I don’t know if you have a lot of kids toys at your home, but we do. And one of the toys we like playing with in our house are hot wheels cars and tracks. Hot wheels cars and tracks are a lot of fun. And they’ve actually developed a lot since I was a kid. When I was a kid you just had a hot wheels track with a rubber band powered pusher that you would pull back and let go. Now they have motorized tracks, in fact one time Aiden had a motorized track that shot the cars through a series of 6 different loops. But hot wheel cars are fun. There are times when our entire living room is filled with hot wheel tracks going up and over and winding around. But there’s one thing I noticed about hot wheel tracks—If you don’t have it set up just right, you can shoot your car off the track. You can derail your hot wheels car and miss the track. If you have a curve right at the bottom of a big hill, your’re going to go off the track. Or if you get too much air, you can easily go off track. Or if the track isn’t assembled just right, it can go off track. That’s just the reality of playing with hot wheel cars and tracks, you can easily jump off the track and start heading in a different direction.
Sometimes this happens in our spiritual lives as well. Sometimes we can get off track. We can get turned around spiritually and we can actually derail from the pathway God wants us to live and start heading in a totally different direction altogether. God doesn’t want us to get off track spiritually. And in our passage today, Paul talks about how to stay on track spiritually. How to keep our lives back on track spiritually. He gives us an example of how he does this in his life. And so as we look at the life of Paul from Philippians 3, the big idea we learn is this: God wants our hearts on track.