09 Trust, Fear, Honor the LORD (Proverbs 3:5-10)
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‘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. 9 Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce;10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine’ (Proverbs 3:5-10).
Man, I love these verses! And I know I’m not the only one, because these verses, verses 5-10, are some of the most frequently quoted in the book of Proverbs by Christians. In fact, according to a website entitled ‘topverses’, which, according to that website, today we come across the most popular verse in ALL of Proverbs, that verse being verse 5.
Regardless of whether or not that’s fully true is irrelevant; The point in me saying all of that is just to emphasize that today’s verses are very popular in Christian circles and for good reason. They 100% should be.
One commentator says the verses that we read today ‘are to Christ’s disciples what the wedding ceremony is to newlyweds. They spell out what is and is not to be done within that relationship. They set the terms of what it means to live with God at the outset of our commitment to Him and through every step of our pilgrimage. They are the ‘to have and to to hold from this day forward’ of our marriage covenant with God. We need to reflect on them regularly as wedding anniversaries encourage us to do on our wedding vows’.
Our verses today show us three of the biggest parts we hold in our relationship with the Lord.
We must trust the Lord in verse 5, fear the Lord in verse 7, and honor the Lord in verse 9.
Let’s get into it.
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Last week marked a shift in focus for us, from the outer life and the voices of the evil man and evil woman at the end of chapter 2, to the inner life, and the significance that it has on our lives. As a refresher, in that episode we began breaking down chapter three, looking firstly at the beginning 12 verses of the chapter in its own section entitled in Scripture as ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart.’ We talked about how those first 12 verses can be broken down into an odd/even structure, with an admonition in every odd verse and a promise in every even verse.
Then, after getting the nitty gritty out of the way, we dove into the introduction of this section, looking at verses 1-4, which, if you haven’t heard that episode yet, you SHOULD! You totally should.
Now if you remember we closed that episode asking ‘how?’
How do we keep the Lord’s commands? How do we write them on the tablet of our heart?
How do we keep steadfast love and faithfulness?
I think these are fair and good questions and I’d even go so far as to say these are really hard questions to answer, IF it weren't for today’s verses. What we see in verses 5-10, found the body of the section, the MEAT ON THE BONES, they answer that how. They build on verses 1-4. They show us the ‘how’ is to:
trust the Lord
fear the Lord
honor the Lord
Solomon writes in verse 5,
‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding’. Let’s break that down, starting with the phrase ‘Trust in the Lord’...
Wisdom starts with recognizing that you don’t have it & that thus leads you to look to God in humility for it.
It causes you to Trust God. Not yourself. And you can’t do both. That distinction is clear in Scripture.
Those who trust in themselves, who do what is right in their own eyes, they have a name, and that name is fool. And those who trust in the Lord, who do what is right in His eyes according to His word, those people have a name, and that name is wise.
To be wise is to put your trust in the Lord. To be foolish is to put your trust in yourself.
The wise trust that the LORD will uphold his moral order according to his sovereignty, carrying out justice and equity without partiality on the world and those in it. The wise trust that as they fulfill their obligations that we’ve been looking at here in our section of Scripture, that God will uphold his promises in his own timing and his own way. The wise trust that God will act. And the wise make the decision daily to believe in that; to believe that God will show up and act. That’s what it means to trust in the Lord.
Trust is not passive. It’s active.
And for me that fact that trust is active is HUGE. The reason why is because I believe the phrase ‘Trust in the LORD’ can become platitudinous, meaning that something can lose meaning because its been overused. And that’s possible with this phrase…I mean again this phrase comes from the most popular verse in Proverbs. People say it a lot. We say it all the time. ‘Trust in the Lord’ ‘O man you just need to trust in the Lord’ ‘Hey trust in the Lord’.
We say that phrase over and over and over again and yes of course we need to trust in the Lord, but at what point are we saying the phrase more than actually living it out?
At what point have our words remained just that? Just words?
At what point have we used this phrase so much that it no longer penetrates the heart? That it does not lead to action?
You see, to trust in the Lord is to be active. It’s not a passive thing, it’s not a one time thing either. It is a constant, active decision we make.
Trust is like a walk. Firstly it’s remembering & reaffirming those first steps with the Lord, how He has been faithful to save and redeem you, to lead you to where you are now. Then, after that, trust is taking fresh steps, day after day. That’s what trust is about. It’s active. Not passive.
Now as we keep reading, we see that our trust must be with our entirety. to trust in the Lord ‘with all your heart’. There’s that word ‘heart’ again. 3 times in our first 5 verses.
