In this past year, and even in this current season and the one to come, we can get weary.  It just seems like the song will never end. Like things are just trudging on. It can make us tired. We can get discouraged. A season of sickness that should have passed is still impacting our life and like no other time in our lives.

I know in my situation, and we have discussed it a few months back, that I feel like my role and goal is to minimize chaos and live in a calm life.  Now if I pause for a moment it is hard to put it all into perspective at once.  I work from home, I don’t have to commute. I can go to the store and no one shows their emotions through all the masks. No one says anything and people just tend to avoid everyone. Yet there seems like a void, like a whole that just does not get filled. After a few months of this situation, honestly, hope began to deflate.

Then there is the spiritual side of life, and staying in the Word, God has led me through these difficult times. Like when he brings a couple verses that just make me pause and think…

⁵  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. ⁶  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. – Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV

What do those scriptures say to you today? How do they meet you where you are at?

This promise God gives us is so powerful, it is so freeing. We are finite and there is so much that exceeds our understanding, it can be overwhelming. But in this command to trust the LORD, we find a place of refuge that allows us to maintain our sanity. We find peace in the promise that if we are humble enough to obey this compassionate command, God will direct our course.

One of the key words in those verses is LORD. When I change the word out, it can have a dramatic difference in that scripture. How about this….

Trust in my thoughts, ability and experience with all my heart, and trust in what I know.   In everything I do, I just need to have confidence that I can do all things and I will make everything alright.

It sounds pretty foolish after reading the scriptures, but in all honesty, that is how I walk a lot of situations out. It is not pretty, but it is a reminder of how easy it is for me to struggle in life.  There are a couple more verses that make this really clear…

⁷ Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom. Instead, fear the Lord and turn away from evil. ⁸ Then you will have healing for your body and strength for your bones. – Proverbs 3:7-8 NLT

This is a great example of taking a few verses here and a few verses there. The social media approach to life.  It often gives us the what, but not always the how. Not to get to “heady”, these scriptures were meant to be read together, it is parallelism. When we understand that, we will gain the healing and strength mentioned. Let’s try it out….

⁵  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
⁶  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
⁷  Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
⁸  It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.

 Here are the parallelisms to catch…

• The command, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart”, corresponds with “Be not wise in your own eyes”;
• “Do not lean on your own understanding” corresponds with “fear the Lord, and turn away from evil”;
• And the promise in verse 6 (“he will make straight your paths”) corresponds to the promise in verse 8 (“It will be . . . refreshment to your bones”).

Does combining and reading the verses together help? What did you glean from them together that was not simply there with the first two verses we read?

The genius of this kind of parallelism is that it allows the writer to make related statements that are not redundant. There’s a clear connection between what verses 5–6 say and what verses 7–8 say, but they don’t say identical things. Trusting in God with our whole heart is not the same thing as not being wise in our own eyes (though we can’t have the former without the latter).

This whole section leads up to one of the most quoted verses in the whole bible….

Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he gives favor. – Proverbs 3:34 ESV

Okay, you might not quote that often, but it is the wisdom that is quoted by James and Peter that we are more familiar with…

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. – James 4:6 ESV

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. – 1 Peter 5:5 ESV

We are not as smart as we think

To be told, “be not wise in your own eyes,” has a different effect on us than “trust in the Lord with all your heart.” It immediately heightens our awareness of and confronts the “pride of life” (1 John 2:16), the pride we all have as part of our sinful natures. This is the pride that assumes we can adequately understand the knowledge of good and evil, and judge rightly between the two. It is a perilous assumption.

The proverbial author knows how seductively deceptive this pride is and warns us against its folly throughout the chapter. What’s so seductively deceptive is how easily choosing evil can appear wise to us because of the benefits it seems to provide those who do. When we read his examples of evil behavior (Proverbs 3:28–34), we might be tempted to think we’re above such behavior. But the fact is, we notoriously underestimate how confusing things can appear in the pressure of real-life situations, when we are afraid or angry or suffering or threatened. (See my confession when we started)

Some times we need that hard directive to not trust our own wisdom and to turn away from evil than to merely be told to trust God. I know there were times when I would trust God as I did my own thing…

It comes full circle back to the scriptures we touched on last week…

⁵ Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” ⁶ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, ⁷ casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. – 1 Peter 5:5 ESV

God gives grace to the humble. To those who humbly trust him with all their heart, he gives the grace of guidance. To those who humbly refuse to be wise in their own eyes, he gives the grace of refreshing peace. To those who humble themselves under his hand, he will give the grace of exaltation. And to those who humbly cast their cares on him, he gives the grace of carrying their cares.

It is good for us to be as familiar with verses 7–8 of Proverbs 3 as we are with verses 5–6. There are times we must remember to trust in the Lord with all our heart, and there are other times we must remember to not be wise in our own eyes. They are similar, related, complementary, yet different refractions of God’s wisdom. And both remind us that cultivating humility before God is among the healthiest things we can do for our souls.