Spare Tire or Steering Wheel? (01/01/2025)

Don’t you love adventures? I do. Our new year lies before us as an adventure given to us by our all loving and ever-present LORD. What we make of it depends largely on our choices.

And the first choice we must make, the most essential choice is our decision about the LORD in our lives. On this adventure, will our relationship with the LORD be like our relationship with our spare tire or with our steering wheel? Seriously. Let’s consider that.

Is our relationship with the LORD one in which we know the LORD is there, but we don’t give the LORD a second thought until we encounter a difficulty or a need? Like our relationship with the spare tire in our auto? Or will our relationship with the LORD be one in which the LORD is always at our hand, helping to steer us, without whom we shouldn’t and couldn’t really proceed? Like our relationship with the steering wheel?

Our relationship with the LORD is meant to be one that we rely on throughout our journey, not just in moments of need, not just when we are in particular situations. Our faith can’t be lived fully if we only exercise it in a pew. It wasn’t given to us for that limited venue. It was given to us to guide us and equip us for our lives, our whole lives, our adventures as we journey through this life to life in abundance with our LORD.

If we are married and the only time we ever think of or consider our spouses is when we’re on a date night, our marriages will not be all they are meant to be nor will we ever realize all we are. Marriage unites us with another regardless of where we are or what we’re doing. The other cares about what is happening in our lives, and our lives and decisions must be lived out with the other in our hearts and on our minds. We are the Church, the bride of Christ.

Ours is a spiritual marriage, a spiritual bond, but nonetheless a bond, a marriage.

As we begin this new year, let us begin by acknowledging our constant need for and reliance upon our LORD. May our adventures be blessed and bring us always closer to the ones the LORD created us to be and calls us to be.

Until tomorrow, let us all love well.

NOTE:

This idea for today’s blog flowed from the content of the movie “The Forge” written by Alex and Stephen Kendrick and directed by Alex Kendrick 2024. Chris Fabry later wrote the novel, The Forge.