“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 we have walked the bended path with God and found Him in the struggle, we are ready to straighten out the bended paths within us: those ways that were once pure before sin came into the world, now corrupted by the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Straightening out the bended paths in us is really the process of choosing the straight path before us when our inner nature would prefer the detour, avoiding the construction site designed to perfect us yet even more.

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 “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 When sin came into the world, a lot of things became crooked that were originally made straight.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)

“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.