Choosing the Path Above!

"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may Live." - Deuteronomy 30:19

Before I got married, among many wise words and well-wishes, amidst the handshakes, hugs, and slaps on the back, I was given this piece of advice: "Every morning, you need to wake up and choose to put her first. Every morning, you must wake up and choose to love. Don't go through life thinking these things will come naturally. It may not seem this way, but the choosing is not as or more important as the doing - it is part & parcel, inseparable from the act. Love isn't true if it isn't chosen."

The power of choice is not only something we were created with, it is something we were blessed with. Created as images of God, we were given a gift - to be able to think creatively, and thus create. To direct the very path of our life by making our own independent choices. This gift of choice is one of the things that sets us apart, and above, all other creation - because, unlike the rest of sentient creation, we have been given the ability to choose outside of our nature, to say no to our natural instincts and to take a path completely alien to what would be considered "normal" survival behavior. Consider this: survival is engrained in our basic make-up. A major aspect of survival is sustenance - finding and consuming food. This is an instinct at the very core of all living creatures, this is behavior shared by animal and human alike, from the smallest living creature to the strongest man. Yet there are times that the Lord instructs us to fast - to deny ourselves food, to put aside the most basic desire of our flesh as an act of obedience and worship to Him. To choose this act of fasting is to choose something outside of our basic survival nature. It is to choose something other, something alien, something set apart from the pattern of our broken instinctual routines - all for the glory of our unseen Creator. Is this something that a lion, a monkey, or a bird, could ever begin to comprehend? No. This is not to say a lion does not make choices - a lion can choose whether to eat Prey X or Prey Y, but at the end of the day, the lion will act according to its nature, and prey on something. It will never think beyond itself and its basic needs. It would never put the needs of others before the needs of The Pride, or give of its food to another animal going hungry. Is this a behavior seen anywhere else in creation? No - this is a gift given solely to Man.

Never take for granted your ability to choose! Every day, you can choose to treat your spouse with love, or else treat them selfishly. Choose love! You can choose to walk in holy communion with God the Father, to speak to Him and to follow the path He lays before you, or you can walk your own path, which is the way of empty self satisfaction - which is merely self destruction. Choose to step into the light, to lay down your selfish desires, and to see clearly and march forward with confidence! When you are at your desk, in your car, on your couch, in your bed - you can choose to converse with your Creator, or you will ignore His calls and live interacting only with that which is already dead. Speak to the eternal Lord, who is waiting and ready to listen (and even more importantly, waiting and ready to respond)! The more you commune with Him, the more you will desire deeper relationship, and the richer your conversations will be! 

I feel this is an important thing to meditate on. We have been given the ability to choose to live differently and set apart, to live in a way completely foreign, and it is of the utmost importance that we do so! We are, by nature, broken and sinful. If we do not choose to act, we choose the path of sin. We sin by nature, so if we do not choose to change the ways of our very nature, we then by default "choose" sin - if it can even be called choosing. I would hazard to say it is hardly choosing, but merely "being". The paradoxical "Choosing Not To Choose". We are on a collision course with death, magnetized in our very design to gravitate towards darkness. If we alter our course and set all sights and co-ordinates, full steam ahead, towards Jesus Christ, we are exercising the gift of Holy Choice, the gift given only to Man, God's Image, the creation set apart over all creation. To choose any direction but Christ is to act like any other animal, our eyes only seeing what is in front of our faces and choosing from those limited options - and that leads only to death. This is the true embodiment of sin - we are not fulfilling our purpose, or living as we were created to live. If you built an airplane to fly through the heavens, yet in the end all it did was taxi along the ground - you would consider it a failure, and you would most likely dismantle it and begin again. Is this the fate you would have for yourself? Or will you choose as you are created to choose - choose Christ and live! Choose Christ and soar to the Heavens as intended!

"Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, CHOOSE this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." - Joshua 24:14-15