Trust Delight and Wait

“Trust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;”

The psalmist sounds like his son Solomon when he instructs the reader in Proverbs 3:5-6 to trust in the Lord with all their heart and lean not into their own understanding. To acknowledge God in all their ways to acknowledge God and he will make their paths straight.

Twice he says, “Trust in the Lord.” When taken in context with the rest of this Psalm you can see that the psalmist is turning the attention, the gaze, of the reader from things that trouble them, to the only one who is worthy of all praise, the object of our affection, the God of the universe who created us, the one who has planned our lives for a purpose. Trust in the Lord! Just trust him!

And again, the instruction is really to focus on him who is trustworthy. No other person on this earth is trustworthy. There may be people who we learn we can trust. But none of them are trustworthy because they are all sinners. Only one is without sin, without blemish. He is the Lord.

What follows trust? What has been expected. A trustworthy person ALWAYS delivers what is expected. Never fails and never disappoints. But seeing this from the right perspective is essential. When the verse says “and he will give you the desires of your heart” he is not saying that God is a genie that will answer every request or desire no matter how frivolous or sinful. Instead, he is saying that if we delight in the Lord he will give us the desires of our heart. In other words, if we delight in the Lord he becomes the sole and consuming desire of our heart. Then he will satisfy our desire by giving us him.

Moreover, what this Scripture tell us is that when we commit our way, our life, our paths to the Lord and we trust him for everything then he will make our reflection of him visible to others and will use our lives as an example of his purpose. But, and here’s the important but, our place is to quietly and patiently wait for God as a good servant does. To not make a sound, to not be frantic in our beseeching, to just wait patiently trusting and knowing that God is totally in charge.