"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."
There is a positive and a negative action enjoined in this verse: the one, trusting in the Lord with all your affections; and the other, not leaning on your own mind or its suggestions—your heart trusting in the Lord, and your mind not trusting in itself. It is very interesting to note the difference in practice which this counsel produces. When my affections lead me to trust in the Lord, I am gratifying my deepest feelings, for the Lord occupies my heart; in Him every resource and benefit is laid up for me, and He delights to give. When you trust in the Lord with all your heart, mere difficulties or sorrows, instead of causing distress, become opportunities for your knowing better His unequaled power and care for you. The moment a difficulty occurs, the heart turns to its resource as a bird to its wing.
If you lean on your own understanding, when a strait occurs, or when any claim is made on you, you begin to think how you can extricate yourself from it; and you are as one pumping at an empty well for water with which you want immediately to extinguish a fire; and after all your toil you never succeed. When you trust in the Lord, want is your passport to Him—your draft on His heart, which is a bank of treasures of every kind, whereat you are enriched and satisfied whenever you apply, until, from habit, you are never happy or at home anywhere else. You are restful, and never without resource. If, on the other hand, you lean on your own understanding, you will be anxious and devising, watching the effect of your sayings and doings, as a chemist watches the result of his various combinations; and yet, with all your toil, you are never able to produce the thing required. In the one case you can cheerfully answer every claim, because it causes you to apply where unbounded wealth is placed at your disposal; in the other, you are made to feel, the oftener you try, how inadequate and insufficient is anything of your own devising to allay or to repair the moral disturbances ever occurring, where God and man are at a distance, and man and his fellow at variance.