The God-Directed Life

made with Proclaim

Sean Couch

Christiansburg Baptist Church

Proverbs • Sermon • Submitted 4 years ago • Presented 4 years ago • 36:16

Proverbs 3:5–6

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As we aquire and apply wisdom, we begin to see God directing our lives in incredible ways. For us to see that, we must trust God to get us where he knows we need to be.

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This Wednesday, I will celebrate 14 years of being married to my incredible wife.

We were blessed to have incredible people put together an amazing rehearsal dinner for us the night before our wedding.

The church where we were having our reception wouldn’t allow us to have a first dance, so we actually had our dance that night during the rehearsal dinner.

I will never forget that moment as we slow danced awkwardly to what may be to many of you a cringey song.

You see, we dated and got married in Memphis, so it is only fitting that our song is a country song.

We danced that night to, “Bless the Broken Road” by Rascal Flatts.

I am not saying anything about whether or not those guys genuinely know Jesus, and I hesitate to take my theology from a country song, but for us, we saw God’s hand in it.

In case you aren’t familiar with that tune, here is the chorus:

...every long lost dream led me to where you are Others who broke my heart, they were like Northern stars Pointing me on my way into your loving arms

This much I know is true That God blessed the broken road That led me straight to you

(“Bless the Broken Road”, Rascal Flatts)

You see, we knew that God has taken the strange and painful, broken and beautiful circumstances of our lives to that point and directed all of that to get us to the place where we made a covenant to love, honor, and cherish each other until death parts us.

We didn’t always act in wisdom, but we had seen God direct our lives to get us where he wanted us.

We had no idea the challenges and adventures that God has had in store for us over the last 14 years, but we were committed and trusting that he knew where he wanted us to go.

Isn’t that what we want? Don’t we want to be able to look back at our lives and see God’s hand directing us as we go? Don’t we want to know that our lives are headed somewhere, that there is purpose behind what we are doing and going through?

We know and acknowledge that God is sovereign over everything, which means he is in control and moving all of creation towards his goal.

However, the Bible indicates that the Lord leads those who are his in a unique way. Those who know God, who put their faith in him, and who walk in wisdom enjoy the blessings of knowing and serving him in ways others don’t.

That’s what we are going to see this morning, so go ahead and open your Bibles to Proverbs 3:5-6.

If you have been around church for a while, you may be familiar with these verses. You might have even written them inside your Bible or have something in your house with these words on it.

Let’s try to look at them again today to remind us of what it looks like to live a God-directed life.

This builds on what we saw last week in Proverbs 2.

We saw that for us to be able to get wisdom, to gain a godly understanding of the world we are in and how we should act, we needed to pay attention to his word, pray for him to give us wisdom, and pursue it.

This passage gets at what happens in our hearts as we do.

Read it with me...

As we acquire wisdom, we find ourselves developing a greater and greater trust in who God is and what he is up to in our lives.

In fact, that’s what I want to challenge you to do today: Trust God to direct every step of your life.

The wisdom we talked about last week leads us to see that this God we serve has a purpose and plan for everything that happens.

He is the one guiding us through this broken road, and it is more than just to lead us to a spouse or a job or health or whatever we might be tempted to think of as success.

Ultimately, that purpose is so that you and I will be like Jesus in the core of our being so we will think and act like him and demonstrate how amazing he is to the world around us.

As we surrender to him, he is making our path straight so we can head in the direction that brings him honor and glory. Along the way, he gives us the strength to pass through difficulties and trials we encounter along the way.

That leads us to trust him in an incredible way. Let’s break it apart this morning.

Wisdom calls us to trust God...

1) With everything we are.

This is one of the core truths that I hope you learn from our study of the Bible together.

I cannot stress to you enough that our relationship with God is not an external issue; it is at the center of who we are.

For the Jews, the heart wasn’t just where their love began; it was the very core of their personality, the seat of their emotions, the most central part of who they were.

So, then, calling us to trust the Lord with all our heart was a call to trust him with the foundational aspect of our being.

We don’t just follow God with some spiritual part of us that is separate from the way we use our bodies or the thoughts we think in our minds.

No; wisdom in Proverbs joins with the testimony of the rest of Scripture and says that we are to trust the Lord with all our hearts; with everything we have within us.

The other option is that we trust what we think is best, which rejects true wisdom and replaces it with the weak substitute we think we can make on our own.

There was a classic old hymn called “The Solid Rock” that talks about this issue. He uses a picture from Matthew 7 where Jesus calls us to build our lives on him alone:

My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame, But wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; All other ground is sinking sand, All other ground is sinking sand.

Is that how you would describe your life this week?

Think back over the last week. Try to put it on a scale: on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being complete trust in God and 1 being complete trust in yourself, how do you rank?

What is your first thought when a problem comes up? “How am I going to fix this,” or, “I wonder how God wants to be glorified in this?”

How about when you get some extra money, “Sweet! I can finally get this thing I wanted,” or, “Sweet! I have a chance to help someone in an extra way.”

When you head starts swimming and the anxiety and depression creep in, do you run to the cross or do you try to just get a handle on it yourself?

You see, when we acquire wisdom, we see that I must trust God with everything I am. There is no other choice.

Now, that’s easy to say when things are easy, but the next part shows us just how deep this trust must go:

2) Even when it doesn’t make sense.

Solomon says that trust must go deeper than even our own understanding.

