“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)

I mentioned in my last email on this subject that sometimes God makes the path crooked. He often puts the bends and twists and turns in the path to work things out in our lives. It is futile to fight against the bends that He puts in the road. If you do find a way around the trial, you are actually worse off. It would be like helping a butterfly emerge from its cocoon. Butterflies develop the strength they need to fly by struggling to get out of the cocoon. If they get out of the cocoon without the struggle, they will never be able to fly and will soon die, falling short of what they were created to do. (N’est pas?)

Not all paths were made crooked by God. When sin came into the world, a lot of things became crooked that were originally made straight. The most obvious things that have been made crooked by sin have to do with our old flesh nature: Crooked desires, crooked dispositions, crooked words, crooked thoughts, etc. That which has been made crooked by sin, God has made straight by the blood of Jesus Christ. That is to say, there is now a straight path we can follow, the path of straight words, straight thinking, godly desires and dispositions, etc. Before Christ, sin had dominion over us, (Rom 6:14) but now we have been freed from the law of sin and death (Rom 8:2) and thus freed from sin (Rom 6:14).

As Christians, we are called to make our path straight. To walk the straight and narrow. No more speaking with forked tongue. Our words to be words of iron. Thinking on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report. The straight path can be very difficult as we straighten out by the grace of God those things that are crooked in us, but it is the path that leads to life and few there be that find it. (Matt 7:14)