Lean Not on Your Own Understanding

Fear has been a common theme amongst Christians as of late. The enemy is trying his hardest to make sure that we're kept in fear. Fear from the unknown. Fear from the past. Fear of everything. And I acknowledged that in my last post.

Since we talked about what, or should I say Who, casts out fear, we also have to know that faith and trust is also imperative in casting it out.

A Bible verse that has been in my head is Proverbs 3:5. And although it doesn't exactly say not to fear, there are some little gold nuggets that we can discern from this verse.

First is the obvious. Trust in the Lord. When we put our complete trust in God, what shall we fear? What can anyone do to us that God can't handle? The Bible is always telling us to trust God, but it isn't always so easy. We want to take matters into our own hands and try to handle our situations on our own. But that won't work. We manage to mess it up further, so God has to fix our mistakes and bring us back around to what we're supposed to be doing. We could have avoided all of that if only we had trusted God.

Take Psalm 56:3-4 for instance.  "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You. In God (I will praise His word), In God I have put my trust; I will not fear. What can flesh do to me?" Psalm 56:3-4

Even David knew the importance of trusting in God. There's no need to fear because our trust is in God.

Side note: I particularly like "I will praise His word." Why? Because praise ALWAYS stops the enemy. It's important to praise, especially when it's the last thing we want to do. Praise brings us out of fear and into trust because we're focusing on God, not our fears (problems).

Then we have this little part of "with all of your heart." That doesn't mean with part of your heart. It means with ALL. If we trust in God with ALL of our heart, that means there's no room for fear and doubts. Hard right?

Fear and doubt are sneaky little devils. They will come to torment you, to make you forget that the One in control isn't the one who matters, but God has the final say-so, not them or us. He knows what's best for all of us, and it's time that we started trusting in Him with ALL of our heart.

And, then, we have "lean not on our understanding." This has two possible meanings. One could be that whatever we "think" is wrong isn't really an issue. It's the lies of the devil making us blow things out of proportion, or it could mean that we shouldn't rely on ourselves to fix the situation. That we should ALWAYS put our trust in God.

Both of those are great indicators of how we shouldn't put trust in ourselves but in the Almighty God.

Once we trust God fully, all fear, doubts, discouragement and whatever other lie the devil is trying to use against you will have to go. And once we start trying to do God's job, we give the devil an opening to come back and torment us.

It's time that we put all of our trust in God, that we fully believe that God will take care of any and every situation that we find ourselves in. Lean not on YOUR own understanding but lean on God's!