Godly wisdom leads us to keep leaning into what God is doing, even when it doesn’t make sense to me at the time.

Some look at statements like this and say, “See, that’s exactly what is wrong with religion—they teach you to turn your brain off and just follow blindly like a lemming.”

That isn’t at all what we are saying here.

I am not telling you to blindly follow me or even God himself.

I am calling you to, as others have said, trust your unknown future to a known God—to the God who loved you so much that he would take your place on the cross and give you his very life.

I am calling you to trust the God who has revealed himself through Scripture and in your own life with things that you can’t work out in your own finite mind.

If God is infinitely wise and good and powerful and present everywhere at once, then it only makes sense that he knows things that I don’t.

Let me give you an example that might help...

How many of you remember these things? <show Magic Eye>

These were called “Magic Eye” puzzles, technically, “autostereograms,” and they were a hit in the 90s.

If you had a book of them and stared at them, you would eventually see a 3D image almost magically appear out of the dots.

You usually had to hold the book up to your face, let your eyes cross, and then pull it back slowly until it just sorta popped.

Since you can’t do that with the screen, here is what this one is: <show Magic Eye Solution>

How many of you tried those and have never gotten them to work?

Try as hard as you could, there was just something about them that your brain could never quite catch, right?

This is what life is like sometimes, isn’t it? It seems like random colors and shapes and everything is jumbled and meaningless.

However, the God of the universe stands back from it all, and he knows exactly the picture he is painting and exactly how he is pulling it all together.

If God is big and we are not, then we have to allow for the fact that he will do things we don’t understand.

He is painting a canvas that stretches through all of history, and that story will show his glory and goodness through every bright stroke and every dark shadow.

Be real with your own heart and before your God this morning: Do you trust him enough to trust him when life doesn’t make sense?

In Isaiah 55, God is calling his people to turn from their wicked thought patterns and chasing after things that can’t satisfy and instead surrendering to him.

It is an incredible passage, in which God declares:

Isaiah 55:8–9 CSB

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration. “For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

My job as a pastor is not to make God make sense to you; it is to point you to the God who operates on a whole different level than you do.

Isn’t it completely logical that we would trust the God whose way of thinking and operating is higher than human reasoning could ever be?

Are you trusting God with the things that don’t make sense, or are you relying on what you can understand?

I am not saying that you need to stop trying to learn more about who God is and how he works and how he has shaped us and what his purposes look like; in fact last week we said specifically that we are called to pursue wisdom for the rest of our lives.

I am saying, though, that we have to acknowledge that we won’t get it all, and we won’t fully understand everything.

Are you willing, then, to trust him and walk in faith, believing that he sees where you are going and what he is doing in and through you, even if you can’t?

Solomon uses parallelism to drive the point home one last time. If we are going to live God-directed lives that move consistently towards the goal of giving him honor and glory by living like Jesus, we must trust him...

3) In every area of life.

This is similar to the first point, although it is aimed a slightly different direction.

Trusting in the Lord with all our heart deals largely with who we are, whereas knowing or acknowledging him in all our ways begins to move outward from who we are to what we think and do.

The CSB is one of the few translations that renders this word as “know.” Most translations use the word “acknowledge” here, so “know” seems out of place if you are familiar with this passage.

They may be on to something by translating it differently.

The word here does mean, “to know,” but it often implies more than a casual knowledge of a subject.

Instead, it often points to a deep, intimate knowledge of a person instead of just knowing facts.

If that’s the case, then the word “acknowledge” may not always capture that idea the best.

We might think of “acknowledge” like the fact that you give that two finger steering wheel wave when you drive by someone…you acknowledged their existence with a very small gesture.

If that’s what you think Solomon is saying here, then you are definitely missing it. He isn’t saying that we simply tip our hat to God and give him a little thought here and there at work or the same five sentence prayer before dinner.

Instead, he is calling us to take that foundation of trust that we have place in God and see how it works through all the different aspects of our lives.

Think about the various areas of your life:

Relationship to God

Physical body & health

Emotions

Parents & siblings

Spouse/Significant Other

Children

Co-workers & classmates

Church family & involvement

Financial and physical resources

Neighbors & community

World

What would it look like for you and I to live with wisdom and honor God in more than a token way in each of these areas?

You and I can only do that as we pursue and acquire a wisdom that helps us see, know, and fear God.

That leads to a trust in him that starts in the core of who we are and radiates outward into every area of life, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Wondering where we start with that kind of trust?

We start by trusting in Jesus.

We trust that God took on human flesh and was born as a baby named Jesus in a small town called Bethlehem. We trust that that baby grew and began to preach and teach, reminding the world who God was and expanding our understanding of God’s character, nature, purpose, and plan. He demonstrated God’s power on earth by healing the sick, correcting lame legs, blind eyes, and deaf ears. He even showed God’s power over death itself as he raised people from the dead.

Ultimately, we trust that this same Jesus died in our place on the cross, taking our sin and paying the penalty we deserved to pay. He was buried and rose from the dead, proving that the price was paid and now offers his life to any who will come to him.

We start by trusting in Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and kingship, and we surrender everything we are, have, and hope to be to him.

That is how we are saved, and it is that hope to which we return, holding onto him when everything around us doesn’t make sense.

We grow in our ability to acknowledge him through every relationship, every area, every path.

And it is to this God we surrender, trusting him to make our path straight, taking us the direction he wants us to go, and becoming who he wants us to become.

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