Commit Your Way to the Lord
Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, and the justice of your cause, like the noonday sun. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. (Psalm 37:3-7)
Commit your way to the Lord: Does this refer to seeking guidance from the Lord about which road to take? Or is it about the way we go about taking the way, the way we behave while on the way? Answer: Yes, all of the above.
Yielding to the Lord is about the same thing as committing to him––yes? For when you come to a yield sign at an intersection, what do you do first? You slow down enough to observe whether or not other cars or pedestrians might be coming from the right or the left. Yielding to the Spirit can be tricky sometimes. I think he often makes it so, in order to get our full attention and teach us how to listen and obey. But yield, we must, lest we crash and burn for being inattentive to God and the people around us.
Surrendering to the Lord might be another apt figure that describes committing our way to his. We’re not talking about surrendering to a ruthless God with a gun to our back. We surrender to love. Think of a woman who has received a repeated marriage proposal from a man who loves her completely. On his knees he’s proposed several times. She loves him too, but is unsure. Yet he persists until she surrenders. That’s what surrendering to the Lord is like. We surrender to love.
So many seem committed to going the general direction Christian people ought go, but have forgotten the way we’re supposed to go the way. Each of us has a race “marked out” for us (Hebrews 12:1), but we have to run our race in the right way, i.e., in a Christlike way. We have to model our attitudes and actions after Jesus and make sure to watch out for other runners who might need our assistance along the way.
Eugene Peterson said, “When we follow Jesus, it means that we don’t know exactly what it means, at least in detail. We follow him, letting him pick the roads, set the timetables, tell us what we need to know but only when we need to know it… There are no experts in the company of Jesus. We are all beginners, necessarily followers, because we don’t know where we are going.”
Though we don’t know where we’re going, we do know who goes with us and what kind of people he wants us to become along the way.
The early Christians called themselves “The Way.” Which is strange since Jesus said he was “the Way.” Yes, he’s the way to the Father, but our journey doesn’t end when we come to the Father. Jesus modeled to us the way to conduct ourselves in this world, and our mission is to demonstrate that way to others. Remember the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets? They were never my thing, but the sentiment fits. Commit to the Lord the way you go and how you live while going that way.
The Hebrew term David used for “commit” means to roll a heavy object onto another thing. Trying to negotiate life by ourselves is too heavy a weight. Committing our way to the Lord means to daily roll ourselves and our many concerns onto his shoulders strong enough to carry any weight.
If you think about it, there really are no uncommitted people. Everyone is committed to something. It may be that you’re committed to your leisure or your own personal pleasure (“lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God”), but you are committed! I can hear Dylan’s nasally voice now: “It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody!”
Let’s be clear, God doesn’t want a PLACE in our lives, even a PROMINENT PLACE. He wants PREEMINENCE! And he deserves it. I like to say, “Choose God. Then give him your choices!”
Only one life, a few brief years,
Each with its burdens, hopes, and fears;
Each with its days I must fulfill.
Living for self or in His will;
Only one life, ’twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last. (CT Studd)
[Next, he invites us to “be still and wait,” which oddly might be our most difficult invitation to accept.]
In the meantime, are you yielding, surrendering, commiting yourself to God and his way of doing things? If yes, what evidence do you have? If not, go for it! You won’t regret it.
