In our heart

DEVOTION

PROVERBS

IN OUR HEART

Prov 22:17-21

17 Pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise; apply your heart to what I teach, 18 for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart and have all of them ready on your lips. 19 So that your trust may be in the LORD, I teach you today, even you. 20 Have I not written thirty sayings for you, sayings of counsel and knowledge, 21 teaching you true and reliable words, so that you can give sound answers to him who sent you?

NIV

We now come to the reason for all these wise sayings, for the wisdom of God, for Jesus and listening to and applying him to our heart and have him on our lips. Here it is. So we may trust in the Lord, we are being taught, yes even today. We have his counsel and knowledge available to us as he teaches them to us. His words are reliable, we can trust in him and his word. He is truth. How can we ever think we could trust in ourselves? Surely we are absolutely confident we cannot save ourselves. There is nothing we can do as far as our flesh or human strength is able to gain eternal life. We know it is all Jesus and our trust in him for our salvation. But what about the rest of our life? Having his word in our heart and on our lips should also give us reason to trust him for every aspect of our life. Everything he says to us about providing for our needs, that we should seek his kingdom first and his righteousness and he will add all the stuff in life we need. He tells us not to worry about food, clothes, money, things, etc. He tells us he will make sure we have what we need. The thing is, it seems we want far more then we need, so we start making our own ways to get them. This then leaves God behind in our lives and we are no longer affording him the trust we should be having in him. We cannot even be totally good all the time. We make mistakes, we fail, we submit to some temptation more then we want to. We fail to do all that we know we should be doing. That is why we have to trust in Jesus, because we are weak, but he is strong. But we need to keep learning, keep trying, and keeping working on the trust issue more and more each day. We think we can do all the right things by our own will, but that is not true. We cannot will ourselves to be strong. We cannot will ourselves to be righteous or holy. What we can do is hide his word, hide Jesus in our heart, allowing him to live in us, as us, as one man puts it. Even then the flesh and the spirit are at odds with each other. Our spirit says yes to the Spirit, but our flesh has another answer. Our mind sees the truth and understands it’s meaning, but our body does not always pay attention to our mind, or our mind does not always pay attention to our spirit. But what we do know for sure is we can trust in him all the time. He is always faithful. He is always there for us, with us, and in us. Thus in the hour of our day before the Lord, we can say, we can give a sound answer, Yes Lord, we have Jesus in our heart.