Principle of the Path # 4 Don’t Lean!

A few weeks ago we began a series titled the Principle of the Path and we memorized this verse. The prudent see danger and seek refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. Once more time. Just fake it if you don’t know it.

The prudent see danger and seek refuge, but he simple keep going and suffer for it.

We’ve been talking in this series about the principle of the path. And the path principle says that Direction determines destination. And we know that when we get in our car and we know that when we go hiking – that the direction you take will determine your destination, but when it comes to our marriages, our relationships, our finances, who we date, how we handle our professions, we forget this principle or we don’t realize this principle applies.

Most of us have some sort of dream. We think to ourselves, I want this kind of marriage or this kind of retirement. We say I want to marry this kind of man, or that kind of woman, or I want to be this kind of person, or have this kind of profession and then we start down a path that is going in a different direction and when we get to that destination, we say, “Oh my! How did I get here, because I wanted to go there? What went wrong?” What went wrong is, it’s the principle of the path. Every path has a destination and you got on the wrong path. Direction, not intention, determines destination.

Several weeks back we talked about praying for wisdom on a regular basis, saying, “ God help me to see when I’m on the wrong path early on, so that I don’t waste my days, and waste my life on the wrong path, and God give me the wisdom to see the need for change and the courage to do it.

You and I know that whatever I do today has ramifications for tomorrow, right. I studied hard for the test on Tuesday and took the test on Wednesday and aced it. I didn’t study for the test on Tuesday – just blew it off, and I failed the test on Wednesday. Those are the easy ones. Hopefully we all understand that. The problem with the principle of the path is that what you do in your twenties affects what’s going to happen to you in your 30’s doesn’t it. The financial path that you’re on earlier in life affects how you retire or whether you retire. The path that you take in raising your kids early on, affects how your kids will turn out later.

Unfortunately we don’t know the outcome of the decisions that we made until it’s really too late. We can’t go back and capture those years again. We can’t go back and unmake those bad decisions. So choosing the correct path, whether it’s financially or relationally, or who you date, or how you live is critical to how your life turns out. The problem is that we don’t have all the information. The problem is we can’t see our future, yet direction determines destination, so what do you do?

This is what we’ve been talking about.

So, if you take God, the Bible, and the Jesus thing out of the conversation, it would seem like someone could create a data base of every decision that has ever been made in the last 100 years and list all of the outcomes that have ever come out of those decisions and here’s your probability that you will end up blessed if you choose that decision. If that were the case, then I could go away from that consultation and believe that I was making the best possible decision, given the odds. If we just had enough information to know where certain paths led that would be great. On paper that seems like the best approach doesn’t it?

But the problem is that we wouldn’t take that advice. Let me ask you a question and I’d like you to answer honestly. How many of you know someone whose very smart, but has made really stupid decisions. Raise ‘em up and keep ‘em up, and how many of you it’s you? Yeah! My stupid decisions were not made because of a lack of information.

For some of us, we made a really bad decision and someone comes to you later and says If you had only done A, B, and C that wouldn’t have happened and you go, “Wow, I wish someone would have told me that 5 years ago.” Those things happen. For the most part, we crash and burn on the paths we choose not because we lack information.

Many people that I know, maybe you’re one of them, have gone to a financial planner, and spent a bunch of time, and they handed this booklet to you and said, “here is your financial plan” and you took it home and filed it somewhere and never did anything with it. You’ve got the information, you just ignore it.

How many times have you been to the doctor and they said, you need to do this and this and this and you nod real politely and then a week later you go on vacation and you forget all about it. You eat whatever you want and you’re not exercising the way you’re supposed to, and every time you stay at a hotel you ask, “Do you have a fitness center,” Oh yes, we have a fitness center, but then you never use it. Why? Your problem and my problem is not information.

So today, we’re going to wrestle with a passage of scripture that sees this tension and gives us wisdom to deal with it. Now, Solomon wrote three books in the Bible. Proverbs is one of them. He also wrote Ecclesiastes, which you should not read until after you’re forty, because if you read it before you’re forty, you’ll say, “Wow, this guy is such a pessimist. Why is this even in the Bible?” After you’re forty, you read it and say, “That’s how I feel! He’s exactly right!” Then he wrote a book called the Song of Solomon that you shouldn’t read until after you’re married, or unless you think the Bible is boring – you could start there and go “Whoooh.” The 14 year olds would creep into the temple and read it at night when no one was looking, because they didn’t have the Internet.

