Part 4 in a 4-part series on Psalm 37

Commit your way to the Lord. Trust in Him and He will do it.             

It’s not always easy to know which path to take in life. We can often respond like a deer in headlights when faced with life’s major decisions, immobilized by fear and lacking any conviction of which way to turn. Yet, just as often, it seems it is the smaller decisions of life that have a way of tripping us up with uncertainty.

I know Jeremiah 29:11 by heart and quote it frequently to myself and others who need to be reassured that God is still at work in their lives.

‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord…

Sometimes those words make me want to shout, “Then God, please tell me your plans, and I will gladly follow them!” And I suspect that sometimes my knowledge that God has a plan for me can cause me to delay making any decision at all for fear of choosing a path that is contrary to His plan.

And that’s why we temper Jeremiah 29:11 with these words from Psalm 37:5

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him and He will do it.

These words remind me that first and foremost, God is interested in the condition of my heart. Could it be that He is actually more interested in what led me to make a particular decision than He is in the actual decisions that I make?

The real question is this: at the core of who I am, have I committed my way to the Lord? Have I committed the direction of my life to the Lord and am I trusting Him with it?

When I was living and working in New York City after college, a friend of mine was making a major decision about changing jobs. She had an offer to leave one financial institution for another and was seeking the Lord in it. I remember her saying to me during this time, “Bonnie, I don’t think God really cares which specific company I work for, as long as I’m serving Him in that place.”

Wow. Those words nearly knocked my Jeremiah 29:11 socks off! I had to sit with her words for a while, a long while, to allow their truth to sink in. Only in time was I able to understand the wisdom in what she was sharing with me.

My friend understood what it means to commit your way to the Lord. God doesn’t intend to micro-manage every step and decision of our lives. Never does He instruct us to let Him make all of our decisions for us. Quite the contrary. He gave us free will so that we can make choices in all areas of our lives.

When we commit our way to the Lord and trust Him with the decisions we make, we can be assured that the promise contained in the following verse will be ours as well. The promise is this: He will do it!

Wow! He will do it! That’s amazing!

Wait…what will He do? Make me successful? Make me wise, respected, and powerful? Make all of my deepest wishes come true?

Not exactly.

What He will do, is precisely the thing that one who has committed his way to the Lord would desire, and here it is…

He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your judgment as the noonday.

As we commit our way to the Lord, He gives us incredible freedom to pursue our deepest dreams. He gives us permission to answer the question He most delights in asking us, What do you want me to do for you? He gives us freedom to make big decisions and to take bold steps in the journey of our lives, promising that as we trust Him with our lives, He will reveal more and more of His righteousness and sound discernment to us.

Knowing which path to take begins with committing to following Him and trusting Him with the rest. It requires acknowledging like King Jehoshaphat of ancient Judah, We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on Thee. And we continue by soaking each decision we make in the desire to honor God with every step we take.