The One About Fog Lights

A few nights ago, I drove into some fog and I then began to wonder how to turn on my fog lights. In that moment, I remembered that when we bought our car a few months ago that the salesperson showed us where the fog light button was. Sadly, I just couldn’t remember where it was.

I had a difficult choice, should I look for the fog lights button or just watch the road ahead with my normal headlights on? I could have stopped the car to look for the button but then a car coming along behind me wouldn’t have been able to see me clearly and there was no places to pull safely off the road. I chose to just watch the little bit of the road that I could see and as you are reading this you will know that I survived the experience but I also need to tell you that I now know exactly how to turn on the fog lights.

To me, the Christian faith isn’t a philosophy or a set of intellectual beliefs, it is something that is down to earth and practical. Jesus taught all sorts of things but he also talked about our need to listen well and to put his words into practice.

The priority of some Christians is to know more information about God but the goal of discipleship is to follow and obey Jesus. Discipleship will involve learning, but the area of growth that most Christians need to concentrate on is to put into practice what we already know.

As we travel through life, things will go wrong and in those moment of crisis we might think, ‘I’m sure that I have read something about this in the Bible somewhere but I can’t quite remember what it was’. In those moments of pressure, we can’t always to stop, open a Bible and think and pray. When put on the spot, we don’t always have the option to phone a friend or to google ‘what does the Bible say about …’.

You see, you need to know how to turn your fog lights on before you drive into fog and we ideally need to know how to follow Jesus and live in the way he taught before we face the stresses of life.

So, if you are a Christian, what is your priority? When we read our Bibles, do we see it as just a job or chore to do? Do we just read for a few minutes and then get on with life or do we read and then consider what the Bible is saying to us about our own lives? When we apply what we are reading it can be challenging and it will result in change in us but it will also mean that in the fog of life that we have more of an idea what to do.