Ponder Your Path
Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. (Proverbs 4:26)
What should Christians “ponder”? What should we slowly, patiently, mull-over until we perceive the hidden lesson, the truth within?
As you might imagine, Scripture tells us to “ponder the work of God’s hands,” and “what He has done.” (Psa 143:5, 64:9)
Amen.
But this devotional isn’t about that.
This devotional is about a second thing Christians are told to ponder: Ponder the path of your feet… (Prov 4:26)
WISDOM
The book of Proverbs is written to help make God’s people wise. Wisdom is applying the principles of God’s Word to the various settings of life, which are not always addressed by the more straight-forward commands of Scripture.
Wisdom is the way of integrating knowledge with life’s activity and reactivity. It does this by first helping us understand: knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Wisdom is integrating biblical knowledge with your life, my life, our lives. It’s not an academic achievement. It’s measured by life. Have we integrated the knowledge in Scripture with our lives? Not, have I integrated Scripture with the lives of some other people. That’s not wisdom. Wisdom has one measurement: my life.
THE PATH
But now, this is complicated. We all start at different places—epochs, countries, locations, cultures, families, classes, personalities, etc. And we all have take different paths. Nearly none of us are “where we’d like to be.” But here we are.
How do we get wisdom? Read the Bible. Yes. But Proverbs, the Bible’s book of “How to be Wise,” says also, “Ponder the path of your feet.” Understand not just the truths of Scripture, but also the path of your life.
This is immediately contrasted with the “forbidden woman.” She is described in Proverbs 5 as an example of someone who “does not ponder the path of life: her ways wander, and she does not know it.” (Prov 5:6) What does this mean? She’s lost, but she doesn’t realize it. She hasn’t stopped to look around. She understands neither Scripture, nor where she is and why.
How are we going to integrate our understanding of the Bible’s information with our unique lives? Ponder your path.
PONDER
This means, slow down, look around, reflect. Self-awareness. Self-assessment. Who am I? How have I grown? Where have I come from? Where have I been? What have I learned? Who have I hurt? Helped?
There are many tools for self-reflection available these days—our culture is wildly self-absorbed, after all. And yet we are strangely unreflective. We’re self-obsessed, without being self-aware. We look in the mirror all day long, but we don’t consider the path of our live. What cycles keep repeating? What do happy-epochs of my life depend on? What sadness am I carrying? Where do I wish to be, or to be headed, at this point in life?
One of the problems with making disciples is this: so much of our life happens under the surface, beneath our decision-making mind. Habits, reactions, choices we make without making a choice. Our discipleship programming deals with the top ten percent of the iceberg. Meanwhile, family traits, personality, typical behaviors, emotional unhealth, and unnoticed habits are all below the surface. So they never consciously interact with Jesus.
We can see these things in other people. How can we help them see what they can’t see?Or, to put it in a more frightening way, how can I see what I cannot see?
Ponder your path.
Is it Christian to lie to your friends about how you feel? We call it “peace keeping,” but it’s not wise or Christian. Is it Christian to fly into rage at your family over very human mistakes? We call it “delivering consequences,” but it’s not wise or Christian. Probably, these are traits and values we learned from our parents, and we have simply not examined them.
Ponder your path.
HOPE
Here’s the great news of Proverbs. Ponder your path, because there’s hope. “Then all your ways will be sure.”
One of the greatest things about God is how much grace He loves to give. He loves to give more grace than we even think is worth asking for. This is good news for those of us who see the marks of generational folly stamped in the inheritances we’re leaving for our kids, or in the wreckage we trail behind us, job to job, church to church.
It’s easy to despair. We certainly have a lot to despair about. But God wrote a book so we might have hope, and might, by His Spirit, begin more and more to look like our heavenly family, like Christ.
But all that hope and help won’t be integrated into your life or mine without some time, space, attention given to our path. We need some pondering. Your path will thank you.
See also:
"And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed." -Mark 1:34
"In these days Jesus went out to the mountain to pray, and all night He continued in prayer to God." -Luke 6:12
"Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life." -Henri Nouwen
Photo by Jacky Huang on Unsplash
