The
Choice is Yours
Whether
it is favorable or unfavorable, we will obey the LORD our God, to whom we are
sending you, so that it will go well with us, for we will obey the LORD our
God.”
– Jeremiah 42:6
I
have told you today, but you still have not obeyed the LORD your God in all he
sent me to tell you. – Jeremiah 42:21
We tell ourselves and
others that we’ll do whatever it is God calls us to do. We mean it. Sort of. We’ll
gladly step out in faith on a journey of our choosing. But when God calls us to
a place we’d rather not go, well, thanks but no thanks.
Faith isn’t for wimps,
that’s for sure! God rarely calls us to go someplace nice and safe. He doesn’t
usually ask us to do something that is so routine we can do it without even
trying. God is all about growth and change and bringing us closer to the
imagine of His Son. He can’t do that when our feet are stuck in the sameness of
today.
We like our routines,
don’t we? We like our days to go smoothly. If we crave excitement, it’s of our
choosing. We love vacations, maybe a game or motorcycle ride. We want to be in
control. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it.
But God knows we’d
never grow without change. How can unchallenged faith ever grow deep roots? How
can we learn compassion if we never experience heartache? How can we learn to
trust Him when we only stay where we can take care of ourselves?
It was a bad time for God’s
people. They had disobeyed and God had allowed Babylon to take most of them.
There was a remnant left. They sought out Jeremiah, the prophet who’d warned them
about God’s anger. This was the same prophet they’d imprisoned, the same
prophet they’d ignored.
This time they were
determined to heed whatever God told Jeremiah. They promised. Until Jeremiah
told them what God said. They had a choice. They could do as God commanded and
remain where they were or they could head toward what they saw as safety in
Egypt. They chose Egypt – and death.
We make choices every
day as to whether we will follow God or our own wisdom. For example: You feel
the Holy Spirit telling you to leave your secure job and move to another. You
think about it. You pray about it. But you just can’t trust God enough to take
that leap. Several months later your company downsizes and you’re laid off. If
you’d followed the Holy Spirit’s promptings, you’d still have a good job. It’s
a missed opportunity and heartache you needlessly suffer because of your
disobedience.
Maybe it’s something
totally different. You’re hanging out with people who sometimes skirt God’s
laws. They gossip. Maybe they go out drinking every now and then, then leave
the restaurant a little bit tipsy. Maybe they fudge on their expense reports.
Maybe they flirt with strangers even though they’re married. Maybe they tell little
“white” lies. Nothing big. None of it is big. You are confident you won’t
become like them. You’re confident you’ll stay righteous. Until the day you don’t.
We have an uncanny
ability to become like the people we hang around with. While we may want to be
a positive influence on them, oftentimes it doesn’t work that way. The gossip
is too juicy. The crowd is too influential. Before we know it, we’ve become one
of them.
It’s not like God didn’t
warn us. We just didn’t want to listen. We head down a path toward a place we
never expected to go. We’ve pulled away from God. We want Him – but we also
want to be part of this world. We can’t have both. Trying to walk that line of
obedience when surrounded by the pull of sin, well, we’re bound to fall.
God’s people had to
make a choice: follow God or follow their own wisdom. They chose what they
believed was the “safe” choice and paid for it with their lives. In a very real
sense, we do the same thing when we do what we know we shouldn’t do, hang out
with people who are bad influences or we stay where we are when we know God is
calling us to something different.
Every day you have a
choice to follow God or the world. Choose wisely.
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