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There is a word in the Old Testament Hebrew that is most often translated "way" or "path" in English but really is much more specific in it's original meaning. The word is 'orach and it refers to a well-trodden paths and particularly the grooves carved into that track. In modern day English, we would call them "ruts."

We live in Texas where most of the roads are paved and somewhat smooth (at least smooth compared with Louisiana's roads) but the roads in Biblical times were nowhere near the level of smoothness that we enjoy today. Almost as soon as the wheel was discovered and carts and buggies began to be used, paths began to spring up from city to city. And as these paths began to be used more and more, the wheels and hooves and feet began to wear down depressions into the path. Man's journeys had created a new invention: ruts.

As ruts grew deeper on the more traveled paths, it became harder to harder to get out of them. They were fine if they were headed in the direction that you also wanted to go and they would serve to guide you to that destination, but if you wanted to turn aside or deviate from that path, they were very hard to get out of. And the tendency of the wheel was to fall back in line with that path carved by those who had gone before. From this we get our expression "falling into a rut." It was more than a metaphor in Biblical days but a literal worry of every traveler. You had to choose your ruts carefully, because getting out of them would require much effort, and to go a path that was different from where most people were headed took a lot of concentration, lest you fall into a rut and be pulled in the direction of the majority rather than your intended goal.

Given the lessons learned from them, it is no surprise that the writers of Bible times would see spiritual lessons to be learned from ruts. We find that personal habits create ruts in the human will and those ruts form paths that people travel time and time again. The book of Proverbs warns us:

The word in the Hebrew for "his ways" is 'orach or "a well-worn path of ruts." God said to beware hanging out with a person who is given to uncontrollable anger and who always reacts violently and with wrath, "lest you learn his ways." It is literally saying "Lest you fall into his ruts and go the same path." Anger is a learned behavior. Somewhere that angry person learned to be angry from someone who had traveled that path. And somewhere that person turned into those ruts of wrath and anger and now through out their life, they react the same way. And so God warns us not get to close to such people, because if you get too close, your wheels will slide into the same grooves and you will cause the path to get deeper and deeper! Once you have fallen into a rut, it's hard to get out of it!

In our text in Job, we read:

As you've probably already guessed, the word for "way" here is 'orach also. The question of God's Word was "will you choose to follow the paths that sinful men have been trodding since the beginning?" The imagery is of a well-worn path of sin -- so many millions of people have chosen that path that the ruts are very deep. And so many people choose to just put the wheels of their life into those familiar ruts and allow their life to happen to the same destination that almost every other person alive has traveled! Living for sin doesn't require much effort or thought. It is the way that is most traveled. It's the easiest way to go.

Is not this true in our lives? Is not the sins that consume us and that are present in our lives, not the results of us seeing others follow that path? And then we get too close to them so that we begin to emulate their behavior, and then before we realize it, the wheels of our direction have slipped into the ruts of sin. From that point on, we continue in those paths because it's the easiest thing to do. It's what we are used to. Our wheels fit comfortably in the grooves.

As a pastor, I have often been frustrated at seeing people delivered from their sin by the Gospel and the Holy Ghost only to see them begin to hang out with the same people and then eventually slide back into their old life style. As a man born into sin myself, I have been frustrated at my own failure to avoid the same old snares and traps. God delivers you and sets you on a new path and new way of living. And then you begin to walk too close again to the old paths and before you know it your new direction and given way to the old ruts of sin again! You intend to do things differently, but you didn't distance yourself far enough from those paths and you find yourself having tasted of God's delivering power and yet back into the same old ruts of a sinful lifestyle. You intend to get a better prayer life, and yet a few days go by and you slip back into the old ruts of prayerlessness. You intend to witness, but after a few attempts, you slide back into the path that you've always taken. You are stuck in the rut that is deepest in your life because that's what you've done the most often, but as God said in His Word, the path with the deepest ruts is not necessarily the best direction to travel. We must consider the end result and the end of the heavily grooved road of sin is that of destruction and death. It may be the path of least resistance right now, but the destination is not what men truly desire!

There is a story that is often repeated among worthless-fact junkies that testifies to the lasting power of a simple rut that I would like to share with you.

