Choices, choices.

It is an old phrase that says, “Life is full of choices: choose wisely.”

Can any of you say “Amen” to that? Whether your concurrence comes from personal experience or through intelligent observation of others is unimportant. The point of the matter remains that we all not only acknowledge that statement’s truth, but that we practice it; for what good does good knowledge do if it does you absolutely no good? I believe Solomon would call that a “vanity.” And vanities are no bueno.

Above my treadmill is a verse on a plaque; it’s my mother’s. She’s a wise woman.

“Choose you this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” (Joshua 24:15) the plaque says.

It is a choice, isn’t it? This choosing who we will serve, who we will say “Yes” to. It’s a choice I feel I choose wrongly more often than I want to admit, to myself or to you or to the Lord.

Yet, what a glorious choice. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, those of us who answered his initial call now have the option of making that choice. Every day. We no longer have to say “yes” to our instincts, to our culture, to the sway of the “prince of the air.”

We can say “no” to all of that now. We have been given the choice.

As I was treading along on that running mill the other night I thought about what a comfort it is to know that I have a good option. Because if you think about it, all the other options, i.e. all the things that the world has to choose from, are not wise choices. They take more than they give and what they give isn’t much in the first place.

Think about it. Aren’t you glad that you can trust in the Lord, the one who owns all the cattle on a thousand hillsides (Psalm 50:10), rather than trusting in money, which can be stolen, lost, embezzled, or—which most of us know a lot about—inflated so much that our sum isn’t worth much anymore anyway?

Or what about our bodies and our health? How terrible it would be to have our trust in those, since they can get broken, diseased, defiled and killed without any prior consent and without any warning. Or at the very least they age; not affording us the freedoms and abilities we once had so much trust in.

I think about putting my trust in things, possessions. These, too, can be stolen, burned, flooded, ruined by moths, chewed by dogs, destroyed by muddy feet.

Intellect? There is always someone smarter than you, always someone who can and will eventually outwit you. That’s assuming you don’t lose your mind against your will to some type of disease, drug, or accident.

There are a lot of people who put their hope in governments. In kings, in princes, in presidents, in prime ministers, in theories of equality. But what good is trusting in something that you typically outlive? I mean, the overwhelming majority of people in this world will see multiple kings come, and multiple kings go. We will see numerous presidents win, and numerous presidents lose. We will see governments rise, and governments fall. These things are always changing; ideologies are like pendulum swings. One good riot and the whole thing gets thrown off kilter, catapulting us towards another idiotic extreme.

And how humiliating a situation to be in when all you worked for and all you trusted in all of the sudden does you no good?

You workout for hours and hours and hours, and you eat nothing that contains dye or high fructose corn syrup or growth hormones so that you can have a strong, healthy, active body your whole life. But then you get in a car accident that paralyzes you from the neck down. What happens to your trust in your body then, when you can’t even make it lift its own arm?

Or all of that money we strive and strive and strive to put away in the bank? And we sacrifice time with our families and time with our kids and time inputting into the lives of others, so that we have time to make that money. Then the stock market crashes. Or then you have hyper-inflation. How humiliated will we all be when it gets to the point where…what’s that phrase… “A bag of gold for a loaf of bread”? Will we not all be shamed to say, “Well, I thought I would be able to buy myself out of these troubles.” And the hours we spent virtually killing ourselves, while not being with the people we love and the people who need us, to put another thousand in the bank we can’t get back and it turned out to be a waste of our time. A somber day that will be when the realization hits, that’s for sure.

When our money no longer has any value, where are we going to turn to?

When our bodies no longer do what we tell them to do, then what are we trusting in?

When our government reaches its zenith of corruption, who will we turn to to help us out?

See, the world doesn’t have any other choices. Their choices are their money, their possessions, their relationships, their intellect, their bodies.

But you and me? The children of God? We have a better choice.
Ours is the One who holds all that we are together in the palm of his hand (Col 1:17). Our choice is the One who says “You who have no money, come, buy, and eat…and your soul will delight in the richest of fare,” (Isaiah 55). Ours is the one who frustrates the wisdom of the world (I Cor. 1:19), who laughs at kings that plot against him (Psalm 2), who removed the sting of death (I Cor. 15:54-57), who reconciles all things to himself (II Cor. 5:18-19), who raises kings and dethrones kings (Romans 13:1), who does not let the guilty go unpunished (Nahum 1:3) and who works all things together for our good (Romans 8:28).

Now that is what I call a good choice.

How nerve wracking, then, to have placed your trust in something that changes; to have made the bad choice. To trust in someone that dies and goes away, in something that has lost its dependability, in a commodity that loses its value, in any substance that can be ruined against your will. Always with the potential that you have to change what you trust in; you have to find something new to believe in.

A sick feeling it would be to have the basis of your trust changed.

For the believer, though, our choice is secure. For we are to choose whom we will serve, and the choice that we can make is the best one; the only choice that will outlive US.

“I, the Lord, do not change,” (Malachi 3:6), “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” (Hebrews 13:8), “The Lord is enthroned as King forever,” (Psalm 29:10), he “does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17), and “from everlasting to everlasting” he is God (Psalm 90:2).
Is it any wonder then that God tells us “Stop trusting in man , who has but breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?” (Isaiah 2:22)? And shouldn’t God be the one to tell us that? For isn’t he the one who, far above having just breath in him, breathes LIFE into things (Genesis 2:7)? Clearly choosing to trust in someone who has breath of lesser quality is not the wisest choice.

Wolfies, I could go on and on. The comparison is naught. For those of us who have the option to choose, unlike our peers of the world, let’s not make a bad choice, ok? For we will become like what we place our trust in (Psalm 115:8). We only have two options: be tossed around like a wave of the sea (Jude 13), or be conformed to the image of the One who sets boundaries for the oceans (Job 38:8-11).

Choose wisely.