Stubbornness tethered to pride leads to ruin …

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You might think people seek out a counselor because they find themselves in a situation where they are out of answers and need help to find a way to change their lives.

For some people, you would be right. But that isn’t the case for others.

Many people seek out a counselor because they actually DO understand what they must do to change their lives but they DON’T WANT to do what is required. So they seek out a counselor hoping his or her expertise can help them find some other way — any other way! — than the only way they see before them.

These people are insistent on doing things their way, and when they can’t — when doing things their way doesn’t work — they look for loopholes.

Things don’t end well for such people, much like the story Rod Crowell tells about a stubborn farmer …

    Like most older post-surgery patients, the kind-hearted farmer was warned that he had to do his breathing exercises and tests to avoid pneumonia. He took the nurse’s advice nicely, thanked her for it — and then proceeded to ignore it.

    After all, he had been farming all his life and done it HIS way. No one told him what to do and even if they tried, HE was always the final authority. That was the state of mind behind his warm, friendly exterior. He came through the surgery all right, did’t he? So why was some silly huffing and puffing needed now?

    But even as his lungs began to fill up with fluid, he remained unconcerned. His family begged him to reconsider. But he refused, and as the nurse curtly said, “it led to his demise.”

When such head-strong people actually do see there’s only one real – or one right – way to go, too often their pride gets in the way and they will actually allow themselves to face ruin rather than acknowledge they were wrong.

Stubbornness tethered to pride leads to ruin.

Perhaps nowhere is this ugly issue of stubbornness hinged to pride exercised more blatantly and more potently than in our spiritual lives. It was Jesus Himself who has stepped out and said to all of us that when it comes to being reconciled to God, to pleasing our Creator, and to dealing with our sin and finding salvation, there is a single way: His way …

“Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me,'” John 14:6.

There are not multiple paths to God, many ways to heaven, more than one way to be saved – there’s just one, and that Way is Christ alone!

“For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all,” Ephesians 4:4-6.

Have you gone the Way of Christ, or is stubbornness and pride leading you to ruin?

Scotty