The words ‘Your word is a lamp to my feet’ mean that we’re supposed to walk according to God’s will and not our own thoughts, wishes, or impulses. The words ‘and a light to my path’ mean that we can’t go in any direction we choose; we need to follow the path that God has planned for us. We’ll never go wrong by reading the Bible for guidance, wisdom, and direction, but it’s important that we 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 where God’s leading me on this.’ If we do that, we could end up with the verse, ‘Judas went away and hanged himself,’ as the verse to guide our day! God can and sometimes does guide us to a particular chapter or verse, but we can’t just open the Bible at random and expect the page we land on to have the answer. Imagine this scene: Someone goes to their doctor with a problem, but instead of asking questions or doing an examination, the doctor immediately says, ‘It’s a problem with your liver.’ The patient asks, ‘How do you know?’ The doctor replies, ‘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 “liver”’. We wouldn’t accept that method to determine our health, so we shouldn’t be willing to accept it when it comes to God’s Word. 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. But whenever we read the scriptural phrase, ‘This is the will of God,’ we can be sure that it really is His will.
