Walking on God’s Path

Written by my son Everett

James 1:2-8 (NLT)

Last week, we heard about how the Lord wants us to be holy; He wants us to obey His commandments and set ourselves apart so we belong to Him. In this same sense, God also wants us to trust Him, and walk in fellowship with Him. Time and time again, the Lord has promised to take care of those who put their faith in Him; and if we trust in God and we rely more on Him and less on ourselves or other worldly things, we will as a result grow closer to God, and I believe our faith will perpetually increase as we test it.

I really like the illustration that the lives we lead are roads that we are walking on, so I will be using this metaphor throughout this message. There are right and wrong paths that we may walk on through life, but it’s crucial that we choose to walk the right path. Fortunately for us, God has a righteous path all laid out for us to walk: one that Jesus paved for us to follow. And as we grow in our trust in Him and rely more on the Lord, we will go from following behind Him, to walking side by side with Him through life.

For our text today, let’s look at the words of James 1:2-8, which says:

2 Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.

3 For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.

4 So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

5 If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and He will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.

6 But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.

7 Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.

8 Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do. 

James has said quite a bit here, so let’s go through it verse by verse, and see all the ways that we can further walk the straight and narrow path of righteousness.

James 1:2 says “Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.” Now, this might sound like backward reasoning, saying that we should see troubles as an opportunity for great joy, but this verse really makes the most sense paired with his follow-up statement. Verse 3 says, “For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.”

These verses are more comprehensible in context, don’t you think? Consider it this way: When our faith is tested, our endurance has a chance to grow, and so because of that, we can see our troubles (the things that test our faith) as opportunities for our endurance to increase, which would give us great joy in our victory over adversity.

 Further encouragement for this great joy is found in the next verse, James 1:4, which says, “So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.”

This verse strikes me as being radically different from other messages I hear. It says: We should aim to grow our endurance, because when our endurance is fully grown, we will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. I had sort of a “wait, what?”  reaction to reading this; I’m sure I’ve read this verse before, but it never really stood out to me before now. Most contemporary things I read tend to emphasize how imperfect everyone will always be. One time I commented “Practice makes perfect,” on the internet, and immediately someone else replied, “Perfection doesn't exist!” So I have the impression that things seem pretty hopeless to a lot of people. I would like to clarify, that I don’t believe we as humans are perfect, and I know that we are limited in what’s possible for us, however, nothing is impossible with God! And I think that James knows this.

So, back to our text, when troubles come our way, we should rejoice at the opportunity for our endurance to grow. If our endurance can grow when our faith is tested, then I think the endurance he’s speaking of must be directly related to our faith, and I think this endurance is something that the Holy Spirit is growing in us.

Let me put it another way. When troubles come and our faith is tested, we must endure; we have to tough it out and not be blown off course from God’s path. The thing is, we still are never alone in this, even when we are tested, because the Holy Spirit can empower us to overcome any challenges that come our way. When we overcome troubles and stay true and faithful to the Lord, the Holy Spirit grows our endurance, and our faith becomes stronger.

We as people may be limited, but God isn’t. The Holy Spirit will never reach a point of saying, “Well, this is too big a problem for Me to help you with.” It’s only our weak human flesh that would want to give up. So if our endurance grows, and keeps growing, James is saying that it can become fully developed, and then any temptation of the enemy, and any pain we face, and any trouble that comes our way, will feel like no big deal, because we will rightly be able to acknowledge that we serve Someone who is more powerful than our enemy, and we have nothing to fear, and nothing to gain from the temporary things of this world.

As I said before, we are never alone as we walk this road of life. God is with us through it all, and He can deliver us from all sin and evil if we trust in Him and ask Him for help. Even when it comes to our faith and understanding of God, He is there to help us. As James 1:5 says, “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.”

