There is an old saying, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” We laugh because there is enough truth in it to make us uncomfortable. Human beings have an astonishing confidence in their ability to figure things out as they go. Sometimes that confidence costs nothing more than a little time and frustration. In other settings, failing to learn what is required can cost a career, destroy a relationship, cause serious injury, or even cost a life. The greater the consequence, the more foolish it becomes to proceed without knowing what we are doing.
Yet strangely, many people approach life itself with almost no thought of instruction at all. We grow up, go to school, work, raise families, make decisions, grow older, and somewhere in the process develop our own working definition of what constitutes a successful life. Be responsible. Treat people well. Don’t deliberately hurt anyone. Help others when you can. Believe in God. Try to be a good person. Those are certainly admirable qualities, but Christianity raises a rather uncomfortable question: Who decided that being a reasonably good person was the objective?
Certainly not Jesus. He did not call people merely to respectability. He called them to follow Him. Scripture speaks of repentance, conversion, surrender, obedience, holiness, growth, service, overcoming, and having the mind of Christ. Those words describe movement and transformation. They assume that the person I naturally am is not yet the person God intends me to become.
That is precisely why instruction matters.
One of sin’s most deceptive effects is that it leaves us capable of judging ourselves while damaging the standard by which we judge. We compare ourselves with other people and come out looking fairly respectable. We haven’t committed the terrible things someone else has committed. We work hard, love our families, pay our bills, and try to treat people decently. Before long, “better than some” quietly becomes “good enough.”
But God has never asked us to measure ourselves against one another. The question is not simply whether I am a good neighbor or an agreeable person. The question is whether God is accomplishing in me what He created and redeemed me to become.
That is something I cannot determine without listening to Him.
God said through Isaiah, “I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go” (Isaiah 48:17). I find the wording significant. God does not merely point toward a destination and wish us well. He teaches, and He leads. Both words imply that there are things I do not naturally know and roads I will not naturally choose. If I could safely navigate life by instinct, upbringing, common sense, and good intentions, I would not need a divine Teacher.
And yet it is entirely possible to believe in God without ever becoming His student.
We can ask Him to bless our plans without asking whether they are His plans. We can ask Him to guide our decisions while rarely studying the principles by which those decisions should be made. We can want His peace while remaining largely unfamiliar with the way He says peace is found. We can spend years asking God to accompany us down roads of our own choosing when He has been patiently saying, “I will lead thee by the way that thou shouldest go.”
Then comes one of the saddest sentences in the passage: “O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea” (Isaiah 48:18).
“O that thou hadst.”
Those are words of lost possibility. God is describing something His people might have known but did not. There was peace available to them that they never experienced. There was righteousness God wanted to develop that never reached what it could have become. The instructions were not given merely to keep them from doing bad things. God was trying to lead them into something better.
That makes me wonder whether one of the great losses of an unexamined Christian life is not simply the wrong things we do, but the things we never become.
How many weaknesses remain weaknesses because we have accepted them as personality rather than asking what God wants to change? How many abilities remain unused because we never ask what He intended us to do with them? How many habits continue simply because we have never held them up to Scripture? How many years can pass while we remain essentially the same person spiritually, content that we believe the right things without asking whether those truths are actually reshaping us?
There is no earthly profession in which we would call that growth. A person cannot study music for twenty years without becoming a better musician and blame the sheet music. A student cannot remain perpetually in the first lesson and call that education. Yet spiritually, we can sometimes mistake longevity for maturity. Years of believing are not necessarily years of becoming.
That is where “When all else fails, read the instructions” stops being funny.
God’s Word was never intended to be emergency literature, consulted when life has gone sufficiently wrong. Nor was it given merely to settle theological questions or provide comforting verses when we are hurting. It reveals who God is, who we are, what sin has done to us, what Christ has done for us, and what God intends to restore in us. It teaches us how to think, what to value, what to refuse, what to pursue, how to love, how to worship, how to use what we have been given, and ultimately how to live in the presence of God.
The stakes are far too high to skate through life assuming we will somehow pick all of that up along the way.
There is something humbling about admitting that I need instructions. It means acknowledging that sincerity is not the same as wisdom, good intentions are not the same as obedience, and being satisfied with myself is not evidence that God has finished His work in me.
But there is also something wonderfully hopeful about it. I do not have to invent the person I am supposed to become. The One who created me has not left me guessing.
He has offered to teach me.
He has offered to lead me.
And when God Himself says, “I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go,” it seems terribly shortsighted to spend a lifetime trying to figure it out without asking Him.
If this Fireside Chat warmed your spirit and sparked fresh resolve to live what you believe, fan that flame with Scripture—“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). Pull a little closer to the Light, and carry it into the week ahead.
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