Avoid It, Pass Not By It, Turn From It, and Pass Away

A man told me about a road, and it took him about ten minutes to admit that it was not the shortest way.

He drove it most days. It went past something that had been costing him for years, and he had a whole explanation for the route, and the explanation was about traffic and about a place he sometimes stopped for coffee and about the lights on the other road being bad.

All of that was true. That is the part I want to say clearly. Every single reason he gave me was accurate.

It was also, by his own eventual admission, about four minutes longer.

I have never met anybody who set out to arrange their life around a weakness. What I have met, over and over, is people who have arranged it that way by accident, one reasonable decision at a time, and who then blame themselves for what happens on a road they are on every day.

And in almost every case, nobody ever suggested to them that the route itself was a legitimate thing to pray about.

Four verbs, all of them about geography

There is a verse in Proverbs that piles up words in a way the writer clearly enjoyed.

Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. (Proverbs 4:15, King James Version)

Four instructions and every one of them is about location. Not one of them is about the inner life.

He does not say resist it. He does not say be stronger about it. He does not say want it less, which is the instruction most of us were actually given and which nobody has ever been able to obey.

He says: go a different way.

That is worth sitting with, because it is so much less spiritual than what people expect from a passage about temptation, and it is far more useful.

You have been handed something about geography rather than about willpower, and all four verbs in that verse are about where a person is (Proverbs 4:15), and it is the Spirit who makes an ordinary practical adjustment into obedience rather than into a trick.

The petition asks God to keep

Now the thing that has to be said, because this is where teaching in this area goes badly wrong and leaves people worse than it found them.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:13)

Read who is being asked. The whole petition is addressed to God and it asks Him to do something. Lead us not. Deliver us. There is no clause in there that instructs the person praying to hold out.

Which means an article that turns this subject into a lecture about effort has inverted the petition, and I am not going to do that here. Nobody reading this needs to be told to try harder. Every person I have ever met in this situation has already tried harder than anybody watching would guess.

You are not being asked to hold, and the petition puts every verb on His side of the sentence (Matthew 6:13), and the Spirit is the one who does the delivering rather than a person managing to.

The route is not a technique for succeeding. It is one of the ordinary shapes that being kept actually takes, and it is worth praying about for that reason rather than as a strategy.

The most physical example in Scripture

There is one account where somebody does exactly what the four verbs describe and it is not dignified at all.

And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out. (Genesis 39:12)

He left his garment. He ran out of a building without his coat, which in that world meant he arrived wherever he arrived looking exactly as guilty as he was later accused of being.

There is no dignity in that verse. There is no inner victory described, no moment of strength, no speech. There is a man leaving a room quickly and losing something on the way.

And Scripture records it approvingly.

You are not required to win anything in the room, and the one account Scripture praises here has no victory in it at all (Genesis 39:12). The Spirit is the one who makes an exit count as faithfulness rather than as weakness.

You are permitted to leave a room badly, and the account of this that Scripture praises involves somebody losing their coat (Genesis 39:12), and it is His Spirit who makes an undignified exit into obedience rather than into a failure of nerve.

And there is a psalm that asks for exactly this, and it asks for it about the interior and the exterior in the same breath.

Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practise wicked works with men that work iniquity. (Psalm 141:4)

Incline not my heart. He is asking God to do something about his own inclination, which is a request most of us have never thought to make.

And this belongs here plainly. If the thing being described puts somebody in real danger, whether themselves or anybody else, that is not for an article to hold. Tell a person before the next time: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.