No one knows better than God how dumb humanity can be. Time and time again, we as a whole have made the stupidest decisions. But, to quote C. S. Lewis, we believers aren’t called to be intellectually dull. We should exercise our minds and see that clear reasoning and a strong intellect are qualities to value. So, if like me, you find yourself saying, “Man, I can be so slow” then instead of accepting that as a flaw you’re doomed to carry, you should ask our generous God for wisdom, and He will give it to you. He won’t rebuke you or regard you as foolish for asking for His help. I think that the wisest thing we could do is to accept that we aren’t going to know all things, and that we should rely on our Father Who does.

Before moving on, I would also like to call attention to James’ choice of words in this verse. He says our God is a generous God, He will not withhold good things from us if we ask for them. We just need to make sure our hearts are in the right place.

On this same note, James 1:6 says, “But when you ask Him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.”

We need to remember that He is a jealous God, meaning that He will suffer no rival for us. If we are to walk the righteous path that leads to God’s Kingdom, we cannot spend half the time walking a totally different path that leads somewhere else and expect to switch back along the way. The path to God’s Kingdom is radically different from all other paths; there is nothing else like it.

When I talk about the different paths of life, don’t visualize it as roads that branch out from each other. Rather, I would actually picture God’s path as going in the direction opposite from all the others. Even if some of the other paths seem to look like God’s path, you’ll find soon enough that they all lead in the opposite direction.

We cannot follow the world and follow God all at once, and likewise, we cannot put our trust in worldly things and trust in God simultaneously. If we attempt to do so, our loyalty will be divided and we will become as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. We cannot let our loyalty become divided; we need to trust in God and nothing else.

The next verse addresses the consequences of letting our faith become divided. James 1:7 bluntly says, “Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”

We can’t belong to both the world and God, and so how could we expect to receive anything from the Lord if our loyalty is divided? We would be like the people God addresses in Revelation 3:16 when He said, “But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!”

Calling someone “lukewarm” means that person is trying to follow God and the world at the same time, but it doesn’t work. They can’t do it. They end up pretending to follow God because God’s path does not go the same direction as the world’s path. In the same way that it’s physically impossible to walk down two different roads that lead in opposite directions, you can’t follow God and follow the world. Jesus really spelled it out for us in Matthew 6:24 when he said “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”

We should all ask ourselves, who is our master? Is it God? If it is, then trust Him, serve Him. If not, then abandon whatever it is that you’re enslaved to right now, and turn to God!

In case we need further encouragement to be singularly-devoted to God, the last verse in our text from James explains all of this again. James 1:8 says “Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.”

James is saying that the consequences of such disloyalty show through in everything that they do. Their lives just fall apart. Everything becomes like if you attempted to walk two roads at the same time heading in two different directions: it simply does not work.

On the contrary, if you walk God’s path and remain entirely loyal to Him, He will take care of you. Consider the words of Proverbs 3:5-6, which says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take.”

The wording: “trust in the Lord with all your heart” makes me think that a conscious effort and decision is involved. We are willfully putting our trust entirely in the Lord. The next line, “do not depend on your own understanding” reinforces this. We are to place our trust in the Lord above even our own perception and reasoning. Even when it doesn’t make sense to us, we are to trust in the Lord; He knows all things better than we do. And on top of that, we are to “seek His will in all you do,” meaning that everything we do, should be done considering the Lord’s will over our own. Rather than doing what we want, we ought to do what the Lord wants. When we do that, I think we will quickly discover that His plans are always superior to ours.

If we seek God’s will, this proverb says, then “He will show you which path to take.” So, we are to trust Him, and seek His will, and then He will lead us down the right path.

If we go our own way, that causes us to be what James said: “as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.” But, if we follow the Lord, He will lead us down the righteous path to His Kingdom. Other translations word it “and He will make your path straight.” Meaning, He will take care of us; He’ll make life easy if we rely on Him. Relatively speaking anyway.

I should explain, when I say He makes life easy, I mean that He really will take care of us, if we will just trust Him and seek His will instead of our will. In the grand scheme of things, we don’t have the power to change things by worrying, so we shouldn’t rebel against the Lord’s guidance, and if you feel like things are difficult, it could always be worse; you could be stuck wandering around a desert for forty years.

