Your paths
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your paths (Proverbs 3:6).
King Solomon teaches us to
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
And lean not on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).
He then goes on to encourage us to acknowledge the Lord in all our ways and to be assured He will direct our paths. Solomon’s father, David, proved the importance and power of trusting in God and knowing His direction. In Psalm 37, for example, he writes,
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him,
And He shall bring it to pass.
He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light,
And your justice as the noonday (vv. 5-6).
Also, in Psalm 23 he writes,
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake (v. 3).
It is important to understand that the “paths of righteousness” He takes us along are “for His name’s sake”. They fulfil God’s purposes in our lives and in doing so bring us into blessing. We have a practical example of this in Paul’s ministry as he starts his second missionary journey. His personal exercise was to revisit the Christians in every city where he and Barnabas had preached the word of the Lord. He wanted to see how these Christians were getting on and to help and encourage them. Paul sets off with Silas, being commended by the brethren at Antioch. But on his travels, God changes his direction, leading him into Macedonia (Acts 16:9) to begin a new work in Europe. Paul was seeking to do God’s will and acknowledging Him in all that he did, but in the course of doing this, he discovers the path God wants him to take was not the one he expected. Yet it proved to be a pathway of great and sustained blessing.
In our lives, we take the single path of following the Lord. This path manifests itself in different ways. I take a path as a husband, a father, a brother, a servant, and as a person with various roles and responsibilities. And in each of these, I am responsible to “acknowledge” the Lord. This is not a superficial, vague acknowledgement but a deep commitment. It is best described in the advice David gave to Solomon in
1 Chronicles 28:9, “As for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve Him with a loyal heart and with a willing mind.”
In following the Lord Jesus, we have to be prepared for Him to guide our steps and to sometimes take us in directions we were not expecting. We don’t know the end from the beginning. We live by faith, and the distance we see in front of us can be short. David writes,
Your word is a lamp to my feet
And a light to my path (Psalm 119:105).
God’s word can shine some distance along our path, and sometimes it shines just to reveal the next step we need to take. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). In such circumstances, we are not lost. We are simply holding the hand of the One who will never leave or forsake us, as He is taking us down the path of His divine will in faith, hope and love and on to the Day when we shall know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12). It is not a time to fear, but to trust. We can never hold God’s hand too tightly and He will never let go of us. His pathway for us is always the best one.
