Walking the Straight and Narrow – Keep Your Eyes on the Lord Purity 1564

Welcome to the MT4Christ 24/7 Podcast. I am M.t. Clark, and this is today's photo. To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.com or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter, or watch us on YouTube. Good morning. Today's photo of snowmobile tracks over a field of snow as the sun shines bright over distant mountains comes to us from an unknown Facebook friend who shared this winter wonderland scene. Social media back on January 23rd, 2023. If this is your memory, let me know and I'll photo credit you on the blog after the fact. Well, it's Friday and time flies while you're shivering your way through the winter. And I look at the calendar and as I look at the calendar today in amazement, as a week from today will be the last day of January. Even though traveling through snow usually slows you down, time keeps marching on. And as we usually focus on one day at a time, uh, after a while we will see we are making progress and will one day, relatively soon, leave the winter of 2024 and 2025 behind, like today's photo of winter of 2023. Um, anyway, I sort of jumped the gun there. Um, my hope is for bright spring days, and even though it may seem a long way off, if we just keep keep living and God does what he normally does with his created order, we will get there. However, while time will move all of us through the seasons, the way we walk and who we follow through the seasons can make a big difference in the person we are when the snow melts and the flowers bloom. As someone who used to live many a season living in the flesh and locked in bondage to sin and addiction, I can tell you how we live really matters, but perhaps more importantly, it is who we follow that will make all the difference in who we become and where our destinies lie. The righteous path of Christian discipleship leads to life and life more abundantly, and it is that path that I encourage everyone to follow. Speaking of following the righteous path of a straight and narrow, the In Touch with Dr. Charles Stanley devotion for today addresses the topic of walking after Jesus, and I'm sharing it on the blog today to encourage us all to not focus so much on our steps than the one who can lead us out of the darkness. Charles Stanley writes, keeping your eye on the Lord, fix your eyes on Jesus for a life of joy and purpose. Have you ever tried to make a perfectly straight line of footprints? It's not as easy as you might think. Most people would tread slowly and steady, hands down, heads down, focusing intensely on their feet. But whenever someone faces this challenge with eyes downward, those footprints will be crooked. If you walk while staring at your feet, you'll actually have no idea where you're going. Perspective will be lacking because you can't see how you fit into the larger landscape. Genuine focus is missing since every step treads over the last step's focal point. The only way to make a straight line of footprints is to ignore your feet. Instead, look directly ahead and find a fence post, street sign, or tree in the distance. Then, with your eyes fixed on that target, walk toward it. If you're locked— if you've locked your focus on something other than yourself, the path will be much closer to straight. The same is true in a spiritual sense. If we walk through life concentrating inwardly, we will miss the bigger picture and likely go off course. But when we focus beyond ourselves, fixing our thoughts on Jesus Christ, we can trust our path will be straight and trustworthy every step of the way. That was from Charles Stanley, and I say amen. It's wintertime and there is snow on the ground, and because of the snow, you get the opportunity to see what your path looks like. We take a look at our steps, we can see that the path we leave behind isn't what we thought it would look like. In cartoons, footprints, paths, um, are usually, are usually pretty straight, but in my experience, the trail I leave behind isn't so linear. While the trail may lead in a straight direction, when I look at the steps, I'm surprised how my feet seem to be almost bowlegged and how the treads may be— may run uneven in the individual steps. On occasion, I've tried to make a straight path, but because my focus was on my feet making perfect footsteps, I quickly veered off course and ended up making a mess of things because it was awkward to change the way I moved to make a perfectly straight line of footprints. Stanley's devotion today gives us great practical and spiritual advice when it comes to going the straight and narrow way of Jesus. While we should be diligent to do some interior— internal monitoring of our thoughts and should examine how we are behaving in life, if we overly focus on our missteps or how we are doing what we are doing, our walk can become rigid, uncomfortable, and even painful. Instead, we are to fix our eyes on where we want to go and pursue it with vigor and not be overly concerned with every step from here to there. Jesus told his disciples to "follow me." He did not say, "You better watch your step and do everything exactly as I do." His example is our guide. He knows we are different and may have our own individual ways of getting to where he is leading us. But he did not tell us to focus on how we follow, but on who we follow. We are to seek the Lord's will for our lives, walk freely in that direction, If we focus on our steps, we will stumble. If we focus on Jesus, we can walk freely because he will never lead us astray. Today's Bible verses come to us from the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John D. Crews. This morning's meditation verses come from the section on humility and pride, and today's verses are for James 4:13-16, uh, which— where the word of God says Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Today's verses fall under the 17th point of our Counseling Reference Guide's resource section on humility and pride. That 17th point is: All proud boasting about the future is evil. Today's Bible verse really raises the bar on what we think of as boasting and seeks to humble us in our presumption that we will live and can plan out a future that is truly in God's hands. The plans of men pale in comparison to the plan of God for is creation. While we can plan and do spectacular things with our imagination and resources, we are often reminded that some things like pandemics, natural disasters, and sudden deaths can change everything. These calamities of life, while not commonplace everyday occurrences, are not so rare that they are not outside the realm of reasonable expectations. We are not promised tomorrow. And while that sentiment has been used to propagate selfish and even sinful choices in man, the appropriate response to these phenomena and the brevity of