Carol McClain

God’s GPS–Not Society’s

Garmin GPS riderview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a fabulous sister-date where we brought my niece to see Santa in July, Janine and I headed back to Malone from the North Pole in Wilmington. Unfortunately, the road home was closed, so we had to rely on my Garmin. It got me lost. My sister took out hers, and we ran them simultaneously.

Remember, we sat in the same vehicle, and we had the same brand of GPS. Both of them took us different directions–all the directions were wrong.

Usually, we could rely on the GPS. On this day, both had faulty data and that data often led us to dead-ends. Ironically, both GPS-es always made us drive into cemeteries–the ultimate dead-ends.

What a metaphor for this world we live in.

We put our faith in something that usually works, but not guaranteed. You all have anecdotal stories about the GPS. We make decisions. Based on those decisions, we make other errors which compound themselves and lead us further astray. We then allow the government to make laws to correct the issue. (We know how well our government works). We repeat the process until we’ve totally lost our moral compass.

And that’s what happens when we base our lives on human knowledge and not on “God’s Perfect System” (GPS) found in his Word, the Bible.

No one is born wanting to walk into a school and murder ten people as happened in Umpqua. No one is born in one sex and decides, as a toddler, he’s really another. No one wishes to become a prostitute. No one starts out wanting to create babies by five different men and believe it’s all okay. No one desires to be an addict.

It starts with one sin at a time. Little “mistakes” that change our course until we are so lost we die in the wilderness.

No experienced hiker walks without a compass. No contractor builds a wall without a level. No pilot flies without an altitude indicator. The end results can be disastrous without them.

“There is a way that appears right, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12).

We as Christians have to make a stand. We have to stop allowing the laws of the land and the attitudes of society to cow us. The consequences–as the effects of the first freedom riders, the first abolitionists–may not give us the desired result, but we’ve got to get back onto the moral path and stop the insanity of events like Umpqua  or Charleston or Chatanooga.