Solomon had all kind of insight into all kinds of things like marriage and finances, and relationships and the reason is because when Solomon became king, he was very, very young – maybe 17 or 18 when his father King David died and so he’s very, very young to be king of a great nation. Not only is he very young to be king, but one of his major roles is to build the first temple for Israel. You can go to Israel still today and see the remains of this temple. This is a real place and this is a real person and this is a real story.

So one night God comes to Solomon and communicates to him in a dream or vision and God says to Solomon. “Solomon, because I loved your father, I love you, and because I made a promise to your father, I want to make a promise to you. And he says, ask me for anything you want and I will grant it to you.

Do you want long life, I’ll give you long life. If you want a lot of money, I’ll give you a lot of money.” This is interesting, “If you want me to kill all your enemies, I’ll do that.” Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing, “Honey wake up, I got this interesting deal, God said he’d kill all our enemies for us, so let’s just make a short list.” That’s just what kings did back in that day, when they became king they went out and killed everyone who they thought would be a threat to their throne.

So God says to Solomon, “Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. Solomon says to God, “I am so overwhelmed with the burden of ruling this nation; I’m so overwhelmed that I’m so young and I have this vast nation to rule and I have to make a lot of decisions about a lot of things I don’t know anything about. I’ll tell you what I want. I want wisdom. I want discernment. I want understanding. I want to have good judgment. I want to be able to sit with people older than me and be able to interact with them and make decisions that are way beyond my years, so that I can rule this vast nation well.

Here’s what God said to Solomon.

Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have you asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be.

God makes a promise to Solomon that he will make him the wisest man who will ever live and who will ever be. If you think that maybe that’s a made up story or maybe that’s kind of silly that’s ok, But when you read the book of Proverbs and you read the book of Ecclesiastes and you read the book of the Song of Solomon, and you think one person came up with all this, thousands of years ago and you’re overwhelmed with the relevance of it to your life today, you’re going to have to say, “Wow, maybe there’s something to that.”

Now, the reason that’s so relevant to our discussion is this. If ever there was a person who could say, “God, thank you for the information. God thank you for the common sense, and God thank you for the wisdom, now go about what ever you do God, because now, I really don’t need you, because I have all this wisdom and intuition and judgment and I really don’t need you, God”; it would have been Solomon.

But when Solomon addresses the question, how do we know what to do. How do we choose which path to take? How do we know what to do now, up front, so that later on our life is a happy ending and not a train wreck? How do we make decisions either financially or relationally or you name it? How do we make those decisions. When Solomon  began to answer that question he did not say, “We’ll I’ll tell you how I’d do it. I’ll just draw on all this vast wisdom and experience and common sense that God gave me and I’ll just go it on my own. And if you want to make good decisions then you need more information, then you need to ask God for more wisdom, or you just need to get more understanding, or you just need to read my books.”

When Solomon answers the question, “Which path should I take in my finances or in my relationships?” his answer really ought to take us by surprise based on what we know about him. Here’s what he says, and if you’ve grown up around the church, then these are very familiar verses to you. Here’s what Solomon says about how we go about choosing our paths in life. Here’s what he says:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart

In every arena in life; every area of your life; every path that there is – trust in the Lord; lean hard into – not information, not insight, not common sense, not even the wisdom of God, but lean hard into God himself, because the answer of which path to follow in your life does not come from information and insight. It comes from God. God calls us into a relational connection with him and nothing else can replace that.

If anyone could have leaned on his own understanding, it would have been Solomon. “I already had that conversation.” He could have said, “I got all the information that I need.” But instead he says, “it all begins with my choosing to lean hard into God and to trust him. That is to place all your hopes, all your trust, and all your confidence – everything that you are, in the person of God.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and, the flip side, lean not on your own understanding

The Hebrew phrase here means to prop something up and give it support, like a walker supports an older person. Solomon says, don’t lean on your own understanding, because you’re going to get hurt. You put your weight on that walker and it’s not going to support you like you think it will. The walker of our own understanding is not made to support us. It will collapse; we will get hurt.  Instead, trust with all your heart, with all your faith, with all your hope, and all your confidence in the Lord and he will support you. He will lift you up.

Our tendency, and all of us struggle with this every single day, our tendency is to make decisions based on our way of seeing the world and what we’ve experienced in the world. If you have a group of guys talking about something you’ll hear them say something like: “The way I handle that” or “The way I see it” or “The way we do that is”. I had that come up one time, here’s what I did. Here’s what I, Here’s what I, Here’s what I. We don’t even listen very much, we just wait for the person to stop talking so that we can tell them how we did it or what we think about that.

