Battle Drill #5:  Trust the Commander!

Proverbs 3:1-20 (NAS95)

Today, we are going to walk through the four action steps of a soldier’s training routine to learn the fifth battle drill – Trust the Commander!

Action Step #1) Know the Field Manual.

The battle drill we are going to learn and apply this week is from Proverbs 3:5-6: “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 your paths straight.”

The fifth battle drill is to trust God, the Commander who enlisted you to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ. Today’s battle drill comes from a very famous Scripture that many have memorized already. Let’s listen to it from the Field Manual in its entirety, Proverbs 3:1-20:

My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments; for length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you. Do not let kindness and truth leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man. 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 your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. Honor the Lord from your wealth and from the first of all your produce; so your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will overflow with new wine. My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof, for whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights. How blessed is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. For her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain better than fine gold. She is more precious than jewels; and nothing you desire compares with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are pleasant ways and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her, and happy are all who hold her fast. The Lord by wisdom founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens. By His knowledge the deeps were broken up and the skies drip with dew.

A significant part of this battle drill is trusting that God is good and that all He does is good! Listen to additional Scriptures that teaches us this foundational truth about God:

When you know God’s nature, remembering that the fear (respect, reverence, awe) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then you can trust Him in every circumstance of your life. We must train this truth into our lives so that it is instinctive, reflexive, and habitual. As way of example from my own life, 11 years ago, right after Alana was born, Kimberly called me to come back to the hospital because Alana’s heart rate had dropped dangerously, and the doctors rushed her away from Kimberly. Needless to say, I made it to Henry County Hospital in record time and I want you to hear a summary of my prayer as I drove down SR-3:

God, I really want to keep this baby and see her grow up. I love her so very much and I love my wife and we come to You asking You to save her, heal her, and allow us the privilege of raising her. Lord, if that is not Your will, then I trust you and no matter what happens we are going to serve you wholeheartedly. No deals, I’m just asking you to heal her, please Lord. I love you and I trust you no matter what. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

That prayer was my reflexive and instinctive because my habitual prayer life is that of absolute trust in the goodness of God; therefore, even in the worst scenarios I trust Him as the Commander of my soul. Your prayer life is critical to training this battle drill into your bones.

Action Step #2) Train together as one unit.

It is when the battle is at its fiercest and survival is the most precarious, that today’s battle drill is the most critical. If it’s not trained to be reflexive, instinctive, and habitual through a significant investment of time and energy in training, then at the very moment it matters the most, when the momentum of the battle is at stake, the soldier may not trust the Commander in action, no matter how much he or she says they do. For example, many people love to declare the popular promise of God found in Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” This promise encourages each of us that God is good and has good intent for our lives, but I want you to hear it in its context, Jeremiah 29:4-13:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, “Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.” For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, “Do not let your prophets who are in your midst and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream. For they prophesy falsely to you in My name; I have not sent them,” declares the Lord. For thus says the Lord, “When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”

Within this promise is the essential truth of training yourself to trust the Commander! The Commander has the strategic victory in mind, even if, especially when, it feels like a tactical defeat! This promise reminds us that God’s people would have to endure 70 years of captivity yet set their whole heart to thriving while doing so! God’s people wouldn’t return home for 70 years, so until then they were to raise their families so that their grandchildren would trust God and be ready to return and experience His promised blessing. Let me be clear about this promise so that we can be very clear about today’s battle drill, as if you were hearing this prayer from Jeremiah himself for you in that day: You are commanded to be faithful even unto death, even if you never get to experience the strategic victory that God has for His people – live in such a way that your children and grandchildren trust God habitually, reflexively, and instinctively!

This is the life of faith, just as Hebrews 11:13-16 said about the heroes of faith:

All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.

There is only way to please God – wholehearted trust in Him! Hebrews 11:6 states, “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”

Action Step #3) Seek the Commander’s approval.

Trusting the Commander requires faith, which, according to Hebrews 11:1, is, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” That is why our battle drill from Proverbs 3:5-6 states, “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 your paths straight.” It is God who brings all things together according to His will. The Apostle Paul teaches us this in Romans 8:26-28:

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

Praying and living according to the will of God requires a wholehearted trust in His goodness and grace in your life. This level of trust must be trained into us throughout our lives, just as Hebrews 12:10b-14 teaches us of the Father’s purposes for His discipline:

[God] disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.

Every soldier has had discipline trained into their very DNA! The life of faith, the life of pleasing the One who enlisted you, is a holistic lifestyle. It is not a part-time national guardsman commitment; it is an active-duty commitment that encompasses every arena and aspect of your life. It is wholehearted! Jesus taught this in Matthew 22:37-38, in what is known as the Greatest Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.” This is not a foreign concept to anyone who has served in the active-duty military. The life of a soldier is a lifestyle, not a job. A lifestyle that is fully submitted to training for and accomplishing the mission.

Action Step #4) Live on mission.

Like we learned from Jesus’ praise of the Centurion (Matthew 8:5-13), the key to being a good soldier is submission to authority and that requires humility. This is why Jesus calls us to learn from Him and to become like Him: “gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29). That means we commit ourselves to the life of training “godliness” or becoming like Jesus (1 Timothy 4:7-8)! This is God’s will for your life and when we are wholeheartedly committed to this then God works in and through us for His good pleasure! Humility does not happen by accident, it requires you to trust God and focus on Him, to receive everything, including your faith, from God and for God, as Paul reminds us in Romans 12:3, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”

In conclusion, allow me to admonish you with and pray over you the magnificence of Jesus Christ and His will for your life as taught by Paul in Philippians 2:1-16:

Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or disputing; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain.

I was an infantryman in the US Army and our motto is “Follow me!” Jesus asks you to trust Him and to follow Him! Jesus will never ask you to do anything that He Himself has not already done for you. Will you trust Him and train to live on mission today? Make this battle drill a reflexive, instinctive, and habitual part of your Christian life so that you can CM – Continue the Mission! When you trust the Commander, His word will accomplish that which He sent it forth to accomplish in and through you (Isaiah 55:11-13). Therefore, live on mission today and train the battle drill of the week for the glory of God.

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