In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.

Proverbs 16:9, NIV (1978)

How involved is God in your life? Some think that He merely watches, observing all the things we do so that He can bring these deeds into the Judgment, while others feel that we are little more than robots that move along a pre-programmed path with little personal choice as to what they are doing or how they will get there.

But this is not at all what the Bible reveals. The 16th chapter of Proverbs gives us some pretty good ideas as to how involved God wants to be in our lives. The passage above reveals that it is up to man as to what path he will choose. He can decide to follow the righteous path or go in his own way - God allows us to choose! But we are also told that even though our direction (and therefore our future) is ours to choose, God will determine our steps along the way. From this, we can see that He is involved in our lives. But exactly how far does that involvement go?

In the first part of this same chapter in Proverbs, God reveals this vital key to life:

To man belongs the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the reply of the tongue. All a man's ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD. Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.

This passage reveals the answer to our question, does it not? We are told again that men get to make whatever plans they want in life, so we can see that we are definitely not robots that are somehow placed here to perform in some pre-planned game that God has come up with. Still, even though we have the right and the responsibility to make our own plans, God is not going to leave us without help along the way. Proverbs 16:25 tells us why this is so:

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

When we take all three of these passages, we can get a pretty good idea as to why God intervenes in our lives. He does want us to choose our own path, but He still wants us to choose the right one because He loves us. So, when our desire is to take the right path, but we are mistaken as to some of the "twists and turns" on that path, He will intervene. How he specifically accomplishes this is His business, and I don't think we have to worry about each intervention that He does make, but it is comforting to know that He is there to help us keep going in the right direction.

Of course, there is a big condition if we want His help and intervention: We have to commit our lives to Him. In other words, while we do get to choose the way we will take, none of us wants to find ourselves going over a cliff that we did not see. I believe this is one of the places in life where God involves Himself in determining our steps. Since He knows there will be times that we are off the path even though we think we are still on it, He will help us to find our way back from our dangerous decisions that would have led to death had we continued on that fatal detour. 

This is probably the long way around the barn to answering our initial question, "How involved is God in our lives"? How involved do you want Him to be? Many people would prefer that God simply leave them alone and stay out of their business. That's fine. I believe that God will let us do that if it is the direction we really want to take, but He still will likely set up a roadblock or two to help us change our minds from our dangerous decisions. On the other hand, when we are determined to take the righteous path and we commit that direction to God, I believe that He will involve Himself in every important aspect of our lives. After all, this is what we want, and this is what we have committed ourselves to.   

So, again, how involved is God in our lives? How involved do you want Him to be? To answer that, we will first have to decide how bad we want to be with Him in the first place.