In the time of Persian rule under King Darius (about the time of Daniel chapter 6 in your Bibles), the Persian empire had an excellent system of roads over which messengers could drive chariots at high speeds. The countryside in Persia is rugged in places, with barren mountain ranges into the rocky flanks of which the military roads were cut. To keep the chariots from going off the side of the mountain while the horses were being lashed along at top speed, grooves were cut into the surface of the rock to hold the chariot
wheels. These "ruts" were created on purpose. Some of these "well-worn ruts" have been found today still there. The ruts were 4' 8 1/2" apart because that was about the right width for two horses to pull a chariot side by side.

By the time that the Romans conquered the world right before the time of Christ. Most chariots were designed to have the wheels spaced at 4' 8 1/2" to fit the ruts in the existing roads. The Romans built better and even more extensive roads and drove the same width chariots across them, creating grooves and ruts of the same width as the Persians' intentional ones. Because the only way one could safely travel on the Roman roads was to have a wheel set that matched the ruts, the standard widths for wagon wheels and horse carts became what is by modern measurement 4' 8 1/2".

As time went by, the Roman empire faded, but their ruts still remain even until today. As England became a thriving center of culture at the end of the Middle Ages, men and women drove their wagons across roads on the British Isle creating the same size ruts all over the country. Because a wheel lasted longer while traveling in the ruts, most of England's wagon workers used tools to create a wheel base of 4' 8 1/2" for their trams and hansoms.

When the early days of railroading came, streetcars and trams were the first invention. It was wagon makers who built the first cars and since most of their tools were created for a specific width of wheel, the first trams and streetcars mostly were laid with a span of 4' 8 1/2" between the wheels. When the concept of a train and engine was formed, and the first railways were laid across England, the same width of the trams was used for the spacing of the rails for most of the lines. As English people and technology created the American colonies and the United States, railways soon began to be laid in America and with the exception of a few narrow gauge railroads in the Rockies, the standard width between the rails of a railroad line today is 4' 8 1/2"!

But it goes even further! When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad at NASA today, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs as they are called. The SRBs are long and slender looking and they are made by Thiokol at their factory in the state of Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know is 4' 8 1/2". Therefore the design of the most advanced rocket system that we possess today was determined by the width of the ruts created by two horses side by side pulling a Persian messenger chariot through the mountains! It is possible that the Challenger disaster would have been less likely to happen had the tanks been designed broader and less narrow. But the lingering effects of a Persian rut thousands of years ago may have contributed to a safety problem that in turn cost our astronauts their lives!

Such is the lasting effect of a rut! And in like manner, sin has destroyed the lives of countless people because of them just following paths of the past that they do not really understand. They live like they do because "it's they way that almost everyone has always lived."

The ruts of sin may be the most common path of our life, but we must realize that we must break out of those ruts! Like Blind Bartimaeus whom the Bible records had spent his entire life on the side of a road begging, we must decide that we want out of the ditch in which we are living and cry to Jesus Christ for help! The ruts of sin may be deep, but Jesus can pull us out of them! Don't worry about what others say! Don't worry about what paths most others will take! But get to Jesus and let Him deliver you from the ruts of sin!

God can and desires to deliver you from the ruts of sin! After warning about the dangers of the path of lust and fornication found in the immoral woman, Solomon said:

That thou mayest walk in the "way of good men." Literally "the ruts of good men." If you've been following the paths of sinful men, now is the time to allow God to pull you out of that trap and to get the wheels of your life into a better groove on a better path going to Glory! God has an alternate path, the "paths of the righteous." Sin may have the ruts of many people that have moved down the path that leads to destruction, but there is an alternative path! There are the paths that the righteous have taken. There are paths of faith blazed by people of faith that have gone before us! You can choose to follow the marks left behind by people who were lost, or you can choose to follow in the ruts formed by the lives of people like Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, Daniel, Isaiah, John, Peter, and Paul! Their paths lead to glory! The ruts of their life experiences can serve as guides to get you to eternal life! We must choose carefully what rut that we follow today, because it will determine the future not only of our lives, but of the generations to come! may we follow in the "way of the righteous!"

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I came across a book this week that grabbed my attention. It's a book obviously written by someone who has never experienced a true Apostolic Church. The book is by Martin Zender and is entitled: How to quit church without quitting God. Some of the chapters are entitled "God does not live in boxes." "Church binds people to clocks and buildings." And the one that grabbed my attention: "Church drives people into spiritual ruts." That last chapter is the general point of the book.

