What Is Wisdom?Sample

A Lamp to Our Feet, a Light to Our Path

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (Prov. 3:5–6)

I can’t read those words from Proverbs 3 without traveling back in time and seeing Mr. Van Houten leading our junior high Sunday school department in the opening exercises and hearing my 12-year-old self reciting them (in the King James Version) as our memory verse. Like many others, this proverb has guided me my whole life with its exhortation and promise.

An exhortation: trust in the Lord with all your heart (positive) and don’t rely on your own understanding (negative). Take God’s Word as your truth, even when you can’t fully understand it. Use it as your rule and guide, even when it’s hard to follow. Acknowledge the Lord—his word, will, and way—in everything you do, think, and say. And then the promise: he will make straight your paths.

As always with Bible promises, this is not an ironclad guarantee that our paths will never be crooked, steep, hard, or deadly. It’s an assurance that the Lord will straighten them all out in the end and make sure they lead us straight—home to him. It includes the promise that he will be with us all the way: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Ps. 23:4).

As you pray, give thanks to the Lord who leads us home.

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