Choosing the Harder Path (GG)
CHOOSING THE HARDER PATH
Most of us avoid crises when we can. It is far more comfortable to sit in the back row than to stand up and be counted. To take up the cross and follow, to walk in the light, to climb “the steep ascent of heaven” are not options that have a strong popular appeal.
But we are speaking of those who actually want to do the will of God. What we are concerned with now is the business of choice when both alternatives seem equally moral.
Choose the harder of the two ways. If you have eliminated all other possibilities and there still seem to be two that might please God, choose the more difficult one. “The way is hard, that leads to life,” Jesus said, so it is likely that He is asking us to will against our will.
But what if He isn’t asking that? The more sincerely we seek the will of God, the more fearful we will be that we may miss it. If it made little difference to us, obviously we would not worry very much about it, so there ought to be a measure of reassurance for us in the very fact of our fear. Jesus is in the boat with us, no matter how wild the storm is, and He is at peace. He commands us not to be afraid.
The supreme example, outside that of our Lord Himself, of a man willing against his own will, in obedience to God, is Abraham. He was asked to sacrifice Isaac, his only son—and this, in the face of all God’s promises about descendants. Abraham was to tie the boy down on top of a pile of kindling on an altar. This he did (with what anguish we can only imagine), and only then, when with the knife poised he had triumphantly passed the hardest test of faith, did God show him that his son’s death was not finally required.