Many years ago an express train between Halifax and Montreal was thrown from the rails by collision with a sleeping cow. Two men were killed, two others severely injured, about two hundred passengers badly shaken up, and the engine and cars thrown off the track and badly damaged. We do not know the cow’s age or pedigree, whether she was fat or lean, nor in fact anything about her, but this one thing: She is a dead cow. And the simple reason is that she was a cow in the wrong place. Yes, poor thing, she had strayed onto the railroad tracks, and as the trainmen could not get her off in time, she paid the penalty and was the cause of a bad accident as well.
These were sad results from so small a matter as simply being “out of the way,” and they serve to illustrate a still sadder one. It is this: Not only in this life, but in the future one, the most serious and lasting consequences come to us from being “out of the way.” This is true of so many of us!
Listen to the words of God as to this: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” Haven’t we all? And God’s answer: “The Lord hath laid on Him [Jesus] the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:66All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6)).
We all just naturally want our own way, not God’s way, and that is iniquity—or sin—and the Lord Jesus died on the cross to secure forgiveness for all who will receive Him. Then it becomes possible to go on “in the way”—God’s way—and in the happiness of living and walking with the Lord now and forever.
Each of us individually should ask: Am I in the right place—in the way of the will of God—or am I like the cow on the railroad track, sleeping in a place of danger and death?
Jesus said:
“I am the way, the truth,
and the life: no man cometh
unto the Father, but by Me.”