The Eternal Value of Trusting Jesus - Proverbs 3:5-6 Pastor Greg Addison

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

Thank you for listening.

Turn with me in your Bibles this morning to Proverbs chapter 3, and we're going to look at these scriptures.

Proverbs 3 · chapter mention

But here's the way I want to approach this a little bit different today.

I've entitled this message, The Eternal Value of Trusting Jesus.

And I struggled over this title because it's just not big enough to get the truth and the joy of what it means to follow Jesus.

Of what it means that Jesus loved us, stepped out of heaven, died on the cross for us, so that he could be our Savior and forgive our sins.

That when he rose again conquering death and sin, he offers to us a life that is so rich, it is so valuable, it is so filled with his love, him walking with us, the ability to trust in Jesus as our Savior, as our Lord, to trust him with our lives.

It is beyond the ability to describe what that means.

And I want you to kind of get that thought in your mind, and I want you to think about this thought.

As I was listening this week to a couple of different uh sermon podcasts that I listened to, one's an apologetics guy that I enjoy listening to, and there's this there's this refrain that I heard from a couple of these guys.

In today's culture, to a lot of people who don't know Jesus, they've not been exposed to Jesus.

And we live now in American culture that is not familiar with Scripture and Christ and church in the way that previous generations might have been.

They might not even have been saved, but they knew people that went to church.

Their parents or grandparents went to church, they went to vacation Bible school when they were a kid, or somebody took them on Easter.

And there used to be more of an understanding of what it means to be a Christian in our culture.

And we are several generations removed now from people who were raised in that fashion.

And so there's a large part of our country, of our culture, and here in Arkansas, that don't know what it means to be a Christian.

And so their definition of what it means to be a Christian comes from this thought process.

They read a newspaper or they see a news report on television or they listen to some news on the radio or wherever they get that.

And what they hear is that Christians are against this and Christians are against that, and Christians are against that.

That's what they hear.

And so their definition of Christians sometimes become this idea that we are these locked down, maybe prejudiced or closed-minded or something people, and we don't believe in all these things, and we're against all these people and against all these things.

And what that says is there is not an understanding, a foundational picture of what a Christ follower is and what that means for us.

And so here's what I want to talk about today is give this understanding of the incredible privilege and the incredible value in knowing who Jesus is and as our Savior.

Proverbs chapter 3, verse 5 and 6.

Proverbs 3:5

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

And do not rely on your own understanding.

Think about Him in all your ways.

Another version says, Acknowledge Him in all your ways, and He will guide you on the right paths.

Now that is who Jesus is.

That's why He stepped out of heaven and came down to this earth to create a plan of salvation, to deal with the judgment of sin, to forgive our sins, so that we can enter into a relationship with the Lord.

Because the Lord knows what life looks like.

And he knows how he designed it.

And he wants us to be able to walk in all that he has planned for us.

And he invites us to trust in him.

Because he is trustworthy, and because he has a plan for us.

And he wants us to know how much he loves us, and we as his followers need to give the world around us an understanding of the eternal value of trusting in Jesus.

Now I want to give you this thought that's kind of the big idea that I'm trying to capture for today.

Here in a nutshell, we as followers of Christ, we must show and share that what we are for as followers of Jesus is greater than what we are against.

That when you trust Jesus with your life, it is the greatest decision that you could ever make.

And it has the greatest earthly and the greatest eternal value of any decision you will ever process and make in your life.

That's what we want to see from this verse.

And when you step back from applying it in situations and all that, when you step back with the underlying principle and value of this verse, it means that in every moment in your life, Jesus is trustworthy and loves you.

And has a desire for each of us and wants to guide you through all these moments in life into the best place and path that you can be.

That's who Jesus is.

That's what he means when he says he loves us.

And it is more than just some, oh yeah, I love that and I love you or whatever.

It is a deep, rich, foundational, eternal love that he has created a path for us to be redeemed, to find him, and to walk in relationship with him.

Well then, Pastor, what about all that stuff we're against and all of that?

How do you sort all that out?

Well, I want you to look at the scripture again because it creates for us an issue or a conflict.

It describes for us what that question and struggle is in life.

Again, look at it.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding.

This sets up what is the deep conflict and issue of life in every human heart.

Why are there things that we are against?

And why are we against those?

And what does that mean to be against those things?

Well, this verse helps us understand the conflict that resides in every person.

You face it when you make a decision whether I'll trust Christ or not.

As you continue to grow, if you make Christ your Savior and you begin to follow Him, then you are working out the understanding of this verse as you grow to know Him, as you grow closer to Him, as you learn more about what it means to follow Christ.

