I’m not sure why it is, but it seems many of us men out there have a powerful need to look as if we know where we are going. While women may be this way to some extent, I don’t know how many stories I have heard about men driving for hours trying to find a spot and refusing to look at a map. When my wife and I first got married I did that very thing. On our honeymoon I drove for hours trying to find a road that if only I had looked on a map I would have seen didn’t exist! Whether it is pride, or a desire to lead this characteristic leads many to refuse to look to that which could offer us direction.

     This tendency may be of little consequence when we are talking about driving a car, but if this attitude is allowed to spill over into our spiritual life it can prove devastating. The Bible tells us that the message of Jesus Christ offers to mankind the direction we need to travel through this life into the world beyond. No one by their own knowledge has the the slightest notion about what awaits us on that journey.

     Jesus said “…I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6, NKJV). The ancient world recognized that Jesus offered a new direction when they called the faith “the Way.” Saul of Tarsus sought letters so that he could seize any who were of “the Way, whether men or women” (Acts 9:2). In Ephesus the Jews who opposed the truth “spoke evil of the Way” (Acts 19:9) and the Gentiles who were angry that people had stopped buying their idols caused “a great commotion about the Way” (Acts 19: 23). When Paul spoke to Felix, who had “an accurate knowledge of [the] Way” (Acts 24:22) he claimed to worship God “according to the Way” which the Jews called a sect (Acts 24:14). The faith in Jesus offered to men and women in the first century (as it does to us today) direction, guidance and purpose in this life and in the life which is to come.

     Are you looking to Jesus for direction through His revealed word? Are you following its course and clinging to its guidance? Or have you chosen proudly to try and find your own way alone? The grave is an uncharted wilderness filled with unimaginable dangers for those who venture into it alone. The Apostles proclaimed—“...there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Don’t let foolish pride leave you without direction.