Submitted by David Miller
Trust in the Lord with all your
heart; do not depend on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:6 NLT)
Anytime
we demonstrate faith, we’re relying on something. When you sit in a chair,
you’re relying on the chair’s manufacturer to produce something that will hold
you up. When you are rappelling, you are relying on the person that made the
rope, the equipment and the person on belay. Faith in God means we rely on Him
and depend on His reliability. Having faith means realizing that God is bigger,
greater, and better than me and He loves us greatly.
Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a path before each person that
seems right, but it ends in death” (NLT). That's
the problem with relying on ourselves.
We are often wrong. Human intuition is not reliable. In fact, it’s just
good enough to make us think we’re right even when we’re not. Then we get into trouble.
Genuine
faith is relying on God's direction and on who He is. God is reliable. He knows
what we need, and He wants to meet those needs. Unfortunately, we think we know
better. We think we have a better plan. We want to use our logic and get to the
answer in a way that makes us look good and doesn’t require risk. But God wants
us to grow, so He takes us a different way.
Many times in Scripture, God asks us
to do what doesn’t make sense to our logic. For example, Mark
10:43 says, “Whoever wants to be a
leader among you must be your servant” (NLT). To
most people, that verse doesn’t make sense; you’d think great people would have
others serving them. Jesus says it’s the other way around; the great people are
the ones serving others. God also promises us that His strength becomes
stronger in our weaknesses. 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NKJV) “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made
perfect in weakness.” That doesn’t make sense to us
either because we cannot see how this happens but it does. When we completely surrender to Him, He
becomes stronger in our life resulting in our faith becoming stronger through
Him. As we lean on
God’s understanding and not our own then our faith is able to stand straight
and strong. Because we trust him, we
obey what He says even if it doesn’t make sense to us. He will take it from there.
