“Indeed, my plans are not like your plans, and my deeds are not like your deeds, for just as the sky is higher than the earth, so my deeds are superior to your deeds and my plans superior to your plans.”  Isaiah 55:8,9

I like to think of myself as okay. Not great, but at least okay. I am probably not the only one who likes to think that way. It is comforting, I guess, to look around and believe that there are a lot of people worse than we are. But today I was looking at these verses in Isaiah and I realize that the word “your”  in these verses was talking about me. Not the other guy, but me. My deeds are not like God’s deeds. My ways are not God’s ways. In all ways, His ways are superior to my ways.

This reality can be fairly depressing if we ponder it. We fall short in all ways. Not just some of us, but all of us! Well, it would be depressing if the story stopped there. But God does not stop there and leave us with no hope.  Almost every part of the Bible is about hope. It tells us how we can triumph in spite of our misguided ways. The Bible gives us hope in a world of hopelessness. Psalm 46:1 says that “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble,” which is so much more comforting than “I am my own refuge and strength and I can rely on myself in times of trouble.” Since my ways are not God’s ways, to rely on myself is a losing proposition.

A while backI took back a couple of inferior rafts that I had bought for camping. I upgraded to one (not two cheap ones, but one good one) that actually floats. I thought it would be a good investment, especially for whoever is in the middle of the river in it. (Never go cheap on eye surgeons or rafts.) Our ways are like those rafts. They are inferior and regardless of how fast or slow the leak is, our ways will eventually “leak.”  Like the rafts, we cannot patch them on our own. We can try to fix things up, but it will never work. I had to get a new raft, just like we have to become new creatures. We can’t patch up the old, we must become new. That can only be done through Christ.

I like to think some of my ways are good. But no matter how good I think they are, if they are mine, they are not the ways of God. What I need to do is to know God well enough to know His ways. When I start becoming more like Him, my ways will start to come in line with His ways. Some of us will go through life trying to patch one thing up after another. We leave God sitting over to the side, waiting for us, while we patch hole after hole, only to have the next one spring up. When we do that, we are just kicking the can down the road. The fix will be temporary. The only permanent fix is to give ourselves over to Christ and allow Him to make things new. By the time some of us are old we are floating in a pathetic raft barely staying afloat made up of more patches than original raft.  We paddle around wondering why we are so stressed, while a brand new one with our name awaits just in reach.

Many people want to try to do their own thing and try to align God with them. That would be like coming back to camp and instead of pulling ourselves to shore, we try to pull the shore to us. The shore, like God, is fixed. We must be the ones that move. If God’s ways are superior to ours, why should He come to us. It is logical that we go to Him. Unfortunately, the common practice is for us to do our own thing and then try to say that is God’s way as well.

On one of our camping trips with the kids and grandkids was out in the river and my raft started sinking. I realized that I was probably going to go down with both ends of the raft above my head closing  like a giant clam.  Between screams for help,  I thought how much better it would have been to have a raft that holds air. Now I have one because I purchased one. The good news is that if we want to get rid of our inferior ways, we don’t have to make a purchase.  Our new ways have been paid for in full, and all we need to do is pick them up. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians was the same prayer we should pray for ourselves. “(I) am asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give (me) spiritual wisdom and insight so that (I) might grow in (my) knowledge of (Him).  (I) pray that (my) heart will be flooded with light so that (I) can understand the confident hope He has given to those He has called—His holy people who are His rich and glorious inheritance.”  Now that’s how you fix a leaky raft.