What Is Your Walk Like

What’s Your Walk Like?

Proverbs 1:8-19 Philippians 1:27-30

Have you ever noticed how much you can tell about a person simply from the way he or she walks. When a woman walks tall and straight with her arms going in opposite directions it says one thing. When she walks and places one hand on her hips and adds a swing to the side as she walks another message is immediately picked up.

When a guy is walking down the streets with both hands in his pockets and his eyes looking straight ahead you get one message. If he takes his hands out of his pockets and keeps looking from side to side you get another message. If you are at the gas station and you spot someone across the street who all of a sudden starts to walk quickly toward you, and you do not know the person, what should you do? Stop pumping the gas and get back into your car.

We look and we learn about people and their intentions from the way they walk. The bible compares the Christian lifestyle to a walk. A walk involves not only moving from point A to point B, but also how we move from point A to point B. Just like any walker, somebody is observing us to see what we’re really saying about what’s going on inside of us. We find in the book of Colossians in chapter 1 verse 10 the challenge to walk worthy in the Lord. Some of the newer translations use the word live instead of walk, but the meaning is the same.

How many of you have seen a person with a devil sitting on one side of his shoulder and an angel sitting on the other side with each trying to get the person to do either the right or the wrong thing. It would be nice if that were the case, because then we would know exactly who we are listening to but often times our walk is not that easy.

Many things seem harmless to us at first, and we have no problem walking in that particular direction. But the situation can change very quickly and we can go from trying to be nice, to being in a mess. One thing about walking is that it’s good to know where you’re headed, what’s the best way to get there, and what to watch out for along the way. Not all pathways end up where we think they are going to go end.

If you want to draw a straight line, you have to have a fixed point at the end to connect it with the beginning. Any of you who have ever wallpapered you know that you need to measure both sides of the paper. Otherwise you can draw a line that think line is straight and even to the other side. But then when you go to hang that paper, you find a gap between the straight edge of the ceiling and your paper. Now if your fixed point is off, your line is going to be off.

The bible tells us that as we walk the Christian lifestyle, we are to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith. This means no matter what we do, our goal is to get to Jesus into that situation. For instance if you and someone in your home is having a disagreement, your ultimate goal is to get to Jesus as soon as possible.

This immediately ends some of the options you thought you had at your disposal. If Jesus is your goal, your fixed point, you are limited in what you can say and how you can say it. You are also limited in what you can or cannot do. It’s not because the other person deserves some kind of special treatment. The person might just be wrong. It is because we have been called to have our walk line up straight with Jesus. I’m doing this for Jesus.

Now if you are anything like me, you are going to be tempted to stop focusing in on Jesus, and putting your eyes on something else. We all know what happens when we take our eyes off the road while driving. We can very easily kill ourselves or kill somebody who happens to be in the way. When we take our eyes off of Jesus as we are walking, we start to hurt ourselves and to hurt others without even realizing what’s taking place.

Most of the time when we take our eyes off of Jesus in our walk, we do so for something temporary. In the Old Testament reading in Proverbs, we found a young man who had been trained by his mother and father with instructions on how to live his life in a way that was going to be beneficial to him. They gave him a warning, saying, look some of the people you think are your friends are going to come and try to entice you to stop walking on the straight path. But whatever you do, do not give in to them.