© Wendy Clark, 2025

Isaiah 48:17-18, ESV
Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go.
Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments!    
Then your peace would have been like a river,  and your righteousness like the waves of the sea . . .”

The sad truth is that though we cannot alter God’s sovereign purposes, we can limit God’s working in our present life. The choices that we make every day, minute by minute, matter. They add up to something. We can choose in ways that align with God’s plans and His purposes and His ways, which lead to peace “like a river” and “righteousness like the waves of the sea.”

Peace like a river–flowing, steady, cleansing–a deep peace that comes from being in the presence of God. In the eternal kingdom it is a river of the Holy Spirit that flows out of the presence of God, out of His throne, and into the surrounding city. By living according to God’s commands that peace, the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit, flows within my life right now, in this present life.

Righteousness like the waves of sea–constant, inevitable, powerful. Walking in God’s ways, living according to His commands, leads me to the path of righteousness. Through the power of the Holy Spirit in me, I am changed, conformed to the image of Jesus over time.

But I don’t have to be. 

I can choose poorly, and I can live unwisely. And God gives that freedom to me.

I am convinced that God gives us freedom because freedom to choose, even to choose unwisely, is good and right and holy. He grants this freedom to His angels, created to serve Him. He grants that freedom to us, created to worship Him and to bring Him glory. Though He could, by His power and His will, lock us up and force us to obey, He does not. He shows us the right path, the holy and perfect path, and then He sets us free to choose it or to choose some other path.

And we are always choosing.

The very good news is that, even if we have been on the wrong path, choosing unwisely, going our own way, at any time we can surrender and realign ourselves to God’s path, to God’s ways.  We can make this switch when we have started off a day heading in the wrong direction. We can make this switch even if we have traveled on the wrong path for many days or weeks or months or years.

It is not easy to move from one path to another, and the longer we have traveled in the wrong direction, the more difficult it may be, and it will require the power of the Holy Spirit in us and a constant and consistent surrender of self, my own plans, my own purposes, my own ways, to God’s plans, His purposes, and His ways. And make no mistake, His ways are not our ways, and surrender will require something of us.

But it is worth it to “consider myself dead to sin” (Romans 6:11). The Apostle Paul writes:

“When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the obligation to do right. And what was the result? You are now ashamed of the things you used to do, things that end in eternal doom. But now you are free from the power of sin and have become slaves of God. Now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life.” (Romans 6:20-22, NLT)

Paul says that though we are no longer slaves to sin as we were before we had the Holy Spirit living in us, we still have to choose to live as free from the power of sin.

Today, choose life that you might live.