Do you feel lost in life? Not sure where you're going? Then make sure you read the right directions and follow the right people!
I was recently lost on my way to a concert in a little town in Georgia. I was somewhere in Tennessee and finally stopped and asked for directions (yes men DO ask for directions from time to time). I stopped at a gas station and learned a few life lessons:
- Number one. Try not to use the toilets!
- Number two. No jokes please about number two.
- Number three. Never ask someone how to get to a place they have never been.
- And number four, don't take directions from a person who doesn't even know WHERE they are.
The lady at the station wanted to give me directions to a place she had never been to and therefore had no idea how to get there. Not only that but this poor woman didn't even know where we were. Literally! After realizing that I could not trust her directions I simply asked where we were so I could look on my map as a point of reference. She informed me that she didn't know. I asked her "well what is the name of the street right outside?" "I don't know" she replied. "I just know that I have been here all my life"
WOW!
Doesn't that sound like some of us, or people you know? We are so eager to tell other people how to get healthy but never take our own medicine. We will listen to anyone BUT God when trying to find peace and purpose for our lives.
Proverbs 21:2 says, "Every man's way (or journey through life,
conduct) is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart"
What you think or feel is important but it is what you KNOW
that will determine how well you get to your destination in life or
how lost you will be. God has a direction for each of us and we will
find it if we start looking in the right place for those directions,
namely, His word and through prayer and seeking Him and His ways, not
our ways. I would think that by now most of us have learned that OUR
ways haven't done us much good in life. We are still stuck in a place
we have been our whole lives with no idea how to get to the places we
want to be and were meant to be.
I was doing a concert in a prison recently and one of the prisoners (doing a life sentence) stood and read the following passage in the service:
'Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call upon Him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him;
for He will abundantly pardon. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord'
Isaiah 55: 6-8
I know there is so much wisdom and life in my Bible. But how will I know it if I never read it and follow it and trust it? It is my map. And if I read it and do what it says when it says to do it, then I will never be lost.
If I want to find God's ways then I need to listen to the voice of the one who has seen Him and been in His presence.
"Not that any man has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father" John 6:46
Someone who has been where I want to go and knows how to get there.
"I am the way, and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me" John 14:6
Walk on brothers and sisters, eLi
The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.