The words ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet’ mean you’re supposed to walk according to God’s will and not your own thoughts, wishes, or impulses. The words ‘and a light to my path’ mean you can’t go in any direction you choose; you must follow the path that God has planned for you. You will never go wrong consulting the Scriptures for direction, but make sure you keep the Scriptures in context. Don’t use the ‘open-window method’, allowing the wind to blow across the pages of your Bible, then shutting your eyes, pointing to a verse and saying, ‘This is God’s leading on this.’ If you do that, you could end up with the verse, ‘Judas went away and hanged himself,’ as the verse for your day! Would you want to go to a doctor with an illness and hear him say, without ever examining you, ‘It’s your gallbladder’? You would ask, ‘How do you know?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I sat by the window a few moments ago and trusted God to blow the pages of my anatomy book to your problem – and the topic on the page was “gallbladder”’. You would run out of there pretty fast, wouldn’t you? Some people practise this kind of theological ’superstition’, then get into trouble and say, ‘Well, God led me,’ when God had nothing to do with their choices. Whenever you read the scriptural phrase, ‘This is the will of God,’ you can be sure that it’s His will. If you disobey Him, you will suffer, and if you obey Him, you will be blessed.
