Proverbs 3:5 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
In the eighteenth century, Scotsman John Patton sailed to the South-West Pacific to the New Hebrides as a missionary to the unreached people there. They happened to be cannibals, and the culture there was one of fear, distrust and suspicion. He settled down despite being in great danger, and began learning phonetics with a view to eventually translating the Scriptures. To his amazement, he discovered that they didn’t have any word in their language for ‘faith’, ‘trust’ or ‘belief’. They simply had no concept of those terms. This presented serious challenges to communicating the gospel, and to his translation work. But one day, he had a brainwave. When his worker arrived in the morning, Patton sat back fully into his chair, raised his feet, and asked: ‘What am I doing now?’ His worker used a word that meant, ‘to lean your whole weight upon’. Patton took this expression and used it for ‘faith’ in his translation.
Are you leaning your whole weight on Jesus today? That’s what living by faith means. I think we usually only partially lean on him. We hedge our bets, have a plan B in case God doesn’t deliver, and make contingency arrangements as back-up. Too often we try to work things out ourselves using logic, or as the verse above says, we ‘lean on our own understanding’. Well, faith is not logical – but neither is it illogical. As Mark Batterson writes: “Faith is theological. It does not ignore reality; it just adds God into the equation. Think of it this way. Logic questions God. Faith questions assumptions. And at the end of the day, faith is trusting God more than you trust your own assumptions.”
Lord, I don’t see the road ahead. I assume you do. And so I choose to trust you in everything, leaning my whole weight on you today. Amen!
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