From Chapter Three, Faith Steps--Moving Toward God:
Defiance leads to alienation but compliance leads to relationship
The good news is found in a silver lining in the cloud of rejected revelation. Consider carefully this unspoken corollary of the process of revelation and response outlined in Romans:
If we respond to God's revelation through nature and conscience by making moral choices aligned with His creation and His law, our thinking begins to align with God's principles and our hearts soften toward Him.Perhaps a husband resists an adulterous temptation and devotes himself to loving his wife. A woman sacrificially cares for her elderly mother who suffers from Alzheimer's. A teenager makes a culture-challenging personal decision to save sex for marriage.
As individuals make choices aligned with God's principles, they step closer toward divine relationship and their providential purpose. Our gears mesh when aligned with our Maker's blueprint, yielding peace, satisfaction and fulfillment.
Conversely, when we make choices opposed to our Maker's principles, we experience negative results such as failure, loneliness and conflict. We cannot find peace, satisfaction and fulfillment. Adultery shatters marriages and families. Enmity with parents removes the crucial emotional support children need. Teenage sex results in emotional scars, disease and crisis pregnancies.
Each moral decision we make and action we take–to acknowledge God or not, to choose good or evil–either draws us closer to God or drives us farther from Him.
Faith steps are the moral choices we makeA discerning and open individual will perceive readily the difference that moral choices make and the fruit they produce in his or her life. Such experience can begin to train the mind and conscience in the direction of God and His principles, as we learn through experience to choose the path that yields the best result.
and actions we take toward God,
as we respond to His revelation and invitation.
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