“And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15, ESV).

I was visiting my college roommate last weekend in Natchez, Mississippi for his annual crawfish boil. His brother, a plastic surgeon, and I were talking shop and sharing stories. He recounted an experience when he was moonlighting as a resident in the emergency room. A young man came in, scraped up badly on his right side after a motor vehicle accident. “I’d been drinking too much,” he said, “I was cruising down the road feeling good. Everything was fine until I leaned over to roll down my right window and realized I was on my motorcycle.”

We know people without Christ can be perfectly happy cruising through life. It’s only when they lean over to reach for eternal life, purpose and meaning that isn’t there that they fall off their bikes.

As Oswald Chambers put it:

“Never have the idea that the worldling is not happy; he is perfectly happy, as thoroughly happy as a Christian. The people who are unhappy are the worldlings or the Christians who are not at one with the principle which unites them. If a worldling is not a worldling at heart, he is miserable; and if a Christian is not a Christian at heart, he carries his Christianity like a headache.”

We, as followers of Christ, face the same risk of scrapes from falling as those without our Savior. When our purpose and meaning are centered on Christ, we can cruise down roads that are straight, curved, rocky or smooth with confidence we will reach our destination. However, if we are fooled into thinking the world has something better for us and reach over to a window that is not there, we are likely to fall and suffer the scrapes that come with it.

In discussing Augustine’s two possible world views, Albert Mohler describes the great danger for Christians:

“If there is a danger in our age among Christians it is that we too would confuse the city of God for the city of man. We would confuse the heavenly city and the earthly city and we would exchange the proper love, which we should find in the heavenly city, for the truncated false love of the city of man.”

We need not only choose which bike we will ride in this world, we also need to stay on it and avoid leaning too far toward windows that are not there. What window am I leaning toward today?

Dear Father,

Keep my eyes on Jesus.

Amen