“I guide you in the way of wisdom and lead you along straight paths. When you walk, your steps will not be hampered; when you run, you will not stumble.” (Proverbs 4:11-12)
My wife and I try to take a 45-minute walk with each other every day. I normally try to get my walk in after work, but on occasion we are forced by our schedules to take early morning walks. I have noticed something different about the early morning crowd. They walk slower than the evening crowd. Why?
I believe it’s because the morning crowd is typically older than the evening crowd and cannot maintain the faster pace set by the younger walkers who frequent the track where we walk after work during the evening hours.
While age may be the major factor, there is at least one other distinction that also helps to explain why their pace is slower. Many of the morning walkers are retired and just don’t have the demands on their time that the younger walkers have. The truth is the reason they walk slower may have more to do with time than age. In short, maybe their lifestyle has more to do with their pace than their age does.
The same thing could be said about our Christian walk because the lifestyle choices we make have everything to do with the pace we are able to maintain on our journey of becoming more like Jesus.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “a long journey begins with the first step”. So it is with sanctification. That first step in the journey – salvation – is unarguably the most important, but we haven’t arrived when we get saved. So while salvation may guarantee us a ticket into heaven, we still have a good bit to learn about being a Christian.
There’s not a day in my life when I don’t stop and think about my relationship with the Lord. To be quite honest with you, I’m not always where I think I need to be, but I realize that the choices I make each day can either draw me closer to God or distance me from Him.
I try not to measure my progress by what I notice in the lives of other Christians. My own mistakes are hard enough to swallow. But I do find comfort when I hear other Christians, who are lot farther down the road of sanctification than I am, confess that poor choices have slowed their progress, too.
The Apostle Paul was one of the greatest Christians who ever lived. Yet even he once commented in a letter to Christians living in Rome that he could not believe some of the things he did. “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15 NLT)
John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, also struggled with his Christian walk. However, he pointed out that direction was just as important as pace. “I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be,” he once said. “But thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’.”
Newton makes another point that we all lose sight of. We don’t live under law. We live under grace. Jesus death on the Cross was, and is, the final atonement for our sins. There’s nothing we can do to add to the finished work on the Cross.
While the choices we make in life do and will affect our relationship with Jesus, it doesn’t mean we can’t win when we stumble. If we’re headed in the right direction, God will make sure the light always shines on our path. The important thing is to keep at it every day, which is what Paul meant when he said, “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us”. (Hebrews 12:1)
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