march 20, 2023

“Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.  Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure.  Do not swerve to the right or to the left, turn your foot away from evil.”

-Proverbs 4:25-27

I took a motorcycle safety class a few years ago and I distinctly recall one thing that the instructor kept saying, “Look where you want to go!”  If he said it once, he said it a hundred times.  This habit is important to develop, especially when you are entering a curve, you want to be looking through the curve to your point of exit.  One thing many new riders do is keep their eyes focused straight ahead at all times, and sometimes even look just a few feet in front of them.  When we do this, we lose sight of the big picture and we can only see what is directly in front of us as opposed to what may be coming up.  By looking ahead, looking through the curve, we give ourselves time to plan for unexpected obstacles, we can ensure a much safer experience, and we will probably find more enjoyment in the ride.  By looking where we want to go, the motorcycle tends to follow.  It’s just natural.  If you don’t look through the curves, you may end up in a dangerous situation.

Years ago, my life was no different from that of an inexperienced motorcyclist.  I was only looking at the next moment in my life, rather than looking at the big picture and seeing what lay in store for me.  I wasn’t looking through the curves and I was just on a straight path that seemed to be filled with more downs than ups.  My sin was pervasive and it was destroying me, I was not trying to look past my sin, toward a future where that sin was minimized and no longer an all-consuming aspect of my life.  We all reach this desire, to escape our sin, at some point, at least I hope we do, and we all come to that realization at different points in our lives.  Initially, my desire to put my sin in my past wasn’t about seeking a savior in my life, so much as it was about saving my marriage and restoring my family.  But wouldn’t you know it, I found my savior along the way because I started looking through the curves of life and what I ended up realizing was Jesus was there, every time, beckoning me towards Him.  Early on, when my faith was fresh and new, I felt that excitement of a new beginning.  However, in just a short amount of time, I realized that my sins were still calling to me and that they seemed harder to resist than ever before.  I struggled, I wrestled with the questions of the truth of my salvation.  What I quickly realized was that just because I looked towards Jesus as my savior, it didn’t mean that I could take my eyes off him.  When I did take my focus off of Christ, it was the same as going through the curves and keeping my focus straight ahead, I was going to crash if I didn’t figure this out quickly.  Now, I am talking about all of this in hindsight, because I sure didn’t see it this way at the time, but this analogy makes more sense to me now because I have matured in my faith beyond anything I could have imagined at the time of my salvation.  At some point I knew I couldn’t do this on my own, I needed Christ and I needed Him to guide me.  I could no longer hope for God to bend His will to my desires, I needed to come to the full realization that God’s will is perfect and that if I didn’t begin to bend to His will, then His will would eventually break me.  I needed to focus.  Consider these words found in Hebrews:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

-Hebrews 12:1,2

These two verses serve as a strong reminder of where our focus needs to be, throughout every moment of our lives.  We must focus on Jesus.  Unfortunately, even if we realize the need for this intense focus on Christ, we will find that sin still invades our lives, usually in a moment of weakness when our attention on Him has waned somewhat.  You see, at the moment of our salvation we were immediately justified, but our sanctification is a process, we stumble but the point is that we put a greater distance between those “human” moments in our lives that cause us grief and hamper our relationship with Christ.  We will endure this process until the day of our glorification.  What we must do, between now and then, is to stay focused, keep our eyes on Christ, and be obedient to God’s will in our lives.  Do this and I think you’ll find those curves of life a lot less dangerous and, dare I say, even enjoyable.