“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack. He lets me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters.” Psalm 23:1

I had a moment a while back. A moment of understanding that came rushing out of my mouth as confession to Jesus.

“Lord, I did not follow You here.”

In order for us to be led by Him, we must follow Him. I found myself in a place that I knew He had not led me. It didn’t mean I had stopped loving Him, trusting Him or that I was no longer His. It meant that I had followed my flesh and found myself where I did not want to be.

Don’t get me wrong — Jesus will lead us into difficult places. We cannot read His word and come away thinking that following Him means long walks on the beach for the rest of our days. But there are certain places we can wander into that we didn’t get to by following Him.

He will not lead us into sin. He will not lead us into the captivity that He freed us from. He does not lead us into despair, hopelessness, or complacency. He won’t lead us away from His Body, the Church. He won’t lead us to hold grudges, to slander or to demand our own way. He won’t lead us into a victim mentality or self-righteous thinking.

We follow our flesh into those places and most often it never occurs to us that we had stopped following Jesus.

But with our very next step, we can follow Him again. We can turn around, obey His Word, die to ourselves and get covered in the dust of His feet once again.