Trust God and Use Your Head

We have to get beyond those knee-jerk reactions that we’ve been saddled with by our history and begin to understand that we can use understanding without leaning on it. And that’s what Jesus did. Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (niv). It doesn’t say, “Don’t use your head.” It doesn’t say, “Don’t think,” or “Reasoning is sinful.” It says, “Don’t trust reason by itself.” Trust God and use your head. That’s the general advice that we have for all of our faculties: we are to trust God, worship him only, serve him only, and use everything we’ve got—our legs, our brains, everything—present it all to God as a living sacrifice and ask him to inhabit it and use it. If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand the content and the method of the New Testament, which is to go with God and think, preach, teach, reach out to people, and minister to them generously with the truth that you have received. Use your best reasoning and the best of everything else you’ve got. And then you’re in good shape.

From The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus. Copyright © 2015 by Dallas Willard. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.