Speaking of which, when the Lord was going to bring Israel out of Egypt, He had an easy plan right from the start. In Exodus 3:8, God said, “So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey.”

He was literally going to make their path straight, and take them straight to the promised land, but things didn't turn out that way. After leading them by the hand out of Egypt, after parting the Red Sea so they could just walk straight through, and even after providing them with both manna and quail to eat that He practically placed into their hands, Israel did not want to seek God’s will over theirs. They selfishly turned from God, and built an idol that they could celebrate in a fashion not unlike the Egyptians and their idols. And they complained and groaned about how hard it was to walk across the desert.

Walking isn’t all that hard, there are plenty of people who can go miles and miles without breaking a sweat. Your legs get used to it, it’s not like they had to sprint all that way. But they complained the entire time, and then they blasphemed the Lord by fashioning a golden statue of a calf, naming it as their savior that brought them out of Egypt. And to make things even worse, when they arrived at the promised land, they were scared to enter it and still didn’t trust the Lord to protect them. You know the saying, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you”? Well, God hand-fed Israel all through the desert, and yet they wouldn’t obey Him. They might as well have bitten His hand with how they betrayed His trust again and again.

If the Israelites had only obeyed and trusted in the Lord, they would’ve been led straight to the promised land, but instead they turned from God and had to wander the desert for forty years.

Reading about the way God led them out of Egypt makes me feel guilty whenever I complain about difficulties, but if I’m being honest, I don’t have anything to justifiably gripe about. I think that the trick here is to show something that I can’t recall seeing much of at all from Israel during this time: gratitude. If we are grateful to the Lord for what He has done for us, then we won’t find it so easy to gripe and complain. We need to adopt a thankful attitude so that we don’t find ourselves seeking our will over the Lord’s. The truth is, we can never deserve all the things that God has already done for us, and if we spent every remaining second of our lives giving thanks, it still wouldn’t come close to what He deserves from us. We have nothing to offer the Lord besides ourselves, so we need to abandon our wrongful ways and our selfish desires, and seek God’s will instead of our own. The things that we want, don’t matter at the end of the day.

I’m not one to talk, I know I’m guilty of wanting to get my way, but I suppose I should clarify. Having a desire to be comfortable and have nice things isn’t sinful. It’s when these desires impose on the Lord’s will for our lives that they become sinful. I don’t think that we need to sell everything we own, give everything we have to the poor, and be homeless to please God, but the point is: if God instructs us to do anything, we better do it. So if our wants and desires get in the way of walking God’s path, then we should discard them. But, if we desire something that isn’t a hindrance to God’s will for us, odds are, He might even give it to us if we ask. As Jesus said in Luke 11:9, “And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”

It almost sounds too good to be true: that God wants us to seek His will and trust Him and then He will always take care of us. But look at George Muller. He was led to start an orphanage and as he followed God’s will, everything he asked for was given to him. God made his path straight, and he followed it. When the orphanage was all set up and ready, no children showed up until he remembered that he hadn’t asked the Lord to bring them, and as soon as he asked, he received. The children came to his orphanage to be cared for. Each day, he prayed for the Lord to provide their daily bread, and God always delivered. It’s because George Muller followed the path God laid for him, and trusted God to do the rest.

If we walk the path that God lays out for us, He will take care of us and help us to walk it. It’s important to obey the Word, and seek God’s will instead of our own so that we do not stray from the path. And in all of this, we should put our trust in the Lord, and in Him alone. As we walk the righteous path to God’s Kingdom, we need to trust in the Lord and seek His will in everything we do. This is something that the Lord will help us with if we place our trust in Him alone.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, help us to always follow Your righteous path. Please forgive us for the times that we’ve strayed from Your way; we pray that You would lead us back and help us to continue onward with You with strengthened resolve. Thank You for paving the way for us, Lord. Help us to trust in You above all else, and to seek Your will over our own. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.