The Way Everlasting
If you present yourself to the Lord so he can search and try you, he’s definitely going to show you the wicked way in you. He will show you through the combination of scripture and the way you speak, react, handle a matter, fall, sneak, pretend, respond, etc.
Pay careful attention to his words and your heart and conduct. Otherwise, you might miss what he’s trying to show you because
- you like the wicked way,
- you don’t see the wickedness of your way, or
- you see it and you don’t like it, but you don’t want to change it.
Ultimately, the Lord wants to lead you in the way everlasting. And he wants you to want him to lead you. “Lead me…” the Psalmist wrote.
At first, going on this way will just be a way of self-denial. You won’t get to do what you were doing before, but you won’t be very far on the everlasting way, either. You won’t see the benefits right away. Mainly you’ll eliminate the feelings of guilt or shame because you now realize that what you have been doing is wicked.
Then, as you get used to being led in the way everlasting, you begin enjoy it more because it’s peaceful, and clean, and right, and good. Yeah, you’ll say, “this is better than the other way”.
And then, you begin to discover many things in the everlasting way that you had been missing by limiting yourself to the wicked way.
It’s like the wicked way was a well worn path right around you and you had never explored what’s “out there”. Now you’re finding all kinds of new things on the way everlasting that you never knew were there. And you find that they are so much better than what you had experienced before. But you had to get off the wicked way to find them. And now, there’s no looking back.
Here are some examples of better things on the way everlasting:
- You find greater satisfaction in loving the Lord than in loving yourself and your pleasures.
- You derive greater fulfillment in pleasing the Lord than in pleasing yourself.
- You have much less havoc in this chaotic world when you’re on the everlasting way than on the wicked way.
- You place much greater value on eternal things than on temporal things. This makes deciding matters much simpler.