Now Mr. Zender and I have some major differences in theology. The Bible tells us not to "forsake the assembling of ourselves together" (Hebrews 10:25) and I still believe that it takes coming to church to be saved. The Early Apostolic church met regularly together to worship together, sing together and study the Bible and hear sermons by the Godly leaders that were placed over them. The scriptures teach that one of the five-fold ministry that are gifts that God has given to the church is pastors (Ephesians 4:11) which is literally "shepherd" in the Greek, and it would be pointless to hire a shepherd if there wasn't a flock of sheep. So let me get one point straight before I move on: if "quitting church" means "no longer attending services, not worshipping together with a body of believers, and not allowing a pastor to feed you with the Word of God" that I don't believe -- and this is scriptural -- that you can quit church without quitting God. Listen to what Paul told the pastors of the church in Ephesus:

Paul told them to care for the church of God which the "Holy Spirit" has made them overseers. And that this church -- that regularly met together and fellowshipped together and had services together -- was one which God obtained "with his own blood!" That's more than just a Oneness scripture, but proves to us that God died on Calvary so that we might be able to come together to have church! People like Mr. Zender who advocate people not being involved in a local congregation will have quite a bit of explaining to do to God as to why they encouraged people to not join an institution that cost God His very life to create!

Having said that I agree with some of Mr. Zender's points, even if I don't agree with his conclusions. Yes, God does not live in boxes. Yes, too many churches do bind people to clocks and buildings. And yes, too many times people in churches are in spiritual ruts from which they need to be delivered! I agree with that. But the answer is not to quit church, but to change the way you have church to match that of scripture! You don't throw "the baby out with the bathwater." We must still keep the church in our lives!

But if we aren't careful, our idea of church that we have been raised with can and will influence us into ruts that are not good. Too many people are bound to a clock in their service. We've got to get out of the rut of watching the clock while we worship. Yes, I'm a respecter of people's time, and I always know in a service what time it is and try to usually dismiss people on a punctual basis, but at the same time, too many of us get into a rut where if God desires to do something deeper or has a greater experience for you, if it is not within your hour and a half that you've given Him, you aren't going to receive it! When we pray before church, you shouldn't be worried about the time. I'll turn the lights on when it's time to start. But you are here to get ready to receive what God has for you for this service. You are here to pray and gather your thoughts and see what He wants in your life. But many of us pray as if we are just fulfilling a religious duty for a few minutes to say that we are faithful. We pray for five minutes and sit in the dark thinking about other things for the rest of the time. You're in a rut. You've missed the point. You've turned church into a rut that is keeping you from receiving what you need from God.

And let me say this: 9 times out of 10 when I walk through the doors an hour early before service, I've already prayed for the service, I've fasted and studied what I feel God wants for that service. I'm ready. Prayer before service is not for me to get ready, but to prepare your minds to receive what God wants to do. I pray before service mainly to help you pray to get ready. Sometimes I may not be praying but may have to attend to something else. That shouldn't affect your readiness. You should be getting your life ready to receive something great. You should be asking God for His will in this service. But to many of us, it's just a rut that we've gotten into that means little in the spirit and has little spiritual value in our lives. When that happens, yes, the church has become a rut!

It's the same with praise and worship. Some of us come prepared to go to a certain level in worship but no further. You may praise until you feel liberty. You may just praise to pass the time until worship service is over. You may praise God until you "speak in tongues." None of those are valid reasons to praise God. All of those are ruts that people get into.

We praise God -- or should -- to magnify Him and because He is truly worthy! We worship God because we are inviting Him into our life. True, there is liberty in praise and worship. True, there is a heaviness that lifts off. But I've seen Pentecostals praise God until they get that liberty and then they quit. And what they didn't realize was that God gave them that liberty because He wanted to give them a special blessing and impart something to them. They quit when they felt liberty and never received what it was that God had given them the liberty to receive. They have fallen into the rut of praising God only until they feel blessed, and have forgotten the real reason for praise and worship! It's no wonder in such cases that our praise quickly becomes old to us! We are not praising God for His mercy and greatness, but rather because of our need. Church has become a rut to us, a path of motions that we think will save us by their completion even if our heart is not truly involved!

