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 PrintableVersion All the way my Saviour leads meOn Proverbs 3.5,6Trust 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.’ 1 Kings 4.32 tells us that Solomon wrote 3,000 proverbs. He was the wisest, richest, classiest king in Hebrew history. He had seen it and done it all. Out of his wisdom and experience he wrote the book of Proverbs, the central theme of which is, ‘How to walk wisely in a wicked world’. Our text is the most well-known of the Proverbs. It is a diamond which seems to sparkle the brightest among all Solomon’s treasures. It divides naturally into three parts. A passionate exhortationSolomon begins by telling us, ‘Trust in the LORD with all your heart’. You know that the ‘heart’ here does not refer to that muscle that pumps 100,000 miles of blood cells through our body’s 146 capillaries every 24 hours of your life. Rather, it is talking about the inner person, the seat of your emotions, the real you. He is saying that, with everything you have and are, you must trust in the Lord. Now this is not propositional faith. We excel at reasoning about God. We are good at looking at the sky at night and realising that there are 2,000 stars visible to the naked eye, but hundreds of billions of stars in the universe. Who made the stars? We are good at looking at the human body and all its complex workings and saying, ‘This is amazing’. Who made us? When a little baby is born into the world, Mum and Dad do not say, ‘Whoopee! I’ve got a random, fortuitous, concurrence of atoms in a causeless and impersonal universe!’ They rather say, ‘She is fearfully and wonderfully made’. Such reasoning leads us to believe in a Creator. But Proverbs 3.5,6 is not about propositional faith. It is talking about experiential faith. It is speaking of personal faith which says to God, ‘I will trust you, unquestioningly, with all that I am and have’. This faith is not just being able to answer a catechism question. ‘What is God?’ Answer: ‘God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth’. Anybody can learn to say that. Up and down the churches of our land there are men and women who are walking Bible encyclopaedias. But many of them have never known what it is to wholeheartedly trust in the Lord. Some years ago I was able to visit Niagara Falls. You can hear the roar of the waterfall miles away. You can go on the boat, The Maid of the Mist, on the river below the Falls and get soaked in the spray of the millions of tons of cascading water. Charles Blondin actually walked across the Falls on a tightrope. He offered to transport people across the Falls in a wheelbarrow. Many people refused. But in the crowd was his mother. She got in and he wheeled her across. If you go up the CN Tower you can see the actual wheelbarrow. In Edinburgh he did a similar feat. He offered to take a person in a wheelbarrow on the tightrope. But no one would. So he commanded his manager who was standing in the crowd to get in the wheelbarrow on pain of losing his job! The point is, of course, that thousands of people believed what Blondin could do. They had heard about it. They had come and seen it with their own eyes. But who was willing to get in the wheelbarrow? We must have propositional faith, but we must go beyond it. It is OK to talk about propositional faith, but it is a different thing altogether to trust our lives to God. Personally we must be able to say, ‘I’m going to trust in the Lord no matter what’. So we have a passionate exhortation to whole-hearted faith. Secondly, we have… A practical explanationSolomon continues by telling us, ‘Lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him’. This can be seen as the practical explanation of what it is to trust in the Lord. Now, does experiential faith mean that we have to close our minds, shut our eyes, step out in the dark and hope for the best? Does it mean that we should never use our minds, or collate knowledge? Not at all. But someone has put very well what it does mean. ‘Never, never, never trust your own judgement in anything. Even when common sense says that a course is right, believer, first of all lift up your heart to God. For the path of faith, and the path of blessing may be in the direction completely opposite to that which you call common sense…. Refer everything to the tribunal of heaven… And that is the only way to outmatch the devil’. Solomon, tells us, ‘lean not on your own understanding’. Yes, reason, experience, knowledge and advice are all helpful. But in the last analysis it is referring all that we are, to all that God is, for all that he wants in our life, that matters. The fact is that you and I, like Humpty Dumpty, have had a great Fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Sin affects us. And not until we are in heaven will we know as we are known. But until then we must continually look to God concerning the situations of life. We must listen to his Word and his Spirit. You know the old saying: ‘All Word and we dry up. All Spirit and we blow up. But with Word and Spirit we grow up’. It is true. We look not to ourselves, but to God — his Word in the Bible and his Spirit in our hearts. Further, we are told, ‘In all your ways acknowledge him’. That is, in every aspect of your life you must seek to submit to what God has to say. I remember reading of a famous preacher who had been speaking at a conference. He had preached five or six times and as he got up to give his last sermon he was really struggling. But he got to the pulpit and said, ‘The sermon tonight is a sermon about keys’. He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket. ‘For God has been convicting me at this conference’, he said, ‘about how many keys of my life have been handed over to him. Yes, I thought the key of my mind, the key of my heart, the key of my will had been given to him. But I am wondering about the key of my marriage and the key of my habits? And I am wondering about the key of my money, and the key of my attitudes, and the key of my relationships — whether they are in his hands?’ Solomon tells us that in all our ways we are to acknowledge him. Are the keys to your ambitions, your business life, your college life, your leisure activities, your possessions and friendships in God’s hands? It is so possible to be in church on Sunday singing Jesus’s praises, but for the rest of the week not doing what he says. We need to give Christ the keys of every area of our lives. What keys have you not handed over? ‘In all your ways acknowledge him.’ Solomon’s words lead us finally to… A personal expectationAs we trust the Lord and submit our lives to him, we are told, ‘And he will make your paths straight’. For people with no sense of direction a straight path is a great comfort. We can expect God to guide us and lead us on that narrow way which leads to the celestial city. I know a wonderful old Christian lady in her 80s. She was born in poverty in Liverpool. She was malnourished in her early years. She has spent numerous stretches in hospital. She is chair-bound. She takes a whole tray of tablets every day. When I visited Esther recently her face was swollen with huge bruises. She had reached for her tablets, over-balanced and fallen heavily on the hearth. ‘O, I want to go to heaven Bill’, she said to me. ‘You are taking my funeral. And don’t forget at my funeral the hymn I want is this one.’ All the way my Saviour leads me; Do you mean being raised in a tenement block? Do you mean having a life of illness? Do you mean suddenly losing your husband through a heart attack? Do you mean having to live on tablets? Do you mean that, when you say ‘Jesus doeth all things well?’ ‘Yes.’ You see it is very easy to read Proverbs 3.5,6 and think that once we’ve trusted the Lord that the circumstances of our lives should become a bed of roses. But in the light of the New Testament we realise that God is directing our paths into spiritual blessings. Yes, it is true that as we wait on him he will direct our paths concerning our work, and our partner, and our home, and all our needs. But ultimately it is, Through many dangers, toils and snares ‘Think to yourselves’, said the Puritan John Trapp, ‘though it be far beyond the reach of any mortal thought, what infinite, inexplicable glory it will be to gaze upon the glorious body of our Lord Jesus Christ shining with incomprehensible beauty and to think that every vein of that blessed body bled to bring you to heaven. Think, though it be far beyond the reach of mortal thought, that this vile, limited, weak, failing, sinful, vulnerable body will be advanced and honoured above the brightest cherub.’ Here is the personal expectation. He will direct your path safely from earth into the glory of heaven. Bill Bygroves,
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