But it sets up this that God has a view of how life works.

And my human perspective and view of life is different than his.

It is fundamentally different.

You see, the Bible teaches us that.

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, Adam and Eve, God had created to walk with them and had a plan for them.

And if you are familiar with the story, and many of you are, as it's taught us in Scripture, sin entered into the world through choices that they made.

They chose to violate God's definition of life.

And when they chose to sin and reject his perspective of life, there were consequences to that.

There were spiritual consequences.

Because of their sin, they could no longer be in the presence of God.

God had to become now in his holiness the judge of that sin.

And because of that, their bodies began to die and death entered into the world.

The planet around us was even affected because of sin.

We are separated from God.

And we now have a perspective of life that is broken because of our sin.

We deal with selfishness and greed.

We deal with a sense of guilt.

We deal with I don't understand other people around me.

It is hard to be vulnerable and trust and engage in relationships because they're dealing with the same baggage and struggle that I'm dealing with.

That's why we have all the struggles that we have in life.

And as people work through that and they chart that out, they begin to struggle with who am I?

And how do I make this life thing work?

How do I make decisions?

And then we make some good ones and we make some bad ones, and that sin begins to compound and the consequences begin to compound, and we get farther away from God.

We know less and less what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and now the decision process just gets more complicated.

And then there is another thing that's happened to us spiritually.

We developed a heart of rebellion against God.

The essence of sin in the Garden of Eden was this Satan came in the form of a serpent to Adam and Eve, and he was tempting them, and he was trying to get them to reject God and his plan for life.

And so what did he do?

He started to lie about the character of God, and he started lying about the definition of life.

See, God had put them in the garden, he said, All of this is for you.

I love you, and I've made all of this for you, and I'm going to come down and walk with you in the garden, and we're going to spend time together, and we're going to enjoy this together, and I've made you creative and skillful, and you're going to be in the garden, and you're going to cause it to be fruitful and multiply and grow, and you're going to be able to work and see these things happen.

It's going to be wonderful.

But here's what I want you to choose a relationship with me, and I want you to love me.

So I'm going to give you a rule.

There is a tree in the middle of the garden, and don't eat of that tree.

Of all this other bounty you have, all of this I've created for you, but I don't want you to eat of this.

And he put a choice there in front of Adam and Eve.

And so then you have this struggle that they enter into this time of temptation, and Satan comes and he says, listen, God doesn't love you as much as he says he does.

He's holding back from you that fruit, number one, but even worse, he's holding back from you knowledge and experience and things that you can have that he doesn't want you to have.

And he began to tempt them and tug at them.

And the Bible says that they took that fruit and they ate it, and sin entered into the world.

And since then, through all of their children and children and children and generations and everything else, we all come to inherit this sin nature.

And what it creates in us is my own definition of life.

And it creates in us a heart that naturally runs to not trust the Lord and to push back on his authority to tell us how life works.

Look at what this scripture says, it sets it up beautifully.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Think about him in all your ways.

You see, here is what God is calling to us.

I want you to know, I know how life works, and I want you to help you with this.

And because of who we are, we push back against someone telling us what to do.

We push back against restrictions.

We want life to be our way.

We think we want this unfettered sort of a freedom to do whatever we want to do, and we have our own perspective of how life works.

And he says, trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Do not rely on your own understanding.

Do not trust inherently this broken machine that we know as the human heart that desires to do this or desires to go this way or define life this way because that will hurt you.

And now you get to why we have an understanding of things that God is calling us to do.

And things that He says, don't do that, and don't do that.

He is pointing out to us that that is sin, and that sin has consequences.

That sin creates judgment.

But even more, that sin also damages you, and it damages people around you, and it hides the gospel, and it causes more people to not trust me.

The more that you do that sin, the more it becomes your perspective of life, and the further it takes you away from the Lord.

How else can we live in a culture today where we have arguments that are just a mind-bogglingly ridiculous and unfactual?

There has to be a reason.

People don't set out to be that lost or adopt positions that are just like, how can that be?

I mean, nobody sets out to do that.

It is the product of, in my own life and heart, I am adopting what I think, what I feel, what I see is true, and I'm pursuing that.

And the more I chase those decisions, and the more I try to think my own way through all of this without the guidance of truth, the farther I get down the road of being away from the Lord.

And the more confusing things become, and the more untruthful, strange thought processes and decisions and philosophies and everything else, we become susceptible to and we adopt.

It comes from this conflict and the call of the Lord, listen, follow me, I will help you with that.

I am the author of that.

I know how that works.

Trust me with your life.

And you see, it is when you come to that decision, am I going to trust Christ as my Savior or not?

