ROUTE MARKERS
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God ~ Romans 3:23 LSB
Water fascinates me. In addition to the various forms it takes – liquid, ice, steam, or vapor – it is life sustaining and life taking. Over centuries, water wears through mountain paths and seeps into cracks and crevices, breaking even the most impenetrable of granite. But I think my favorite visual of water is watching what happens when it runs into a wall. Hitting the immovable, it redirects its momentum to a new path. In a similar fashion, when I was ten years old, I hit a wall and the truth of God’s Word eternally rerouted my life.
We had just moved to a suburb of Chicago and started attending a new church. The fourth grade Sunday School teachers, Bob and Kay Gottschalk, were taking the class through the Romans Road when I heard Romans 3:23 for the first time – for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Before that day, I had never heard I was a sinner who could not save myself. Over the next weeks and months, I would be introduced to what the God-breathed Word teaches about His holy nature and my sin nature - that is, by birth, by nature and by choice, I am enslaved to that which I obey. It took only a few short months of wrestling through the truth of those passages when I embraced Romans 10:9 & 10, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, leading to righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, leading to salvation.
An encounter with the truth of God’s Word redirected my life.
Over the years, the course of my life can be plotted, not by events on a calendar nor by the circumstances of any given day, but by the movement of the Spirit of God through the power of the Word of God. His truth changed and changes still the course of my life – in how I think, what I believe and how I live, that is, the fruit of what others see of Christ in me.
There is the route marker of 2 Corinthians 4:6 – 10; 16 – 17:
For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; in every way afflicted, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. . .
In that passage, God undid how I viewed suffering in the light of His unceasing and immeasurable glory! In that exchange, I embraced hope in the reality of verses 16 & 17: Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For our momentary, light affliction is working out for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.
In Isaiah 40, God put me on my knees:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,
And encompassed the heavens by the span,
And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure,
And weighed the mountains in a balance
And the hills in a pair of scales?
Who has encompassed the Spirit of Yahweh,
Or as His counselor has informed Him?
With whom did He take counsel and who gave Him understanding?
And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge
And made Him know the way of understanding?
How it shattered the flesh to see the Almighty as Creator, and the reality of my place as dust!
I could go on and on. Passages beloved; pages worn; the path of my life altered!
What passages of Scripture outline God’s course corrections in your life? As you walk in a manner worthy, take the time to mark the route both as a reflection of your gratitude and a respite for the journey ahead.
Written by: Carol A. Jenkins (6/2022).
