Look straight ahead,
and fix your eyes on what lies before you.
Mark out a straight path for your feet;
stay on the safe path.
Proverbs 4:25-26

Read: Isaiah 35:1-8, Proverbs 4:14-17, 24-27
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 2 Part 4

Relate: Good Will points Christian to the narrow way, the road that stretches ahead from the gate. It is a straight road, clearly differentiated from the many broader paths that branch off in various directions and seem to offer more comfortable alternatives. It is a narrow road, Good Will explains, but it is the right road. It is the only road that leads where Christian needs to go. The other roads, the wider ones, the more inviting ones, the ones that look like they might intersect the narrow way further along, do not lead where they appear to lead. They are crooked roads dressed up as straight ones. The narrow way is unmistakable precisely because it doesn’t try to look like anything other than what it is.

React: There is a simplicity to this directional moment that I find almost comforting. We sometimes make the Christian life sound like an impossibly complex navigation problem, full of competing voices and ambiguous signs and endless theological nuance that only trained experts can parse. There is nuance. Of course there is. The road is long and its terrain varies enormously. But the basic direction is not complicated. It is narrow, and it is straight, and if you are asking yourself whether this wider, more comfortable path you’ve wandered onto is still the right one, the answer in most cases, is that you already know it isn’t. The narrow way has a quality about it that the broader paths lack. It requires something of you. That requirement, though it costs, is part of what makes it trustworthy.

What I keep coming back to is the word straight. Bunyan’s narrow way is not winding. It does not double back on itself or wander through scenic detours. It goes somewhere specific, by a route that is honest about itself. In an age that prizes the winding journey, the exploration of all possible roads, the virtue of keeping all options open, there is something genuinely countercultural about committing to a narrow, straight path and staying on it. I have frequently used the flight of an arrow to describe sanctification. That flight is intended to be straight, but reality often seems to be more of a crooked arrow flying through a hurricane. But by God’s grace the destination is still achieved. The road is straight, but Christian’s journey along it is not. We have already seen this and we will see it again and again. Christian is prone to wander. So am I. I cannot blame the road for that but rather my failure to stay on it. Thank God His grace is greater than all my sin.

Respond:

Dear God,
Move me like You do the Mountains. Move me like You do the wind. I am so grateful that You never leave the lost forsaken. Your way is straight and clear. You are always good. But my feet are not. Help me to stay on Your road. But when I wander off again, please bring me back to where I belong.
Amen