This is the internal conflict that you're dealing with when you make that decision.

And really, it is a fundamental decision.

You don't have to throw away everything over here and throw away and all that.

We we make that too complicated.

Here's what you come down to.

You recognize this internally.

Am I going to repent of my sin and trust in the Lord?

Am I going to believe in him?

Am I going to take my life and I'm just going to say, I am willing to set aside all of my own perspectives of life?

I don't even know what all those are yet.

But if Jesus stepped out of heaven and he gave his life for me, no one has ever loved me that much.

And if he loves me that much, then I will trust him with my life.

And you begin that journey of trusting him with all your heart.

And you begin learning what it means to acknowledge him in all your ways.

And you begin to bring your decisions to him and you allow him to guide you and walk you through that.

This conflict we have to deal with.

People have this struggle.

So many times, when you stop and you share Jesus with someone, this is what you get.

You get things like this.

Well, Pastor Greg, you know, I'm going to die one day, and when I get up to the pearly gates, I guess they're going to get out the scales and they're just going to find out if I did enough good things or not.

Well, you know where that comes from?

That comes from this internal conflict.

That's my human perspective of life.

You see, we're innately selfish, and here's what I want to think.

I want to think I'm a good person.

Being a good person and a sinner, you're talking about apples and oranges, those don't have anything to do with each other.

You can be a good person and you're still a sinner.

How many sins does it take for us to become a sinner?

It becomes one.

Once I've sinned, I'm no longer perfect, and now that sin must be judged.

It is not a question of whether I'm a good person or not.

And you can't do enough good things to remove the judgment of the sin that we must be punished for.

And so here's what I think.

I think I'm selfish.

I want to think of myself as a good person, and I want to think I've done more good than bad.

And so I just sort of define that as life.

Well, that's not what the Bible says at all.

The Bible says all of us will give account for our sins.

And the only way to not pay the price for your sin by death physically, but spiritually, and separation from God, an eternity spent in hell separated from God, the only way to do that is to place your faith and trust in Jesus Christ who paid the price for our sins.

But you see, it is this internal conflict and my definition of life and how I'm trying to define this.

I hear people say this.

Wife don't believe any of that.

If God is so good, then why is he let all these people die and why is there starving children in Africa and all this kind of people they dream up all this stuff?

Where does all that come from?

That's a person who does not know the eternal value of trusting in the Lord, but even more, that is someone who is not willing to give an honest look.

It's okay to be a doubter.

Why not be an honest doubter and go find out for yourself?

You see, we are trying to define life by our own perspective.

And I'm clinging to my perspective because if I cling to my perspective, then I have this view of myself.

If I cling to my perspective, I feel like I'm still in control.

If I cling to my perspective, I do not have to surrender my life to the Lord.

But why don't you go find out who Jesus is?

Why don't you find out what the value is?

Why don't you ask the question?

Why don't you test him out?

Why don't you listen and ask the Lord?

And some of you are doing that.

And that's awesome that you are.

Praise the Lord.

You are giving an opportunity to find out who he is.

So let's talk about the value.

Let's talk about what we stand for.

You should follow Jesus because he is trustworthy at the level of his holiness.

What that means as holy and righteous God, he is incapable by his nature and character of ever walking away or failing in a promise.

He is so trustworthy.

Everything he ever said in this, he could never violate a promise in Scripture.

Because of his holiness, he is trustworthy, and you can always count that he will be faithful to every promise ever made.

And then if there was a question in that, when Jesus stepped out of heaven so that he could create salvation and he went to the cross and there he died in our place, he shed his blood on our behalf, rose again conquering death and sin.

And what that means is that when you step into a relationship with Jesus, when you trust him as your Lord and Savior, when you give him your life and your hope, and you ask him to pay the price for your sins and you surrender your life, lock, stock, and barrel to him, you trust him with all of your heart.

What that means is every promise that was ever made in Scripture, you are now in a covenant relationship with a holy God, and every promise is sealed in the blood of Jesus Christ, and God would never violate his holiness, and he would never trample on the blood of Jesus.

Here's the call of this verse trust in the Lord.

That word Lord is the covenant name of God in Hebrew.

And what he's saying is you can trust in a covenant keeping God.

God will never walk away from you.

He will never leave you or forsake you.

That is what we've been talking about the last two or three verses.

When Paul said in Romans 8, I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things that are present, nor things that might come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing can ever separate us from the love of God which is found in Christ Jesus.

That's what we've been talking about those last the trustworthy of God.

And he says, trust in the covenant Lord.

Acknowledge him in all your ways.

Ask him, think about him.

What does he want me to do?

Follow him.

Why?

