“I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them: I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do: I will not forsake them.”
~ Isaiah 42:16
Hi James and Ellen,
What did you eat for breakfast this morning? What did you wear today to school? What is the last video that you watched? Life is always filled with choices. You will always be faced with making choices. There are times when you will make the wrong choice. If you are hearing what God is saying in the Bible and believe in what you are hearing God say to you, God will help you make the right choices. If you believe in what the Bible is saying, you believe that God knew you before He created the earth. In today’s chapter – which is Isaiah 42, you read that God created the heavens and the earth. It is easy to know what the earth is like. You are living on the earth. You can see the mountains, the oceans and the rivers which make up the earth. You can see the flowers, the trees and the plants which God is using to put color and food on the earth. You can see the animals, the birds and the fish which add life to the earth. Finally, there are people – like you, who God put on the earth. People are God’s very special, unique creation. It is harder to know what heavens are. The sky sometimes is thought of as the heavens. You can see the sun, the moon and the stars which were all created by God. God lives in heaven. Heaven is a very special place. The Bible tells you that there is no place more beautiful than heaven. Heaven is a place where you are to look forward to being in one day. Heaven is a place – if you have made the decision to believe in God, where you will one day meet God face to face. This decision includes believing that God sent His Son Jesus to this earth. Years before God sent His Son to this earth, Isaiah was told by God that He was going to send someone very special someday to this earth.
Your ma and your dad every day have to make choices. Your ma every day has to choose what food to fix for you to eat. Your dad every morning has to choose to get out of bed to go to visit people and places. What if your ma chose not to fix something for you to eat one day, what would you do? What if your dad chose not to get out of bed one morning, what would happen? You are learning every single day from your ma and from your dad how to make choices. Your ma and your dad every day are teaching you how to make choices through the choices that they make. Your ma and your dad at times will make wrong choices. You are going to learn from the right choices and from the wrong choices that your ma and that your dad will make. There will be times when you will not know what choice to make. The Bible was written to help you to make right choices. God is speaking to you through Isaiah in verse 16 when He had Isaiah write “I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them: I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do: I will not forsake them”. God in this verse is talking about His specially chosen people – the Israelites. God is calling His specially chosen people blind. If you close your eyes or if you have something put over your eyes so that you cannot see and then you try to walk, you will not know where to go. You may run into a chair or into a table or into a wall or even into another kid. To walk when you cannot see, you will need someone or something to help you. God in this verse says that He will help His people walk. If you believe in God’s Son Jesus, you believe in God. God says that He will help you whenever you ask Him for help. God says that He will not forget you if you believe that He is God and that He wants to always help you. When you are talking with God, God wants you to ask Him for His help whether you need help or not. Asking and then thanking God for His help is never taking up God’s time.
A choice had to be made one day while your grandmaa and grandpaa were traveling with a missionary in his pickup to a town in Bolivia where your grandmaa and grandpaa would end up living for three years. Right after the missionary finally got through a several kilometer stretch of super thick muck, the missionary arrived at a wide river called the Rio Grande. The only way for the missionary to get his pickup across the fast moving Rio Grande – which was at flood stage, was to have it carried across on a flat bottom barge like boat. After having his pickup pulled and pushed across the fast flowing river, the missionary drove his pickup off the boat and onto a potholed gravel road. About a half an hour later, a stake truck was spotted in the ditch off the right side of the road. It was by now dark. The truck was stuck. The missionary who was driving your grandmaa and grandpaa to the town where they were going to live saw that he could not keep going on as flood waters had made a deep trench like cut across the road. To get past this deep cut, the truck’s driver had chosen to drive off the right side of the road to go through the mud to get to the other side of the cut. After helping to get the truck back on the gravel road, your grandpaa wondered what the missionary should do to get to the other side of the deep cut. Your grandpaa knew that if the missionary tried to do what the stake truck driver had tried to do that the missionary would probably get his pickup stuck in the mud, too. While the missionary was deciding what to do, a small four-wheel drive vehicle bounced through the muddy ditch. It seemed like driving through the ditch on the right side of the road was the only choice to get to the other side of the cut in the road. Before the missionary drove into the ditch, your grandpaa asked for a flashlight. Your grandpaa wanted to see what the ditch on the left side of the road looked like. When your grandpaa checked the road’s left side ditch, your grandpaa found that vehicles where easily being driven past the cut on that side of the road. A wrong choice would have been made if . . . your grandpaa needed the flashlight’s light to find out what was on the other side of the road. God is your light. God will always shine His light before you to show you where to go.
Isaiah 42 (7)