We are to trust in the Lord with ALL of our heart. Trust is an entire commitment. That means no commitment to the flesh. That means no other confidence, no confidence in the flesh, can co-exist with it. Why? Because God wants the entirety of your heart. He wants all of it. He wants your trust to be completely and entirely in Him.
Trust is an entire commitment. And this entire commitment entails an exclusive commitment, where we are, moving on to the second part of verse 5, to ‘lean not on our own understanding’.
To lean on our own understanding is to lean on a broken crutch, because we’re broken people. It’s foolish. Yet we do it all the time.
As Bruce Waltke put so eloquently, ‘one is a fool to rely on his thimble of knowledge before its vast ocean’.
We are foolish to think our limited, imperfect knowledge can contend with the limitless, perfect knowledge of God.
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Now as we move on to verse 6, Solomon adds to his call for entire and exclusive commitment an exhaustive commitment:
‘In ALL your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight’
That phrase in the middle of the verse ‘acknowledge him’ has twofold meaning:
It’s confession and inclusion.
You see with acknowledging the Lord it's easy to see that solely as a confession, as in: ‘God I’m doing this thing, these are my ways and I’m bringing them before you, that you may bless them or that you may be glorified by them…etc’. But acknowledging the Lord is not just confession. It’s inclusion as well. You’re not just telling God what you’re doing, you are inviting Him into it. In all your ways you are desiring God’s presence to exist in them, to drive them, to exude from them.
The Hebrew word translated to acknowledge him in this verse is yada (pronounced ‘ya-deh’), which primarily means to know. It also means to confess, but primarily it means to know.
Think about that in the context of our verse. In ALL your ways seek to know Him. To know Him. That’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. That’s our primary responsibility as followers of Christ. It’s to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God wants to know us and be known by us.
In ALL our ways He wants us to seek to know Him.
What a prayer that could become…’Lord, I desire to know you more, to know you more intimately, to understand more of who you are, I desire to know you, today, Father, in everything. In all my ways, Lord Jesus, I desire to know you’.
That’s what I think Solomon is getting at in the first part of verse 6…not just mere confession, but inclusion as well.
When we do this, when we trust in the Lord, in our:
entirety
exclusively
and exhaustively,
the three E words that lead to true trust in the Lord, when we do that, God will make straight our paths.
I love how one commentator reacts to this promise that God will make straight our paths. He says
‘One has to view the course of one’s life from a bird’s eye view, not from a worm’s eye view, to see this truth’.
Additionally, a Portuguese proverb says ,
‘God writes straight with crooked lines...’
I love all that because I think it’s true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe God is making our paths straight when life seems to be pulling us in every direction. When we have career decisions that need to be made, when we have health issues that are getting cloudier rather than clearer, and relationships that have ended suddenly or changed in dynamic. It’s hard. It’s hard to believe God is making your paths straight. But that’s where we need the bird’s eye view. I can’t speak for you but for me when I look back on my life God has made my paths straight. Even though in the moment everything felt crooked, God was writing straight with crooked lines.
And there’s a strong chance He’s doing that with you too. He’s quite the writer, quite the author, and even though the journey in the story He is writing for you is unpredictable, the ending is known. He is making your paths straight and they ultimately lead to an eternity with Him. And that’s awesome.
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Now on the topic of paths and the One who writes ours to be straight, we ought not to write our own.
Verse 7 says ‘Be not wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord, and turn away from evil’...
Here we see the second admonition, following trusting in the Lord, and that is to fear the Lord.
Now we obviously have talked about the fear of the Lord quite a bit here on this podcast, but Solomon is using the phrase a bit differently here. He’s using it in contrast to the first part of the verse, to ‘be not wise in your own eyes’. He gives a negative command and follows it with a positive one.
It’s as if Solomon anticipated the question ‘How do i do that?’ in response to his son reading the negative command to ‘be not wise in your own eyes’ and so he answers that immediately by saying we should ‘fear the Lord’.
To be not wise in our own eyes is to fear the Lord.
And not just that, Solomon says it is also to ‘turn away from evil’, which is the last part of that verse.
And those two commands, to fear God and to turn away from evil, they are inseparable in this verse. You don’t get one without the other. Together what they represent is godliness through the fear of the Lord, and goodness through the turning away from evil. Godliness and goodness. Piety and ethics.
What we learn in verse 8, in Solomon making a promise filled argument to his admonition in verse 7, is that godliness and goodness, piety and ethics - it is rewarding.
Solomon says ‘It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones’.