Because he is trustworthy and he will never, never, never forsake us.

That's the value of who God is.

Even more than that, listen to what he says.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

And do not follow your own understanding, your own perspective of life.

In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will guide you in the right paths.

Now you think about who God is.

We should trust God because of his eternal wisdom, his omniscient knowledge, his infinite wisdom will guide you through life and eternity because of who he is.

Listen to the promise.

Trust in the Lord.

The covenant of God is to guide our lives, hold our lives, work in our lives.

In all your ways, acknowledge him and listen to the promise, and he will guide you in the right paths.

Now, here's what we need to understand about his knowledge and wisdom.

If you did a study of all of Scripture, or if you just did a study of the book of Proverbs, here's what he's telling us.

He knows the definitions of life.

He knows what life is.

And he knows what sin is.

And he knows what eternal life is.

He understands how to be saved, how to be forgiven.

He understands all of those things for us.

At a fundamental level, if you think about marriage, God's word teaches us what marriage is and understands it.

In the entire time that I've lived in Arkansas, the 20 plus years we've lived here and pastored here, Arkansas has always been in the top five states in the country of people who get married for the third time.

Heard some guy say one time, you know, people complain about being in the army, but they always re-enlist.

Here's what happens.

Here's what we know from that.

Marriage is a fundamental human experience.

Everyone comes from a family and they want a family.

There is an innate drive in us.

We want to be a part of a family.

We want to have a family.

We were made to be relational.

There is a call to be in relationship.

And what happens is people continue to follow that call.

Like after the second divorce, why not just give up and do something else?

Because there's a fundamental existential draw into that experience in life.

And so here we are, we live in a state where people are searching, and they're searching so much they're getting married three and four times.

Part of the problem is they don't have a definition of marriage and how it works.

It's right here.

You can trust the Lord with your marriage.

You can trust him how it works.

You can trust it because he created it, he defined it so in his wisdom, he knows how to apply it in your life because he's the author of it.

He knows how to help us with our children and how to help us guide us in our parenting because he is the author of family.

He has created that.

He knows the definition of that life and how it works.

And every aspect of life that you can come up with, your finances, your relationship with friends, your purpose in life, your career, all of that is here, and he's defined it all, and we can trust him as a covenant-keeping, trustworthy God that he has the definitions of life.

And so he knows how to guide us in that.

So when you get in that moment, what in the world am I going to do with my kids?

Well, because he defined family and he defined parents and he defined the roles and he defined life and he knows your kids and he created them.

And they were fearfully and wonderfully made, and they were planned before you even thought about having them, and has a God has a design for them.

He can now tell you, in this moment, I want to give you this wisdom and show you how to make this decision to guide your kids.

Because I've defined life.

What he says, acknowledge him in all your ways, and he will guide you in the right paths.

How does he know to guide us in the right paths?

Because he defined the path, and therefore he knows how to make the decisions to stay on it or get back on track, how to avoid the dangers on it and guide us through it.

He also knows the destinations for life.

Bible tells us very clearly throughout Scripture, God has a plan for your life.

He has a plan for your life.

How do I find that?

Well, he's defined life, he's defined purpose in life, he's defined value, he knows how to make decisions and guide you through those, and he knows the destination and how he wants to get you there.

My dad used to say all the time, son, life is real simple.

Don't make it hard.

Where you are, where you're going, draw a straight line.

Now, sometimes it's hard to acknowledge where we are because we may not like it.

Or sometimes it may be hard to acknowledge that destination because I'm thinking I want to go over here and Jesus wants me to go over there.

Now we're back to the we've revealed the conflict.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't rely on your definition of how it works.

Trust in him.

Acknowledge that decision.

Bring it to him, and he will guide you in the right path because he knows where you are, and he knows where he wants to get you, and he knows how to guide that path to get you there.

This is an incredible right here.

I've even gone back and started praying through a sermon series with this right here.

It is incredible when you begin to think that God understands life and how it works.

And so now when you start looking at some of those, the Bible says God made man and woman and marriage and put it together.

And now we start giving some of those, don't do this or don't do this, or this guidance that that's sin and not that, all of a sudden it begins to be in a different context.

Because now you understand God has defined life and God has defined marriage and he's defined a plan for you.

And he wants to guide you in the right path.

And when he says, don't do that, he's trying to tell you that does not work and that is going to hurt you, and that path is off.

And when he tells us we need to speak the truth in that area, what he's trying to say is, listen, you need to bring to the people who need an understanding of the trustworthiness of Jesus, who he is.

