God uses the consequences of your sins to guide and train you. Think of it like your car’s GPS. When you’re traveling in your car, your GPS tells you which way to go. If you miss a turn, it reroutes you to the next best course. This rerouting can happen time and again as you try a shortcut, or go a different way for some reason. The voice on the GPS doesn’t yell at you or call you foolish or stupid. It just keeps rerouting you based on your choices. But basically, the more you deviate from the GPS instructions, the longer it takes to get fully back on track. Still, in any event, the GPS will keep directing you, and eventually, you will end up at the same destination. But you will suffer the loss of time and gas. And you will potentially encounter other problems you might not have had if you had stayed on the original course. So, you may suffer the consequences of going your own way, but the GPS isn’t punishing you. It’s only trying to get you to your destination with the best possible directions based on where you are right now.
This is how it is with Christians and their lives under the guiding hand of God. They make their own choices, but God superintends their direction, as they wind their way to their destination. If you decide not to take God’s guidance in a matter, as you find it in the Bible, you veer off course. You may suffer consequences, perhaps increasingly so, the longer you defiantly stay off course. Or think you can take some parallel course and stay just close enough to God’s course that you can avoid having to live a godly life. But when you try to do that, when you try to make your life easier, and more manageable, by keeping certain “roads” of your life “off-limits” to God’s authority, eventually you’ll find the rest of your life getting harder. And those turns you take will cost you more and more. Still, God keeps on directing you, like that GPS. He will use the consequences of going off course to draw you back onto the best path. And God is infallible, unlike any GPS. He knows which ways are blocked off, and what otherwise unknown dangers may lie ahead on the journey. He wants you to stay on track, right close to him. Maybe it’s time for you to give up on your “alternate road”, or your “parallel path”, or trying to seek “your truth”. Maybe it's time to listen to God’s truth, to listen to and trust the GPS – God’s Positioning System.