If you’ve been traveling you know how useful a GPS can be. (For someone reading this forty years from now, that stands for Global Positioning System.) Usually, they can get you where you need to go pretty accurately, and they’re constantly updated with road changes. Some even keep up with traffic and will offer to reroute you around accidents and traffic jams. Whether you use Maps or Waze, Tom-Tom or Garmin, you can count on a GPS to get you where you want to be with little to no hassle.
But they aren’t perfect. These things only work as long as the data they’ve been given is correct. I was once on Interstate 635 during rush hour when construction had narrowed the road to one lane. The GPS happily reported that I was only 12 minutes from the river (a distance of about eight miles)—except that the freeway had become a parking lot and no one was going to cover eight miles that quickly. Something had gone wrong with the data input, and the system wasn’t aware that traffic had come to a stand still. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out.”
So what you put in is extremely important. It’s the only way you can be sure of what comes out. “Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me,” says the Psalmist. To ensure that the outcome of my life is wisdom and goodness, I must put in God’s words. Those words best tell me how to live life, for they come directly from the Source of life. Better than the fanciest GPS, those words will never steer me wrong.
That’s something to think about.
Westside Church of Christ 