We have to explain and live out and show people through our lives that we follow this definition of life because God has defined it this way, and God loves us, and God has a plan for us, and he's also defined the destination, and he wants to redeem folks from hell, and he wants to walk with us in this life, and he wants us to be in heaven, and he wants us to be a part of the value he's created for life, and he is infinitely trustworthy.

He is so trustworthy, he gave up his own holiness to pay the price for sin just for us.

That's who God is.

That's what it means to be a follower of Christ.

That's what we stand for.

That's why all those things, in those conversations, we're back to the fundamental truth of what this means.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him will never perish, but will have everlasting life.

God did not come into this world to condemn the world, because the world was already condemned because of our sin.

But he sent Jesus into this world that the world through him might be saved.

He understands the definitions of life.

He will guide you through the decisions to get you to the definitions that he defines.

That is who we are, and that's what we live out, and that's what we show in our lives, and that is what we are for.

And we are against things.

It is because we are for something so much greater, and we want to help you understand how to get to the plan that God has for you.

And then this verse is incredible because it teaches us how we do that.

We walk with Jesus in relationship.

Listen to this.

This is a loving verse.

I mean, this is a personal verse.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own understanding.

He is talking to each of us as individuals.

And when we engage in that conflict, and how do I understand this?

And what's the right definition here?

What's the right process?

What's the right decision that I make to go down the right path?

Trust in the Lord, Greg.

Greg, understand your conflict.

Set aside your own perspective of life.

Come follow the Lord.

Acknowledge him in all your ways.

In other words, last week, the prayer verse we talked about, we bring those things to the Lord.

And we talk to him with, and we trust him in that.

We walk with him in relationship and that he will guide you on the right paths.

He speaks to us, Greg, no, not that way, son.

Sometimes with me, he has to go, Greg, no! Wrong way! Right?

I think he starts with a nice conversation.

And sometimes it's my conflict that puts him in that role.

Here's what he says: trust.

You see these two pictures.

This is what faith is for us.

Trust.

This is your perspective.

This is your heart.

This is the belief that you choose to invest your mind, will, and emotions in.

Is God trustworthy?

Trust in the Lord.

That means you believe in him.

Even if you are, this is new for you, you're not a follower of Christ yet, but you are searching and you are listening.

Listen, this is a choice of faith that you made.

If Jesus loved me that much that he had died for me on the cross, I can trust someone who gives life for me.

And you adopt this.

This is what, when we talk about this perspective of life, we've got to understand this conflict, and I've got to look to him and say, Jesus, I see and I hear, and I am going to choose to believe.

I'm going to believe your trustworthy.

I don't understand it.

It doesn't make sense yet, but you know what?

I'm going to trust you because I see you are trustworthy.

You are trustworthy.

That's why we come in worship and we invest all this time in worship.

Because we need to get our eyes on Jesus.

We need to rehearse in a way that stirs our hearts the faithfulness of God and what he's done.

We need to rehearse in those songs that Jacob and the praise team and choir led us in today, where he is trustworthy and we can believe in him, and he has done that.

We study God's word and we see Jesus in Scripture and we see him hanging on the cross for us.

And we get that image of Jesus hanging on the cross and in the pain and the struggle of hanging there, he says, Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing because we've been following our way and not yet learned to trust.

And then there is the act of obedience.

It is faith.

That's what faith is.

It is it is belief with action.

It is complete reliance on him.

Intentionally choose to seek him and follow his way in those decisions.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Lean not onto your own understanding.

In all your ways, seek him or acknowledge him.

It is when you make that decision, you come to him and trust he has the definition.

And trust he's going to guide me through that.

I'm going to trust that he has an understanding of the path that I need to follow.

I'm going to trust that his definition is good.

And so I am going to intentionally seek him.

Lord, show me how to do this.

And when he gives us a word, I am going to step in that direction and I'm going to follow him because of who he is.

Because he is trustworthy.

Because I am relying on him to guide me.

It is faith in him and what he does.

Old hymn we used to sing, but we still love it.

Trust and obey.

For there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.

That's what he's saying.

You can trust him.

Acknowledge and follow.

I want you to bow your heads before we close.

And I want to ask you this question: where are you in your journey?

How have you resolved that conflict?

Have you trusted in Jesus as your Savior?

If you've never trusted him as your Savior, this morning I want to invite you to come and give your life to Christ.

In a moment, we're going to sing, just like I've talked about, we're going to turn our eyes to Jesus.

God's people who have voted on this verse, who have walked with this verse, who have relied on this verse in faith, are going to sing a testimony.

And if you've never trusted Christ, trusted him with your heart, acknowledged your sin, surrendered your life to him, committed to acknowledge him in all your ways and follow him, I'm going to invite you to come and to give your life to Jesus.

We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.