Bread of Life Church of Fresno
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Bread of Life Church of Fresno
006 BoLCF Daily Proverbs 3:5-6 Devotional with Harold
This week, hear about how Proverbs 3:5-6 has marked Harold Forbis’s life as he has acknowledged the Lord in every aspect of life and then seen either real-time or in retrospect how God has made his paths straight.
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Welcome to Bread of Life Daily, where we take a few minutes of the day to orient ourselves toward God and connect with a brother or sister in Christ. We hope this episode helps you love God, love people and serve both. Hi everyone, this is Kyle hosting today Bread of Life Daily and I am here with Harold Forbis. Hi, Kyle, how are you doing this morning? Doing great, Thank you. So today, everyone, we are going to be having Harold here to lead us through a devotional on Proverbs 3, 5 through 6. So let's all take a moment and be together as a community. Harold, why don't you go ahead and start us off?
Speaker 2:here, sure. Thank you, kyle. This is a scripture passage that has been very important to me, very meaningful, very encouraging and very helpful to me in my 43 plus years of walking with the Lord. And let's just look at it. I'm going to read through it or quote it real quickly and then we'll come back and just take a walk through it. So there's four phrases here, three instructions and a promise.
Speaker 2:Proverbs 3, verse 5 says Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and he will direct your paths or some translations have some of that a little bit different he will make straight your paths. So there's actually three instructions there and then a promise at the end. And I think for a lot of my early Christian life maybe I was a little bit legalistic, but I really just I wanted to please the Lord, I wanted to live according to his will, I wanted to anything I saw in the Bible. I wanted to do it and I wanted to obey it. But I think I did it a little bit legalistically, like a check mark thing. It's like, okay, I got a problem, I'm going to trust in the Lord. Okay, I'm trying to do that. Now I'm not leaning on my own understanding. Now I'm trying to acknowledge him and then, oh good, he's working in the background directing my paths or something. To kind of cap it off. But at some point I realized that that actually the important point there is.
Speaker 2:The fourth phrase, which is the promise which God will be faithful to. It says he will direct my paths, he will make my paths straight. Well, that's what we all want, isn't it? It's to be living in the will of God, to be having an upright life, to be having a life that the Lord is sovereignly in charge of and directing in every way, because then we know that's going to be the best life, it's going to be a blessing to me, it's going to be a blessing to all of the people that are around my life. So then we back up and look at those instructions that will help us live in a way that we receive that blessing in the Lord directing our steps. So the first instruction is trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting that that's the first instruction, so this isn't something we're working our way towards, but this is where we start is trusting in the Lord with all of our heart. That's the starting place, the foundation of a Christian life. And then what that means is there's no room left for me to lean on my own understanding. It doesn't say don't get understanding. It says don't lean on it or don't depend on it or don't trust in it, because I'm trusting wholeheartedly in the Lord. I'm an information guy. I think you probably are. Yeah, absolutely. I love information. I love manipulating it. I like spreadsheets. I love plugging numbers in different rows and columns and see how that changes the outcome. But in the end, if I'm not careful, I can rely on my own wits to be able to manipulate that data to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you'll really be starting to trust in your own wisdom and your own devices rather than on God's sovereignty and his wisdom and plan taking all that information that I have and all that I know I don't have.
Speaker 2:As I begin to add it up and present it to the Lord, I realize there's a lot I don't understand about every situation, so I see myself just spreading it out before the Lord. Hezekiah the king of Judah did that in I think it's 2 Kings, maybe 1914. He'd received these threatening letters from enemies of Judah and it says he took them up into his chambers and he literally spread them out before the Lord and I don't remember exactly what he said to God, but basically he was submitting it to him. It's not that God didn't know about that or about your situation or my situation, but it's that now he knows that I'm acknowledging, I'm submitting all of that to him. I'm saying, okay, here's what I know about it, but I know there's a lot more I don't know. I just lay all of this out, the situation and everything I know about it. I lay it out before you.
Speaker 1:So you've gained this kind of understanding about various things in your life and you're laying it out before God and saying I'm submitting it to you, I'm acknowledging you and all these things, and so what is that at the end there, that promise he will make your path straight or he'll direct your paths? What does that kind of look like after this submitting to him?
Speaker 2:Well, the great thing and the important thing about knowing that it's a promise is that it's not just a cap phrase to cap off the others. It's a promise that God will be faithful to, and so it says acknowledge him in all your ways. So this is not just every urgent situation and then I start this process. This is in certainly desperate times, but in good times. Maybe if I do this in good times I don't get into desperate times so much. And so the promise is that God is always working, sometimes behind the scenes. We know it's a promise, so we know we can rely on it, even if I'm not seeing the result and the answer right now. So this becomes not an urgent, desperate prayer request situation where I start through my checklist. This becomes a lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is more of a holistic approach to living the Christian life as opposed to problem-solving individual things, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:And, kyle, I have seen this happen. I've been a Christian for over 43 years. There's so many different situations that I have had desperate situations where I didn't know what to do. One was a very serious illness and series of surgeries that Evan had about 17 years ago and it was a miserable time and a very uncertain time even for the very sustaining of his life. I had a couple of points for about a year, six months to a year. It was a pretty miserable time but we did our best to trust in the Lord, to not try to figure it out, because there was no figuring it out, yeah, but continually acknowledging it, you know, acknowledging it, laying it all out before the Lord and looking back over that time.
Speaker 2:There were some very obvious, pretty miraculous things that God did in Evans, in his physical body, but also just the sustaining of his spirit, where he was going through things he couldn't understand and that we were left. You know you want to cry out why, but you realize it's like no, we just cry out, lord. And so many situations like that, that looking back over it, and good situations that we were in, that I would like to have continued because they seemed like great situations, but the Lord brought it to a close. And looking back over trusting Him, obeying Him, not going with our own understanding. Now we look back and say, wow, that was going to be a catastrophe and we didn't realize it Sometimes financial, sometimes employment. So yeah, just an encouragement to everyone who might be listening to make this a life process. Trust in the Lord with your whole heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. Acknowledge Him, lay everything out before the Lord, all your situation and everything you know about it. And the promise is he will be directing your paths all through your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an encouraging reminder and, I think, a great explanation of passage, and I think it's really evidently seen in your life. That's a good place to live from, that's right, okay, well, harold, thanks for joining us today and for leading us through those scriptures and for sharing a bit of who you are, and we will see you next time. My pleasure, thank you, kyle. Thanks for joining us today. We hope this session will help you love God and people more. Thank you, kyle.