Proverbs 3:5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
All is a strong word. All means all. Every last one of our desires, thoughts, and choices must flow from complete trust in God. That’s wisdom.
But anyone reading this who is honest has to admit that we never trust God with ALL of our heart. Mixed motives abound. Half-hearted efforts are our norm. We are tossed and turned with every wind of change.
Proverbs 3:5 is wisdom’s version of the first commandment – You shall have no other gods before God. In the same way that no person has ever kept this command, no person has ever been truly wise. No one has ever trusted with ALL their heart.
Except one.
Jesus. He trusted completely. He trusted whole-heartedly. There was never a moment that he did not actively choose to trust the Father’s will. He trusted when asked to take on flesh. He trusted when asked to leave heaven for earth. He trusted even to the point of giving up his life while carrying the shame and condemnation of our cross. Our curse.
This is the good news – Christ trusted the Father with all his heart for us. What does that mean? It means that when you fail to trust with all that you have and all that you are, the Christ that lives in you is trusting for you. His faith fills up what is lacking in your faith.
Bu there’s even more good news. The glorious promise of the New Covenant is that we have been given a new heart. A heart of flesh that replaces our heart of stone.
Ezekiel 36:26. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Paul could see that the Holy Spirit has written the New Covenant of God, not on tablets of stone, but on hearts of flesh.
2 Corinthians 3:3. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Look at those first three words again – And you show. Jesus is not only our Savior filling up what is lacking, he is our energy empowering us to live out his law of love from the inside out. Trusting God with the whole heart is now both possible, and inevitable for us. The Christ in you has left no part of his heart untouched by God’s love, and he has left no part of your heart untouched by his love. Where does this leave us? It leaves us with the ability to live out Proverbs 3:5. We can keep in step with the Spirit, not the flesh. We can obey from the heart, not just from behavior modification. We can trust even without understanding, not trust our own understanding.
We can live and love like Christ.
You: What has been your motivation in following Christ?
You in Christ: Are you experiencing Christ’s love from the outside in AND the inside out?
Christ in you: Where do you see your desires becoming more like the desires of Jesus?
Pray: Father, thank you for changing my heart and making it possible to live a life like Christ’s, a life of trust. Amen.
To Live is Christ 