Proverbs 3:6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your paths. There have been many definitions of religion. It is one of the great and fascinating features of life which tempt description, just as the glory and charm of nature provoke representation in art. I am not going to add another definition. I am only going to say that for practical purposes our religion may be described as our response to the will of God. It is an obedience. When I have said that, I have said in the same breath that religion is not an easy thing, but a hard. If religion were not so commonly represented as an accommodation to the weak, it would be a mightier power in the world than it is to-day. Christian religion is not, in the first place, a concession to our weakness. It is an appeal to our strength. It is deep calling to deep. It is a summons to unite all that is within us. God does not address Himself to our weakness, but to our power, to our faith. His Church is the fellowship of the strong, or those who are growing strong, not of the weak, who hug their weakness and demand that the rest shall wait for them. Religion, I say, is a hard thing. Any appeal to our will is hard. To submit the will is the hardest thing man has to do. If religion were merely sympathy, it would not be so hard. Sympathising is easy. What is hard is to obey. Have you not discovered that? How easy it is to sympathise with Christ, to love one so lovely as Christ! How hard it is to obey Christ! Have you not found that obeying Christ is more hard than loving Him? Have you not observed that Christ asked for obedience much more than He asked for love? It was to our power of doing hard things that He appealed. It was to our strength He came, to side with that against our weakness. You must begin by taking Christ Himself. The one comprehensive expression of God's will is Christ. To respond to Christ is the first step in religion. It is the first comprehensive act of obedience to God's will. It is the first comprehensive surrender of your will to His. But that is a serious matter and a severe. It is not a mere thrill of sympathy with some of the lovelier features in Christ. You have not accepted Christ when you have felt you would like to love Him and serve Him. That is no act of will. What Christ did for you was more than that. He did not feel as if He would like to love and help and save you. That would have been a very sentimental salvation, no salvation at all, a mere piece of amiable religious failure. How does it look to say that Christ had a weakness, or tenderness, for mankind? Yet it is all that some forms of religion seem to recognise in Him. And to admit that you have a weakness for Christ, is that religion, faith? Yet it is all that you have in some forms of religion which have much to say about sympathy with Christ and little about obedience, about self-committal. To love much that is in Christ is one thing, but to wed Christ, give yourself to Him for good and all, take Him for better or for worse by a decisive act of loving will and total life — that is another thing and a greater. How are we to let God direct our path? When will He direct it? If this verse be true, it is when in all our ways we acknowledge Him. What does that mean? Push your inquiries. Do not swallow texts whole. There are forms of acknowledging God in all our ways which do not seem to win the blessing promised here. A man may be very pious in his habits, and feel no shame or backwardness in acknowledging God in connection with his daily pursuits. He may be particular about family worship, about saying grace, about church-going, about obliging his servants to go to church, about thanksgiving for prosperity, about giving God a portion of his income, about making a ready and sometimes even effusive recognition of religion in his manner of speech, his churchly feeling, his philanthropic energies. In plenty of cases all this is quite sincere, in some it is not. It is sometimes combined with ways of business which excite comment, or a habit of mind which does not adorn the faith. But, whether sincere or not, it has this feature. The man stands in his own ways and acknowledges God. The acknowledgment of God is an extra something joined on to the pursuit of his ways, joined on to the rest of his activities as the Sunday and its engagements are attached to the rest of the week. Now, if this is sincere it is something to be thankful for. But it is hardly, perhaps, the kind of thing which makes a man sure of the direction of God in all he may go on to do or design. Again, there are some people who are most unselfish in all their thoughts and acts, people whom it is a happiness to know, and who are a rebuke sometimes to our own selfish ways. In spite of their absence of self-seeking they are not so directed in their paths that they become directors of conscience to others. Some, I mean, with less unselfishness have a moral judgment that we should trust more. To say the truth, unselfishness is sometimes a negative kind of virtue. There are people who are more unselfish than obedient. They do not think of themselves, but — they have not the secret of the Lord. They are not self-willed, but they have not the insight into the will of God. We speak of the sinlessness of Christ, and I fear it often means something colourless and negative. It keeps us from thinking as we should about the positive and complete obedience of Christ. And so with the unselfishness of some sweet souls. It is more the absence of self than the presence of God or the secret of His Spirit. Again, when we think of God directing our path, what do we mean? When you look for God's guidance on a difficult matter what is it you expect? Do you expect to hear, as it were, a voice in your soul's ear saying clearly, as if some one called in at your window, "Yes, do this," "No, don't do that"? Do you expect to see in a vision of the night a beckoning figure? With cases like St. Paul before us, or even Joan of Arc, how can we deny that God has taken in special instances that way of revealing His will? But where would missions have been if the missionaries had waited till they saw the beckoning of some man of Macedonia in the dead of night? No. The commentary on the text is, "Whoso shall do the will of God shall know the doctrine," or "My judgment is just, because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." We must not only acknowledge God in our ways, but by our ways. We must not only pursue our own ways and interests, and add to that an occasional further acknowledgment of God; but our ways and business themselves must be the acknowledgment of God — the doing of His will. Life must be obedience, service. And in a life so lived there grows up a habit of mind which increases in the power of discerning God's will and receiving His direction. As we pursue this obedience there grows up in us a mind conformed to Christ's, a fellowship of the Spirit, a faculty of judgment which has the life secret of the Almighty. Our natural powers work. Our rational judgment is alive. We bring our reasonable faculties to bear on things. And yet Within all there is a moral sympathy, a moral affinity with the Spirit of God, which guides our judgment almost insensibly. Our affection and devotion, guide, shape, colour our views. Christ had no visions. It was His judgment that acted always in His perception of God's will. But it was a judgment leavened by all His love of the Father, by all the obedience of His past. He steered by the compass of the Spirit. He never followed wandering fires. He did not act from suggestions in a trance. His human judgment was quickened by the Divine Spirit. It was not in abeyance. He divined God's will not by His human weakness, but by His human strength. God directed His path through the exercise of His native powers, raised to superhuman insight by the intense purity and perfectness of His obedience at every stage. Everything He did gave Him power for seeing and doing His next thing. Every way He took so acknowledged God's will that the direction of God never failed His path. Do not fall into the habit of expecting calls and impulses of a distinctly preternatural, miraculous, magical sort at your decisive steps in life. So live that the faculties that God gave you to read His will may be pure and fit for their work. If your eye be single, your body will be full of light. Obedience is the secret of just judgment in the will of God. Learn the habit of worshipping Christ in spirit and in truth. That is the school and practice for that judgment which sees God's will, kindles to it, follows it, perceives it for others, and makes you a guide, antagonist, and helper to their weakness. There are many great cases in history where sanctity has given a penetration of judgment which baffled policy and puzzled shrewdness. And in the great affairs of the world the right judgment in the long run will reside with the men or the Church that best succeeds in holiness, in fine and deep obedience. Dwell much with God, and you acquire God's habit of mind. Then take your honest share in the world, and you learn to read the world with God's eye. Go into action, and you perfect yourself by practice in the art of interpreting God's guidance for life. (T. P. Forsyth, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.WEB: In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. |
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