: you must give up your trust in yourself. This sounds almost blasphemous to the heart of man. We are trained from childhood to put our trust in ourselves or in other people.

What we want to do is hang on to our trust in ourselves and add to this our trust in God. This may be "trust in the Lord," but it is not "with all your heart." This verse presents the two to us as an either-or decision: either you will trust in the Lord with all your heart, or you will lean on your own understanding, your own mind, your own ability.

Jeremiah makes this point even more emphatically.

Jeremiah 17:5-10.
5 ¶ This is what the LORD says: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD.
6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no-one lives.
7 "But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him.
8 He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."

It's not merely yourself you must stop relying on, but anyone other than God. If you put your trust in God, you will be blessed, and receive the benefits of your trust in Him. If you trust in yourself or someone else, you will be cursed: you will receive the results of your misplaced trust.

There is an important qualification here that we must not overlook. Verse 5 makes it clear that it is talking about the man "whose heart turns away from the LORD." This is not talking about someone rejecting God completely, but about someone who turns away from God's counsel in a situation in order to do things his own way. To the extent that we substitute our way for God's way, to that extent our heart has departed from the Lord.

Jeremiah makes it clear that the problem lies in our own heart.

Jeremiah 17:9-10.
9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
10 "I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve."

Your heart will lie to you! Your heart will lie to you about God, and about the things of God. Your heart is not a reliable source of information about God, or about the will of God. If you allow it, your heart will deceive you, and turn you away from trusting in God.

Jesus dealt with this problem in the Sermon on the Mount, and he dealt with it just as ruthlessly as it is dealt with in Proverbs and in Jeremiah.


Matthew 6:24.
24 "No-one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

At first glance this might look like it lets us off the hook. "I'm not serving money," you might say. But Jesus isn't talking about pursuing riches, but about pursuing the basic necessities of life. You cannot serve God and your next meal at the same time!

Matthew 6:25-33.
25 ¶ "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?
26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
28 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labour or spin.
29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.
30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
31 So do not worry, saying, `What shall we eat?' or `What shall we drink?' or `What shall we wear?'
32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

"Seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness" makes it clear that we are talking about priorities here. When God says "lean not on your own understanding," He doesn't mean toss out that wonderful mind He gave you. He doesn't mean throw away your common sense. He DOES mean that you are to subject everything in your heart and mind to what He has revealed in His Word. Nothing in your mind, nothing in your understanding, nothing in your reasonings can be allowed to override or overrule what God has instructed in His Word. Whenever and wherever the two come into conflict, God's Word must reign supreme. We must commit ourselves to doing things His way, not our way, even when His way makes no sense. Where our way is in agreement with His way, there is no conflict.

In the New Testament we are told very precisely how to keep our minds in subjection to the Word of God.

II Corinthians 10:5.
5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

We are charged by God to be responsible for our own minds, demolishing every argument, every pretension that elevates itself above what God's Word says. We are to arrest every thought that is not in line with God's Word, and bring it into submission and obedience to Christ. As we do that, we will be trusting in the Lord with all our heart instead of leaning on our own understanding.

Proverbs 3:6.
6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

The Hebrew word translated "acknowledge" literally means "to know." We are to demonstrate that we know God in all our ways. We do this by keeping His commandments, by doing things His way.

I John 2:3-5.
3 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.
4 The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.
5 But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him:

If we do things our own way, we are responsible for the outcome. But when we do things God’s way, He takes responsibility for the outcome. The result is that “...He will make your paths straight.” This has two meanings. First, God will make your way straight and smooth. God will deal with the obstacles in your path, in His way and in His time. Second, God will make your way of life straight, upright, or righteous. Your life will be pleasing to Him, and He will be able to do for you the things He really wants to do.

The choice is ours. Either we can trust in ourselves or in others and be cursed, or we can put our full trust in God and be blessed in spite of the circumstances around us, or the obstacles in our path.

Which way will you choose?

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Created 6/15/97, by Ivan Maddox