Direction........

Time and time again we hear that we should seek God's direction for our lives. We are told that we should seek God's guidance in making big decisions, we should pray for the answers to life's big questions, and we are told that we should aspire to carry out all our actions in accordance with God's plan for our lives.

We have all been guilty at times of being overly confident in our own abilities. Our egotism has at some point given each of us over to an over-inflated sense of self-assurance. Having experienced some successes we come to believe that we can function without the Lord. In some cases, many of us start in the right way - fervently seeking the guidance of the Lord, and as He promises, He guides our steps. As we begin to develop a level of comfort that the Lord is with us, and is smiling upon our endeavors, we sometimes then begin to seek the Lord's guidance less, and trust more in the unfounded confidence in our own hearts.

It's easy for Christians to believe that we are in alignment with God's will and we are capable of making our own decisions. After all, we have been saved by grace, we are His chosen, and we live by the aid of the Holy Spirit. We begin to believe that our own decision making is sound, and forget that it was because of God's good providence that our decisions were blessed to begin with. In either case it is by an over-grown sense of self-righteousness that we then cease seeking God's guidance in our decision making. When we begin to believe we are "good" people, and believe we operate with "good" intent, we become confident that our decision making is consequently "good". We then become dependent on ourselves for our own guidance, and unfortunately, as has been demonstrated by thousands of years of history, self-reliance ultimately leads a person far from the Lord.

Jesus teaches, "No one is good except God alone" (Luke 18:19). We must not begin thinking that because we have come to know Christ that we are now "good" people capable of making righteous decisions. The truth is, we are sinners, soiled by sin, making decisions with a fractured conscience and deceitful heart (Jeremiah 17:9). Though we are justified to God through Christ, it is by Christ's righteousness alone, and not by any good of our own (Ephesians 2:8). No person does righteously apart from the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We must remember who it is that is good - He who makes us good - and seek His advisement always.

Sometimes the best thing for us to remember is that WE are His children, and like our own children we require/demand that they ASK FIRST before they are allowed to do anything. Why do we do this? We want the best for them, to keep them safe, knowing that we have experience and knowledge that they have not yet acquired which allows us to provide both. Is it so crazy to imagine our Father wanting the same from us?

Obviously we will make independent choices and decisions based on the things we know and that are good and right, these are not what I am referring to, but rather those times when you don't know the how, when, where, what or why and certainly not what the outcome of what your choices will be. Thankfully God does and we just need to ASK.