Our tendency, mine as well – I mean you look at my job. Many people look to me for answers and I often times find myself thinking or saying, “Here’s what I” I, I, I, I. My experience, my world view, books that I’ve read. Things that I’ve done. Lean not on your own understanding.”

That’s not to say that this year you shouldn’t be wiser than last year based on life experience, and that doesn’t mean that we are not lifetime learners, trying to have a fuller, more Godly perspective on life – of course that’s part of it. But Solomon slices this pretty thin. He says, with all that you’ve learned, with all the life experiences that you’ve had, with all the wisdom that you’ve accumulated, even with all of that knowledge and wisdom, don’t make the mistake of when it comes to choosing which paths in life to take, thinking I’m old enough, I’m wise enough, I’m careful enough to lean on my own understanding.

Solomon says, “Even with all of my wisdom and knowledge, I refuse to lean, to be propped up, by my own understanding, whether it’s marriage or business, or relationships, or education, or whatever it might be. Don’t prop yourself up with your own understanding.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – DVD Chapter: 33     Start Time: 1:47:00     End Time: 1:48:57

We are called to lean not on our own understanding. Indiana Jones could not see the right path. It had to be a step of faith. For most of us, maybe all of us, we tend to see life from our own perspective. We may think that we have what it takes to parent our children, but we refuse to go to God with it. We think to ourselves I can do this. I was a kid once, so I can parent. Excuse me. Isn’t that like saying I had surgery once, so I’m qualified to operate?

I can handle this. I can handle owning my own business. I’m a man. I can do this. I don’t need any help. I am tempted to rely on my own understanding of my own relationships, money, and everything else, but the wisest man in the world says, “don’t go there”. If you want to take a path and end up in a train wreck, then don’t trust in God. If you want to be blessed and filled with joy and peace and love, then lean hard into God everyday!

Direction doesn’t start with a quest for which way to go. Direction begins in submission to God. Submission proceeds direction. Trust the lord with all your heart, means, “God, I’m going to trust you with all my finances, even thought I don’t have a clue about what you say about finances. Don’t get me wrong, you should find out what God says about finances, but ultimately trust in what God is saying to you as you lean in towards him.

God, I’m going to trust you with my marriage even though I don’t know what you say about marriage, because I don’t want to wait until I have 3 bad options for marriage. I want you to know that I’m trusting in you with all my heart and I’m not going to trust in my own understanding, but I’m going to trust in you even before we get to those forks in the road. Then this is what he says. He repeats himself for emphasis.

In all your ways, you marriage ways, your entertainment ways, your financial ways, your dating ways, your morality ways, in all your ways, not just on your Sunday ways, not just on your religious ways, not just in your “I’m going to try and get some good luck from God ways, because I did this and I need this – no, no, no, in all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Proverbs 3:6 (NIV)

That is that we need to learn to put God at the center of everything that we do. I’ve heard it said that we should put God first, but I don’t really like linear thinking on this, because I can put God first in my day and then I can go about my day however I want. I can forget God and never think about him or his ways again. But that’s not what Solomon is saying here and that’s not how the rest of the Bible talks about how we ought to live. God ought to be in the center of everything that we do.

How do you do that? Look for the good in the world and thank God for it. Look for the good in every person and celebrate the God who made that person. As you begin to do that, it will change the amount of joy and peace that you have in your soul and it will remind you of who God is, so that when you have decisions to make throughout your day, you will remember to lean not on your own understanding, but to lean on God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind and with all of your strength.

Because remember, direction, not intention, determines destination. Your focus throughout the day will determine your destination throughout the day, and your focus day after day will determine where you will go in the long run. Our direction and our focus every moment of every day determines what direction we will go and what path we will take. This is not just about going to God in all the big decisions of our lives, but this is about going to God with our lives. Our focus throughout the day is a direction. We are choosing to focus on God, to be thankful for the small things and the big, to ask for God’s will in the big things and the small. I need to ask God about how I ought to act toward my spouse, not just when we are having troubles, but also when we’re not.

Because remember, direction determines destination. WE are not just trying to get to heaven. The Christian walk is about bringing a bit of heaven to earth by the way we interact with God and each other. We are called to practice for eternity.

WE are called to grow in our love for God and each other and we can do that by seeking God with all our heart and by leaning not on our own understanding, because when we practice acknowledging God in all our ways, he will make our paths straight.