TRUST IN THE LORD

I cannot believe that a month has gone by without a blog! Well, after the last blog, actually, at the time of the last blog, my family had to live out what I'd written about. That was, to be a godly example during times of illness. I learned that I had been walking around with pneumonia (I guess that is why it is called walking pneumonia-smile). One of my grand babies became very ill and a few other challenges with illness requiring us many interactions with doctors and other medical professionals.

I thank God for His grace that operated on our behalf and for those docs and other medical professionals that He used on our behalf! I believe that God received glory through our attitudes and behaviors (even when we had to apologize, repent and/or regroup) and the evil one's attempts to keep us from completing God's will were cancelled out.

Many folks were praying with and for us, and hopefully still are. "The effectual fervent prayer of the righteous avails much!" Thanks so much to all of you who prayed for us!

My husband woke up my writing passion by assigning me the teaching/preaching responsibility this past Sunday. I taught/preached what the Lord was ministering to me. I'll only brief you.

If you'd like the notes from the message, please email me at christiantrngctr@aol.com and on the subject line put: Send Notes from 7/20/08.


TRUST IN THE LORD

with all your heart:

Proverbs 3 chapters 5 and 6 are well known verses:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. (NKJV)

It can easily become like a cliche', something that we say without full revelation, understanding, or compassion. As we take the time to prayerfully meditate upon the words of this passage, revelation and understanding will come that will cause the passage to actually become a part of your everyday life.

Trust, this is a word that all good relationships bank on, and that not so good relationships crave. To have a good relationship, trust is high priority.

Other words for trust are:

Rely on, depend on, lean on, believe in - to love (love and trust must work together for relationships to be healthy).

In order to trust, we must know something about the other person that gives us the sense that we can trust them. To trust in the Lord, means that we already have an understanding as to who He is, that is what “Lord” means, to even begin to decide to trust Him. What does the Bible mean when it uses the term Lord?

Lord means the One True God and speaks of God's unlimited power and authority. God, who revealed Himself as Jesus in the NT (read John chapter 1), is the Creator and made us in His image and likeness and knows our lives from the end to the beginning and is Present with us always (Emanuel, God with us) to help us live out this earthly existence according to His plans and purposes for our lives.

To trust with ALL of our heart indicates that we are to trust the Lord with all of who we are- with our whole being; with our mind, will, and emotions, with our inner man, with our life. Everything about us is to show that we trust in the Lord.

Recent scientific studies report that the heart functions as an intelligence center and communicates with the brain. The premise is that the heart has a belief system that is in communication with the brain. The belief system of the heart affects the bodies’ chemical makeup leading to a healthy being or destructive being.

When we read: Prov 4:23 , "Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life," in light of these scientific studies, we see that God, the Creator, knows all the details and functionality of the heart. If we do not keep our hearts, our lives and bodies are negatively affected (see Proverbs 3:8)

To capsulate, to trust the Lord with all of our heart, literally means to depend on, rely on, believe the Lord, the One True God who has unlimited power and authority, with all of who we are; for what we believe, or rather who we believe will show itself in our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual functioning.

Lastly, to trust the Lord with all of our heart means that we cannot lean on, that is trust in our human understanding. We must totally trust God’s Word to be the basis of our understanding. To acknowledge Him in all of our ways means that the Lord’s Presence in our lives, our real time relationship with Him, (which includes a desire to please Him/to do what He says), will be evident in all that we do, say, and involve ourselves in, to such a degree that He is actually directing our paths.

We do not have to figure out our next step if we trust the Lord with all our heart!