Word International Ministries Al Ain

Straight Paths For The New Year

by: Sis. Bing Domingo

 

Proverbs 3:5-6  “ Trust in the Lord the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.”

 

Every New Year brings new anticipation and new expectations. So we ask, will this year be a prosperous year for me? Will I succeed in everything I do?  If this question is in your mind, here’s a good news for you….God has in His word the assurance that He will guide us in every step of our way as long as we follow His instructions.

 

In Proverbs 3:5-6, we can find three things that we should do and when we do them we will be blessed with the promise of God to guide us. The First one is to …  

 

Trust in the Lord…

 

Here’s a short story about TRUST...

A little girl and her father were crossing a bridge. The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter:
"Sweetheart, please hold my hand so that you don't fall into the river." The little girl said: "No, Dad. You hold my hand." "What's the difference?" asked the puzzled father. “There’s a big difference," replied the little girl. "If I hold your hand and something happens to me, chances are that I may let your hand go. But if you hold my hand, I know for sure that no matter what happens, you will never let my hand go."

The word trust in the Bible is “baw-takh” which means “to be confident or sure”; to hope. The dictionary defines it as firm reliance on the integrity or ability or character of a person or thing. Just like the little girl in the story, God wants His children to trust Him. Simply believing is not going to do good to us. We need to have faith.  Is it not that when we speak about faith, we tend to think of some sort of mystical quality that belongs to the spiritual and not in the practical day to day living? Faith is actually more concrete than we realize, and trust is the practical outworking of our faith. We then can understand faith better when talk about trust. After all we find ourselves having to trust people every day. We trust whoever built our house that it's not going to fall in on our heads. We trust the bank with our money. We set our watches and alarms trusting that they would function right to wake us up in the morning so that we won’t be late for work.

 

But how many of us have experienced heartaches because those things and those people we trusted have failed us? Is it because we do not have faith in them? It doesn’t matter if we have so much faith, but what really matters is the object of our faith. God is All-Powerful! He is the Great I Am, the Creator who owns the universe! He alone has all the resources to supply our every need. If He did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us all things? He is Faithful and True and able to keep His promise. ( Numbers 23:19). He is unchanging. He is our Refuge and our Ever-present Help in times of trouble. The Name and the Blood of Jesus is more than enough for our protection! We can trust Him because He is the All –Knowing God, the First and the Last who knows the end from the beginning! God is indeed worthy of our trust!

 

……with all your heart

 

How does God want us to trust Him? With all our hearts or with our whole being. Trusting in the Lord with all our heart begins with our knowledge of Him, and we would never know God unless we have a relationship with Him. Notice that the verse says, “In the Lord”, He is not the God who is far away, but Jehovah who has revealed Himself to those who have chosen to accept Him as Lord of their lives. Many of us try to live by faith and want to trust God but have little or no knowledge of His character and His ways. The more we know His word, His promises, His character and His ways, the more we can trust Him. He loves us and has better plans for us. That’s why we can trust Him with our lives.

 

Lean not on your own understanding.

 

The way we can show God our trust is to stop relying on our own understanding. We should not depend on our own wisdom and understanding in every decision we make or every step we take. Jeremiah 17: 5 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” Many people try to follow the dictates of how they feel, that’s why they married the wrong person, left jobs because of fear and so on. But we could not trust even our feelings for it may deceive us. Our understanding is so limited. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9). Before we accepted Jesus as our Savior, we only operate on our own reasoning; we don’t know the ways of God that’s why we are used to rely on own wisdom. We thought we are better than God, like Solomon who started right with God but became wise in own eyes and eventually brought division to the nation of Israel. When we were born again, although God has given us a new nature, we have brought with us into our new life our mind full of knowledge on how to do things our own way and no one as pressed that CLEAR button in our brain. That is why we need to have a lot of renewing of our minds with God’s word so that we can start relying on His promises. Lean not on your own understanding. Lean instead on the wisdom of God's word. As we daily read and understand his word we will be learning to think His thoughts after Him. And that will help us as we seek to trust in him with all our hearts.

 

In all your ways acknowledge Him.

 

What then should we do? If we are to stop relying on own wisdom or understanding, we then should acknowledge God every minute, everyday through prayer, with thankfulness and with submission. When we acknowledge God in every decision we make, we seek His advice or counsel, we wait for His perfect and appointed time. We don’t go ahead of Him. His word says that there is a proper time and a proper procedure for every matter. God wants us to be fully aware of His presence and be completely dependent on Him. The first man, Adam lived in complete dependence on God before He sinned. The moment he disobeyed God, he started to live his life independently. And so the generations after him tried to live independently from God, doing things which are right in their own eyes. Praise God that through our Lord Jesus Christ who showed His complete dependence upon the Father, speaking only what he heard from the Father speak and doing things He saw His Father did, we can follow His example. Remember the principle that Jesus followed? His only desire is to do the will of His Father who sent Him. If that would be our desire too, when we pray, we should ask God’s will to be done, to close doors that are not meant for us and open doors that He wills for us and be willing to go wherever He leads us. When we do these things, we can expect God to fulfill His promise for us. And that is……

 

He shall direct  your paths

 

The word in Hebrew for Direct is “yaw-shar.”  It means to be straight or even; prosperous; be upright.

 

What a great promise and encouraging promise for us!  It's a promise that with God’s helps as we trust in Him, He will guide our every step. But walking in the paths that Jesus walked are not an easy path but have the promise of an eternal joy in His presence.”

 

We may have thought that God's path is easy, but it’s not. But understanding that these paths have been well trodden, and these are the paths of righteousness, of love and forgiveness, we are sure to reach the destination that God has planned for us. God’s ultimate purpose for us is to walk uprightly becoming like our Lord Jesus Christ. He will guide us in all our ways.

 

Conclusion:

 

God has a wonderful plan for each of us. Jesus said, I have come that you may have life and have it to the full. He has given us His word for our instruction. To receive God’s guidance, Solomon said, we must trust in the Lord with all our hearts, stop relying on our own understanding; We must acknowledge God in all our ways. This means turning every area of life to Him.

 

 Jesus emphasized this truth in Matt.6:33 when He said:

 

“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.”

 

Let’s take a look at our values and priorities. What is important to you? In what areas have you not acknowledged Him? What is His advice? In many areas of your life you may already acknowledge God, but it is in the areas where you attempt to restrict or ignore His influence that will cause you grief. Make Him a vital part of everything you do, then He will guide you because you will be working to accomplish His purposes.

 

Prosperity is deeper than mere material wealth. True prosperity comes when we obey God.  Let us obey His instructions and we’ll be assured that He will guide us and make our paths straight and prosper us this New Year!

 

Sis.  Bing Domingo