Staying on Track
October 12 — Psalm 18:1–28
For I have kept the ways of the Lord; I am not guilty of turning from my God.” (Psalm 18:21)
In numerous surveys over the past twenty years taken among professing Christians in America, there have been some disturbing similarities. These surveys have indicated that fewer and fewer believe that the Bible is truly the inspired Word of God and believe it is merely the words of many men. More and more professing Christians doubt the virgin birth of Jesus or that Jesus lived a sinless life. A growing number believe that Jesus is not the Way as He proclaimed in the Gospels, but that there is more than one way to heaven. Add to this the growing acceptance of stated sins as merely “faults” that need to be dealt with by the person and not involving God, and you have a “new-type” of Christianity that didn’t exist when most of our parents and grandparents were born.
How could this happen? In Jeremiah 2, the prophet is addressing a similar problem that the Israelites faced thousands of years ago. He is addressing people who, if you asked, would still identify themselves as “God’s chosen people,” true Israelites who traced their ancestry back to Abraham. But they no longer believed everything their forefathers believed. In fact, they had strayed so far from the Lord that they were worshipping the gods of other nations.
In Jeremiah 2:5, we read
This is what the LORD says:
“What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they strayed so far from me?
They followed worthless idols
and became worthless themselves.
It refers to their ancestors, implying that Jeremiah’s hearers were doing something that their predecessors had also done. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Just like the Israelites, many Christians have been straying from the Truth for many years and have passed the same onto their descendants.
Notice the consequences of the Israelites choices — they “became worthless themselves”! In other words, the false gods with all of their false beliefs that they began to follow were leading them down a dead end street. They were headed the wrong way fast and it would lead them farther and farther away from the one true God!
Many today will call you “narrow minded” and even a bigot if you hold fast to your faith in Christ and the Word of God. For you to say that there is only one way to be saved and that is through Jesus Christ may cause some — even some who may call themselves Christians — to scoff. But there is One who will stand by you and be pleased to see you stay strong: Jesus Christ, your Lord!
Today, may you be able to echo the Psalmist’s words when he wrote, “For I have kept the ways of the Lord; I am not guilty of turning from my God” (Psalm 18:21).