Jan 8thDevotion Proverbs 3:3-6 Standing Fast When Trials Come

Proverbs 3:3-6 – Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.  4 Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.  5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.

How do we never let love and faithfulness for God leave us? When the things that cause worry and fear seem to wash over us in waves how do we remain steadfastly in faith?  What helps is to remember what we know and cling tightly to it.

“Let love and faithfulness never leave you.”  Listen to the Lord.  Praying every day is wonderful and necessary, but are we just talking and not listening?  When we pray do we listen to Him?  After all who is the Almighty Wise God, Him or us?  Listen to God.  Practice listening, it is the most important part of prayer.  As we listen and watch for His response, we will begin to recognize when He responds.

If we want to become angry at God then all we have to do is trust ourselves more than Him.  We tell God what it is we are concerned about.  Then we are prone to tell our All-Knowing God the best way to answer the prayer.  The exact way.  Then if the prayer is not answered the right way, the way we have told God how to answer the prayer, then we get mad at Him.  Folks, God is God and we are not.  Either we know who He is or we don’t.  Will we honor ourselves rather than God?  Do we know what is best more than God does?  Do we really think we know better than He?  To keep a proper perspective memorize Vs 5-6.  The Lord God is alone God and so we should trust on Him and not on ourselves.  After all, if we trust ourselves most, why pray?  We pray because God is God and we are not.  From eternity past He has known everything that will happen, why it will happen, and what is best to happen.  So shouldn’t we lean on Him who knows everything instead of ourselves who have very limited knowledge?

Psalm 34:8 – Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.  Do we personally know God?  Who do we say He is?  How do we know that He is what we say He is?  First and foremost because the Holy Spirit, because God reveals Himself to us.  (John 16:13-15, 1 Corinthians 2:10, Matthew 16:17, John 15:26)  We need the Holy Spirit to prepare our hearts and minds to receive and to instruct us and guide us.  The Holy Spirit leads us to the Word and opens it up that we might know God.  He brings us to intimacy with God and we increasingly know Him as we continue to seek Him.  Only by the Holy Spirit of God and the Word of God can we know God.  As we yield to the Holy Spirit God we read the Word and pray for understanding, as we yield to the Word of God, as we seek intimacy with God, we will come to increasingly personally know Him.  (Jeremiah 29:13)

Daily cry out to God to know Him and His Word, as we yield to Him, we will, more and more, know God better and better.  There are two truths known by all who love and seek Him. The two are that He is good and that He loves us.   We must not know these merely as a doctrine or concept that we have been taught and can recite, we must know this as a fact that we know beyond all earthly facts.  We must know these things more than we know our name, or where we live.  Above all we must know that He is good and that He loves us.  When a storm tears down our house, we may not understand why it happened, but the why will not matter.  It will not matter because our trust is in our God whom we know, beyond all else that we know, that He is good and that He loves us.  Since He is good He will allow only what is eternally good to us, whether we understand it or not.  Since we know beyond all doubt that He is good and that He loves us, there is nothing that can happen in our lives that would cause us to doubt Him.  For anything to be contrary to these two facts would be God contradicting Himself, it would be Him betraying Himself, and we know that He cannot do that. (2 Timothy 2:13)

Finally let’s test our love and trust of Him.  Since we know who and what He is, since we know that He is good and that He loves us, then do we, as loving, trusting, and faithful servants of His say “Lord God, in all my life, in every way, may your will be done.” All of His will?  What if it means that you will die?  What if that means a loved one will die? Even harder, what if that means you and a loved one will faithfully live for Him and suffer for Him if that need be?

Since we know that God is always good and that He always loves us we know that we can trust Him.  So the real question is can God trust us to be fully faithful and always yielded to Him?  If these things are true of Him and of us, than why do we worry?  Why do we doubt?  Worry and doubt are not compatible with knowing these things about God and for those who love, trust and are yielded to Him.  Let us not say we are only human.  We who love Christ are human with God Almighty inside.  We are not only human, we have divinity living within.  So let’s ring in our hearts what Joshua said to the Children of Israel “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)  Then we do not need to know why and we don’t need to understand.  If we truly know and trust God then we always do.  Oh, we are not perfect, but the more we yield to God and let Him make us into something new (2 Corinthians 5:17), the more perfect we become.  Just as our God Almighty is.

Remember what we know about God and cling tightly to it.  Praise God!  Trust and praise God!

Psalm 150:6 – Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.  Praise the Lord!

Micah 7:7 – But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will Hear me.

Micah 6:8 – He has shown you, Oh man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

Numbers 6:24-26 The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you; 26 The Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.