Two Paths to Travel (Proverbs 19:3)

It is so easy to get ourselves twisted up in the things pertaining to sin. However, the Lord's path will always be straight.

"The foolishness of man subverts his way [ruins his affairs]; then his heart is resentful and frets against the Lord." Proverbs 19:3, Amplified

When we allow foolishness to overtake our lives, our path is twisted and goes in a different direction than what we were before. In the New King James, instead of the path of the man being subverted, it speaks of a twisting of his path. Whenever I think of twisting, the game Twister always comes to mind. Spin the dial to a body part and a color, and begin contorting your body. It starts out fun (and even ends fun because it is after all a game) but the game gets harder and harder as you have to stretch in ways that you haven't done in a while or were not even meant to. It is a bit like sin. It starts out fun, but then we are having to stretch ourselves in ways that we were not meant to.

As we are stretched (because there is a difference when the Lord stretches us and when we subject ourselves to the immoral stretching of sin) our hearts begin to fret and get anxious. Who would be the most obvious target of that anxiousness than the Lord. It is called displacement; it is a psychological term that means angst and anger is removed from the intended target and placed on an innocent party. Take for instance the man who has an altercation at work. For the rest of the day he feels so angry, but he does not lash out at the one he is mad at. Rather he waits until he gets home to take it out on his wife.

In truth, our anxiousness should be turned inward for we are the cause of our own misery. "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God Himself cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed." (James 1:13-14, KJV) That desire is already within the soil of our hearts as a seed. That twisting path is already ahead of us. We have to make the conscious effort to choose the higher road, the straighter path. It is within our ability to "just say no". We cannot blame God for the path we took the first step on.