Keep Your Eyes on the Road

"Let your eyes look directly ahead And let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you. Watch the path of your feet And all your ways will be established. Do not turn to the right nor to the left; Turn your foot from evil." Proverbs 4:25-27

As I was driving in to work this morning, I heard a new rendition of an old hymn that I haven’t heard in a long time. As I listened, the third verse stood out to me. Here are the words to this beautiful verse:

“O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.”

It got me thinking about my own walk with the Lord Jesus Christ, and how easy it is to get distracted from the path I am walking. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love”. I can identify with that. It’s not that I’m a backslider, I’m not, but I understand how prone to distraction I can be.

As we read through the Bible, we see in many places where God warns His people not to turn to the right or the left. We read that God desires them to follow Him wholly, and to not allow things to pull us away from Him. One of the saddest verses in the entire Bible, in my opinion, is 1 Kings 11:6: “Thus, Solomon did what was evil in the Lord's sight; he refused to follow the Lord completely, as his father, David, had done” (NLT). Here was man who had powerful experiences with the God of the universe. He had on two different occasions been visited by the Lord, he was given everything he had by Him, from his wisdom to his riches, and yet, he did not set his gaze straight before him, but he allowed distraction to draw him away from following the Lord. His distraction took the form of women that were heathens, worshipping false gods. So Solomon allowed compromise in, all because he looked away from God.

There are surely many diamonds to pick up as we follow the path Christ leads us down. But as the Israelites of old, coming into the Promised Land, were told to stay behind the Ark, because they were in a land they had never been in before, so let us stay behind God, following Him close. For there the most precious diamonds will be found. All that glitters is not gold. From my own experience, it easy to see what shines so beautifully as we pass by, but the temptation is to veer off and chase the gems in forbidden territory. I'm reminded of years ago, when I was learning how to drive. My dad constantly said one phrase to me: "keep your eyes on the road". Come to think of it, my wife has said that to me a lot too. So today, let’s do as the writer of Proverbs tells us, and set our gaze in front of us, keeping our eyes fixed on our wonderful Savior. God bless.