“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you, and (4) make the crooked places straight: (Isa 45:1-3)

When I was a young man selling life insurance in the fishing villages of British Columbia, I sometimes had to travel by mountainous logging roads to get from one village to the next. On one particularly memorable trip, it took me three hours of zig zagging up and down a washed out gravel mountain road just to get to my first prospect. Thirty years later, I returned with my wife to show her that same rustic fishing village. To my delight, the government had come in and made a straight path, a paved highway, and the travel time between the two towns was now only twenty minutes.

What a difference a straight path can make! That is precisely what God did for Cyrus. He made the crooked places straight. When everyone else had to fight the terrain, God promised Cyrus He would make his path straight. Would that all our paths be straight; but not all crooked paths are bad. There is much to learn in the struggle that can’t be learned on the paved highway. Think of the crooked path as training. It’s where things get worked out in you to prepare you for the responsibility of the straight path, when things can accelerate.

Jesus knew all about straight paths. He could (and did) walk through walls. I believe as we mature into sonship (not a gender statement), we will also do the seemingly impossible. We will walk through walls of resistance that were built to keep us out. Some of you reading this are running into those walls right now and Jesus stands ready to lead you right through that wall. You will find yourself on the other side and not quite know how you got there, but there you will be. Do you think Peter understood how he was able to walk on water? It was only when he began to reason, that he began to sink. Selah.

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you…

A father’s promise to his son is that he will go before him and make a way. That’s how God led Cyrus and that’s how He wants to lead us today. A good father wants to give good gifts to his children and one of those gifts is to make his child’s path easier than his own. The father wants to open doors for his child, but there’s a catch. As genuinely as the father wants to go before the child, the son or daughter must be willing to follow the father.

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