Don’t go there!

Do not enter the path of the wicked, And do not walk in the way of evil. Avoid it, do not travel on it; Turn away from it and pass on.  – Proverbs 4v14-15

We all face those times when we are tempted to head down the wrong road. There are plenty of opportunities. As we walk through today there are going to be plenty of chances to choose the right path or the wrong path.

If we had any sense we would avoid the wrong paths like the plague. We wouldn’t go anywhere near that part of town. Back during the last days of The Troubles in Northern Ireland going to Belfast was okay, as long as you didn’t go down the wrong road. There were places where people who lived up there simply said ‘Don’t go there!’ You were pretty much okay, for example, if you drove straight down the Shankill even in a car from the Republic. You did not, however, want to get off the road if you did not know right where you were going. So, for the most part, people driving cars from down here just avoided the Shankill completely.

Most of us know where the danger areas of our spiritual lives are. The smart thing to do is to not even go near those places. If we are smart we will not go that way, we will avoid it, we won’t go down that road, we won’t travel on it, we just pass on by. Later in the same chapter we have a few more words – ‘Let your eyes look straight ahead, And your eyelids look right before you. Ponder the path of your feet, And let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or the left; Remove your foot from evil.’

The words are pretty clear. It doesn’t take a lot of sense to figure out what God is saying here. When it deals with evil God simply says – ‘Don’t go there.’