One Way (Friday Devotional)

 

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says, “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

- James 4:1, 6-7

Almost every time I leave or return home, I use the alleyway that runs behind my house. Like most such alleys, this one has only one narrow lane, so drivers have to proceed slowly and be mindful of other cars. There is no designated direction you are ‘supposed’ to go; everybody just minds their P’s and Q’s.

Nevertheless, I have a confession to make. Every time I am going down the alley toward the main road—just a couple hundred feet, since our house is the fourth from the corner—and another car pulls into the alley from that road, I feel the stirrings of road rage. Why can’t they just turn onto the street instead of using the alley?! Why are they going that direction?! Why should I have to be the one to pull into a driveway and give them room to proceed—don’t they know this is my alley?!?

That’s how sin tends to bloom—it starts with a sense of entitlement about things you objectively know aren’t yours. Since the day Adam and Eve partook of the one thing God forbid them to touch, human beings have been shouting, “Mine!” about things to which we have no claim. Driven by a mixture of self-importance, pride, and greed, we lash out at our neighbors in the name of rights—rights which, oftentimes, are more imagined than actual.

The prescription for entitlement, according to the Bible, is grace. Just as God showed us favor we did not deserve in sending Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, the Holy Spirit gives us the grace to respond to indignities with forgiveness when our flesh demands retribution. While we are born into this world with a spirit of pride, Christ calls us to a God-given spirit of humility. Once in bondage to sin, faith in the Lord gives us deliverance from evil, freedom to a new way of life.

You’re never going to enjoy not getting your way—but in Christ, you start to see that your way is not the only way. For when the entitlement of the flesh is exchanged for the humility of the Spirit, His way is the only one that really matters.