“A person’s steps are confirmed by the Lord.” (Psalm 37:23)
There are times on our journeys of faith when we come to a fork in the road and we simply do not know the will of God. There certainly are no verses of Scripture that tell us to go to the right or to the left. We have no prompting or leading of Spirit. We do our best to make the proper choice, while acknowledging the hard reality that we simply do not know which direction is the will of the Lord. Having done everything we can to discern the will of God, we journey down one side or the other of that road.
Psalm 37:23 offers insight when we find ourselves at this kind of crossroad. As a person’s steps are confirmed by the Lord, this means we should sometimes move forward into what we perceive to be the will of God, praying and looking for confirmation.
That confirmation may be positive or negative. If everything works out and the direction we have chosen obviously has God’s stamp of approval on it, we can say that God has given us a confirmation of His will. We have the conviction that God is saying to us, “This is the way, walk in it.” (Isaiah 30:21) We see evidence of the reality Jesus described in the Gospel of John, chapter 10, that when He calls His sheep to follow Him, He goes before them. After we commit to a direction, we see evidence that the Living Christ has gone before us and prepared the way for us.
Sometimes, the confirmation is negative and the results are the opposite. When that happens, we should be humble enough to go back to that fork in the road and choose the other direction.
Dick Woodward, A Prescription for Guidance