How Do We Acknowledge God?

One New Year’s Eve I asked each member of our family to give a verse they would like prayed for them that year. One requested Proverbs 3:6: “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

As I made this verse into a prayer—“Help him to acknowledge You in all his ways, so You can direct his paths”—I thought about what it means to acknowledge God. I had originally thought of it as our response when someone walks into the room and we acknowledge them rather than ignore them. That might be true if we are acknowledging a friend, but it occurred to me that to acknowledge God is much more. The Hebrew word for “acknowledge” is the common word for know.

God, who calls us to acknowledge Him, says, “Lean not on your own understanding.” If I acknowledge God, then, I don’t merely notice that He is with me. I recognize Him as Lord of all. I do not trust God merely in a general way and then trust myself regarding details. I abandon myself in every way to His supervision.

At times this is fairly easy. When a woman came for advice, I knew I had to look only to the Lord, for she surely knew every answer I could think of on my own. As I “knew only Christ,” abandoned myself to Him, and said only what He gave me to say, she began to hear from the Lord.

The key to acknowledging Him is to continually look to Him, believing He directs every detail. It’s a matter of faith.

Dear Jesus, help me to acknowledge you in all my ways today.

“This is what the Lord says—your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: ‘I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go’” (Isaiah 48:17).