Psalms of Comfort 16: The Ultimate Choice
Psalm 119
24 Your statutes are my delight;
they are my counselors.
Our lives are filled with choices aren’t they and we get used to being able to choose but when those choices are taken away from us we don’t take kindly to it, do we? We don’t take kindly to other people dictating our choices either, our society holds the right of choice as one of its foundation stones.
The country has been celebrating VE day but the British people didn’t really choose to go to war in the first place. That decision was made because of a threat to their future. They fought to maintain their freedom, their right to choose. Our choices really shape our future but sometimes we don’t see that. We only see the here and now. We can be very short sighted.
We have been doing a series on prayer at our midweek meetings and last week we did unanswered prayer and we thought about how God gives us what we would have asked for if we knew what he knew. There will always be tension between Gods providence and our free will. Did God choose it for us or did we choose it ourselves? Quite frankly I don’t think we will ever understand that one this side of eternity. The Psalmist here chose the way of truth, he chose to follows Gods laws.
When you became a Christian, you chose to follow Jesus Christ. You were led in to that place of choice by the Holy Spirit. Your circumstances may also have influenced that choice.
There are many things in life that we can’t choose. We can’t, for example, choose the weather. We can’t control the economy. We can’t choose whether or not we are born with a big nose, blue eyes, or a lot of hair. We can’t choose if we will get Cancer or MS or dementia or arthritis or any other disease that is not influenced by the way we live our lives. We accept these choices because they are out with our control.
There is one choice however that is the ultimate choice and it is in our control. Where we will spend eternity and that choice, God leaves to us. God invites us to love Him, to be faithful to Him, to choose the way of truth and to set our hearts on his laws. It is an invitation from God straight in to our hearts, nobody else can make that choice for us.
In the end, the choice is yours and mine. If you have made the right choice then continue to live according to that choice. If you have not chosen yet then why not? He has already extended His love to you through Jesus Christ.