And we can make ruts out of the preaching. We are here to just hear another sermon. And we forget that God wants to speak to us and perform what is being spoken through His Word. And we can make a rut out of teaching and we forget that the Bible teaches that you are blessed only when you understand. Prayer requests can become a ritual and we can pray forgetting that God actually is a healer and wants to move in our faith. Giving can become a rut, that we fulfill but without a cheerfulness that God loves and without remembering what a blessing it is to have an income from which we can give.

And so I would agree with Mr. Zender that there can be many ruts within a church that are not ordained of God. But the solution is not to quit church, but rather change our focus and our paths within the church! If church seems monotonous and boring to you, you are in a rut or ritual. But we are not commanded to serve God with mindless actions, but rather to serve Him with "all our heart." Church services are where God wants to actively work in our life through the influence of Godly men and women being near us. Church services are where God wants to change us and transform us into an army of what He wants us to be. And yet there is this rut that many Christians are in that church going is a boring necessity of living for God. That's why some churches can have a dinner and have three time more people show up than at a prayer meeting. That's why some churches can have total physical exertion from it's members in their softball league but have people asleep during the praise and worship service! Their rut is how they are viewing what church is supposed to be!

But somebody make up in your mind that "I didn't get delivered out of sin, just to fall into a rut of traditional church!" "I didn't get delivered out of ruts of generational vices just to fall into a rut of generational ritual!" But rather I want to see Jesus and see Him in a greater way! If you are in a rut, then the same way out of sin's depths, is the same way out of the rut of ritual and tradition: cry out to Jesus! Get radical with your worship and prayer! With Jesus active in your life, you'll have to come out of your rut!

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And so we come to our other text. And in light of all that has been said in this message, it teaches us an astonishing principle: God has ruts that we want to be in! Being in ruts is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as instead of the ruts of sin, or the ruts of tradition, we are rather in "the ruts of God."

In the 25th Psalm, we read of David writing about how following God is akin to choosing the right path. He says of God:

He is speaking of the Lord's ways as "old paths." And then we come to this powerful statement:

"All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth." I probably don't need to tell you that the Hebrew word for "paths" here is 'orach and the Adam Clarke Commentary says that word: "signifies the tracks or ruts made by the wheels of wagons by often passing over the same ground. Mercy and truth are the paths in which God constantly walks in reference to the children of men; and so frequently does he show them mercy, and so frequently does he fulfil his truth, that his paths are earnestly discerned. (Adam Clarke's Commentary, Psalms 25:10)!"

There are roads and paths that lead from where God is to those who keep His covenant and Word. And those paths have been traveled by God so much that there are ruts within them. One rut is mercy, and the other rut is truth! Those are the ruts of God by which He moves into our lives! God doesn't just ask us to follow Him, but rather He comes to us, forging and blazing the way that we should take, Himself!

Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, the life." We are following a path that He has already walked! And He has left us an example of how and where to walk! It must be the path that He chose that we choose to walk down! We must escape the ruts of sin and follow the ruts of God! He has blazed a trail of mercy and truth to us and we must choose to turn upon that road!

The problem is that the grooves may not be as deep as sin's path because fewer have traveled down this road, and it may take a bit more effort to stay on the "strait and narrow" but you should know that the end result will be worth whatever effort it took to follow it. Fewer have passed this way of living according to God's will than have passed upon the road of sin, and so the ruts are not near as deep. And so I am reminded of the famous poem by Robert Frost:

And so I close with two truths about the road that we choose to take for our spiritual journey that can be learned from this secular poem.

The first is "way leads on to way." We cannot backtrack time, and our decisions in the future will branch off of the decision that we have made today. Like in the natural, in the spirit, the effects of the ruts that we follow last long. And so your decision between the pathway of sin and the way of God today will affect everything else that you must decide in your life.

And the second point is the testimony of the poet: "I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." He had no regrets of ever taking the road less travelled!

It will be the same in the Spirit and living for God. Jesus said:

We must choose the path of God that is rutted by mercy and truth! It may be the road less traveled, but we will never regret taking it! We must choose the road of God of sacrifice. It may be the road of most resistance, but in the end we will never regret taking it! We must choose the path of God's will. Just because the majority of people in the world would choose the well-worn grooves of the path of sin and prefer to ignore it, does not negate the fact that having chosen the path less traveled, we will never regret it!

Let's leave the ruts of sin and tradition but let's get caught up in the ruts of God's example! Mercy and truth beckon us to heaven! They are ruts worth falling into!