No Easy Road
No Easy Road
You’ve asked your good friend for directions. He obliges with a specific, detailed, hand-drawn map.
Reassured, you set off on your journey only to discover the route he has given you is a jumbled mess. A real nightmare. It’s a road full of detours, gaping potholes, puddles, ruts, and ripped-up pavement. Terrible drop-offs loom on the crumbling shoulders of the road, with not a guardrail in sight. Nowhere on that horrible road is there a place to turn around—and you’re much too far along to back up!
There you are, bumping along with sharp-edged boulders knifing at your oil pan, scraping your whitewalls, ruining your alignment.
You’d be fuming, wouldn’t you?
But what would hurt more than anything is the knowledge that your friend knew the road was like that. Most likely you’d pass the time rehearsing what to tell that joker the next time you came nose-to-nose with him.
“Hey, buddy, thanks for nothing! Next time I’ll get where I need to go without your help!”
What would you think of a friend like that—one who had deliberately given you those directions and sent you down that dangerous road?
You’d drop him. Fast.
That’s what you or I would do. Consider, though, what happened to the apostle Paul. The preacher from Tarsus was given directions that sent him down a more tortured road than the one I’ve just described—a road of dangers, hunger, humiliation, loneliness, terror, and blood.
Paul received his directions in the middle of the night. In a lonely detention cell. From the mouth of the Lord Himself.
“The following night the LORD stood near Paul and said, ‘Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome’ ” (Acts 23:11).
Okay, so there was the Lord Jesus giving Paul his route.
“The road I want you to take, Paul, is the one that’s going to Rome. Keep heading in that direction no matter what. You can’t miss it.”
With Jesus Himself as travel agent, you’d expect a First Class trip, right? Not so. For two years on that long road to Rome, Paul faced more than his fair share of bypasses, ruts, hazards, and roadblocks. The journey featured constant trouble, murderous plots, and imprisonments. Then there was that long detour when a hurricane tossed him around the Mediterranean for fourteen days. Until his ship finally hit a sandbar.
And broke into pieces.
After which he managed to swim to an island.
After which he was bitten by a poisonous snake.
An easy road? Hey, the Roman Road was no freeway. The tolls were unbelievably high. And yet this was the very road Jesus told him to take. Ah, but Paul trusted his Friend. Though the road was rugged—even vicious at times—Paul trusted. He never denied his friendship with Christ.
And when he got to Rome? Oh, how the Lord used him!
You may wish the road Jesus sent you on had a turnaround. Maybe you’ve even been tempted to shift into reverse and back away from His direction.
Listen. Just take those road hazards—the potholes, ruts, detours, and all the rest—as evidence that you’re on the right route.
It’s when you find yourself on that big, broad, easy road that you ought to worry.