Godliness and goodness, to be not wise in your own eyes, to live under the authority of God, in the fear of Him, that brings life.
I think there’s this notion that following Jesus is restricting more than freeing, because you have to ‘submit’ yourself to another and we by no means want to submit anything in this generation, let alone submit ourselves. So I think there’s this idea that living a godly life, in the fear of the Lord, under his authority, shunning what the Bible says is evil even if its not popular by worldly standards; I think people think thats not healing to the flesh or the body, rather it's a hindrance to it. People don’t think it’s refreshing to the bones, but intoxicating to the bones.
It's not. Godliness and goodness, piety and ethics, living a life in submission to the authority of God, doing things His will His way, for His glory, that brings life.
It doesn’t damage it. It doesn’t ruin it. It gives it.
Now it should be noted verse 8 is not talking about physical health per se. I’m an advocate for growing in godliness and goodness as a medication for physical illness and disease, and God could certainly heal you and protect you from that, but this more about the heart. Remember, inner life not outer life.
It’s as if Solomon is saying that when we get better spiritually, growing in godliness and goodness, that everything gets better. Not that our circumstances get better or our health gets better, but our perspective certainly does. Though outwardly you are wasting away, as Paul says, inwardly you are being renewed, healed, refreshed, day by day.
So we are to trust the Lord, fear the Lord, and then lastly, we are to honor the Lord.
Verse 9 says
‘Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; 10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine’.
In my Bible I have a little indent, a little space, between verse 8 and 9, and that’s because it marks a slight transition.
We are seeing in verses 9 & 10 the outward obedience that comes from inward piety and goodness that we just talked about in verse 8. We’re seeing how the inner life, things that are unseen, the trust in the Lord, the fear of the Lord, we’re seeing how that escalates and manifests itself outwardly through the honoring of the Lord.
So essentially we’re going from inner life BACK to outer life in these two verses.
‘Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce;10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine’.
I chuckle a little reading these verses because somewhere right now my Dad is shouting amen. Honestly he should be the one teaching these verses not me, and the reason why is because he gets fired about this stuff. I’m telling you he’s passionate. Like there are some things that I know I can say that will get my Dad going: for example I could say Kyle Filipowski, and my Dad would get fired up (he dislikes him a lot), I could say National Championship, and my Dad would get fired up (he loves UNC), I could say David Tepper, and my Dad would get fired up (he loves the Panthers, not their ownership), AND, AND, I could also say tithing and my Dad would get fired up.
He cares very much about honoring the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce. My Dad understands and would tell you this verse in part means that giving financially should be at the top, or the beginning of your budget, and not at the bottom, not at the end. Tithing, the giving to the Lord, is the first thing we do with our produce, not the last.
But I also want you to realize that wealth is not limited to money. First part of verse 9 again it says ‘honor the Lord with your wealth’...
I’m almost certain all of you listening are in the US and we have varieties of wealth that we don’t even realize. Food, shelter, clothes. We’re called to honor the Lord in that wealth too. We’re called to honor the Lord in what we eat and drink. We ought to honor the shelter he has given us and take good care of it, we ought to honor the resources we have, whether that's a phone or a car, school education or employee benefits, we ought to honor the Lord with those things.
‘Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; 10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine’.
When we honor the Lord with our wealth and with our firstfruits, He blesses us. Our barns will be filled with plenty, we will lack no good thing. And our vats (wine press), will be bursting with wine.
Hear that word FILLED. Hear that word BURSTING.
When you are filled you have no room for anything else. And when you are bursting, you have too much!!!!
What does that mean?
It means for us God will reward those who truly worship Him, who trust fear and honor, God will reward those in excess. He will not fail to bless them, and to bless them generously.
You can’t out give God. There is not a soul in heaven who has gotten there because they gave too much here on earth and God did not or forgot to supply for them. You can test God in this way, and He will not fail.
In fact that was God’s challenge to the people of Israel in Malachi 3. God said,
‘'‘Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.’
God blesses those who honor Him with their wealth; who give Him their first and their best. Don’t withhold that from Him.
Friends to close I want to bring you back to the wedding ceremony at the beginning of the podcast. I told you that these verses today were a lot like a wedding ceremony, and they are. They spell out what is and is not to be done within our relationship with the Lord.
We are to trust in the Lord, fear the Lord, and honor the Lord.
Those three things are our ‘to have and to to hold from this day forward’ of our marriage covenant with God.
And we need to reflect on them regularly as those of you are married are encouraged to do with your wedding vows.
I love you.
God bless.