our lives is to be humbled, to contemplate God, and to thank Him for His abundant blessings, both in times of flourishing and in times of sorrow. Recognizing that we are subject to the Lord's will every day should cause us to appreciate life. And to live a life of grateful appreciation and worship to our God. As always, we encourage everyone to go to mtforchrist.com where we always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue sharing from our— well, Day by Day Along the Way by J.E. Adams. It's a 365-day devotional and we're on day 63., and where Adams shares Proverbs 14:2a, which says, 'He who walks uprightly fears Yahweh.' And J.E. Adams writes, 'To fear the Lord is a command that often confuses people. The phrase became somewhat technical in biblical usage and incorporates several elements. First of all is the awe, awe inspired by the majesty of God. That side has been overemphasized by some in the past.' The word also retains something of the dread of God's power and wrath. Then, in its more technical sense, it comes to mean the trusting life of a believer. Contemplate that. Think about his vast, awesome mercy and goodness and how it relates to your everyday walk as you depend upon him. Are you amazed again at, at the God you serve, at his glory and might? Think about these attributes in relation to your work, home life, and so forth. When you have finished, go over such thoughts again and again. Then perhaps you will begin to understand the fear of the Lord, the fear, and fear him as you ought. Amen. Yeah, and you know, between today's verses and J. Adams, we're getting, you know, we're getting a picture here like we are not promised tomorrow. God is in control. And we should have fearful reverence for him. You know, we shouldn't be afraid of God, but we should recognize that he's in control and he is mighty and he is holy and he's different from us. But he also loves us, and, um, he made us in his image, and he wants us to follow him in the way we should go. And he gave us Jesus to be not only to atone for our sins, but to be our example. To— this is how I, God, would live a human life, um, one of service and compassion. Um, so we were greatly humbled by that. And, um, we— and that's why we always ask the question, have you fully surrendered to God? Um, You know, they— A.W. Tozer said, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And I think that's very wise. But I, I say what, what do— what we do with what God's word says about us is the most important thing about us. It's one thing, you know, to think thoughts. It's another thing to follow the Lord. And, um, you need to do both. But, um, we, we emphasize the second because, um, you shouldn't have a faith of just mental assent. It should be reflected in how you live, what you do. And one of the things I do, um, as a result of my faith is I lead the Celebrate Freedom support group at Starpoint Church on Wednesday evenings. It's Christian recovery and discipleship group. Any hurt, habit, and hang-up basically that you're stuck in, the Lord can help you with. Um, and we invite you to come into community with us at Starpoint on Wednesday nights to, to, you know, start walking and talking with God, uh, out of the darkness of your life and, uh, into his glorious light. So we encourage anyone in the upstate in New York who can get to Clifton Park to come on out and join us, uh, on Wednesday night. And, uh, but if you're not in the upstate, guess what? Good news, um, we're currently doing a series where we're recording all the teachings— well, not all the teachings, but yeah, well, all the teachings that we do at Celebrate Freedom Uh, it won't be like being there, but you'll get the lesson and you'll get my personal encouragement and coaching as I try to be your, your recovery coach, uh, online through the series. Um, basically it's called Christian Recovery Celebrate Freedom. Um, it's on YouTube and it's at mtforchrist.com on our YouTube playlist page. So we invite you to go check those out while you're at it. If you're looking at that playlist page on YouTube or mtforchrist.com, you can find other playlists we've done. Uh, for victory over the darkness, the Bondage Breaker, Freedom in Christ, our very own Celebrate Freedom discipleship course. We even did a, a course on, um, von Hopper's discipleship. So if you'd like to check that out, that are all out there, uh, we share them because they've— these things have increased our faith and helped our walk, and, uh, we believe they'll help, you know, we believe that you can find or increase your freedom in Christ by joining one of them. So we encourage you to check those out. And if you are encouraged by what you see or what you hear, we appreciate your support and donations, basically, to M.t. Clark's Community Freedom Ministry. It is what we do to share the good news of freedom in Christ and Christian recovery and a transformed life. And so it's about recovery and discipleship. And change lives. And we appreciate your support. You can donate either through the Cash App, Venmo, or go to emptyforchrist.com's donation page to give via PayPal. Um, and we appreciate that. Thank you. And beyond that, we always end by asking the same question in a different way: are you empty for Christ too? Are you, you know, have you emptied yourself of the things of this world and are being filled with the Holy Spirit to lead you in to the abundant life that the Lord has for you. If you are, we say great, keep on walking and talking with God. If not so much, then I'm not surprised. There's not many people who know, um, that you can have a deep personal relationship with the Lord, um, that leads you, uh, you know, to live a different life. Um, but you can have it, uh, you just have to ask the Lord to give it to you.. And you do that in prayer. We know prayer works. That's why we pray every day, um, like right now. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. We thank you so much for— it's Friday. Thank you, Lord. And we just pray for you to go before us today, Lord. Um, you're the one who's in control, and so we just ask you to guide us in the way we should go through whatever we have to face today, um, to get us to our countryside home and our wife this evening. And, um, pray also for anyone reading or watching or listening to today's message, that they be encouraged to follow you. And, um, we pray for you to bless their— bless, bless their prayer request and, and their lives, Lord, and, uh, to guide them in the way you would have them, have them go. Um, because we all want to do what's right, Lord. Um, we want to lead good lives, but we don't know what that is without you, and we desperately need your help with that. So we're asking for your help today, Lord. Lord, we thank you, we praise you, we love you, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.