Making the Right Choice

This morning, I want to start our message with the story of a prestigious university faculty that had gathered one morning. And they had these weekly meetings where someone would get up and share a little bit of what they were doing or something like that. And this one archaeological professor got up one morning and brought with him a lamp that he had unearthed in the Middle East. Now, this lamp was reported to contain a genie, who when the lamp was rubbed, would appear and grant one wish. The dean of the college, not wanting to miss a chance on an advancement, grabbed the lamp from this archaeology professor and stroked it.

Suddenly, the genie appeared. The phantom made him an offer, a choice of three rewards: wealth, wisdom, or beauty. Without hesitating, the dean selects wisdom. Of course, a man of academia.

Done, said the genie, and disappears in a cloud of smoke and a bolt of lightning. All heads turn towards the dean who sits surrounded by a faint halo of light. At length, one of his colleagues wanting to hear a jewel of wisdom whispers, say something. What wise insights do you have now? The dean sighs and says, I should have taken the money.

Making the right choice is not always as easy as we think it is. We are faced with choices daily. Some seem trivial: what to wear, how we will use our time, what we will eat. And some choices are significant, having ramifications for the future: schooling, career, where we will live, who we will marry. Yet all of these choices with which we are faced, of all of them, there's none as important to us as we, who are created in the image of God, how we will respond to our creator.

When we sort through the implications of our choices, whether they be major or whether they be minor, how does a relationship with God figure into the equation? Now this morning, we're going to be looking at a passage which deals with choices. It deals with choices. And it sets before us, as it did for an ancient people, Israel. It sets before us a choice.

On the eastern shore of the Jordan River, the Israelite nation, young fledgling nation as they were, came before what they sought to be the promised land. On the banks of the Jordan, Moses, their great leader, gave his last sermon before he was to die and said, you can enter into this land, but you have a choice. Once again, at this moment, they were reminded of the work the Lord had done for them: that He had brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand, with signs and wonders, that He had protected them, that He had loved them like a son, and that He had brought them to this place, having cared for them for forty years in the wilderness. Now having reviewed God's mercy shown to them, Moses tells them of the blessings which will come their way if they respond to God's grace with obedience. They are told what would happen with the gift God had given them.

Let's turn to that moment in Deuteronomy 30. Deuteronomy 30, which is towards the end of the book, and we're going to be reading from verses 11 to 18. Deuteronomy 30:11-18. This is Moses talking. This is his sermon.

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it. Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it. No. The word is very near to you.

It is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees, and laws. Then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.

You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to His voice and hold fast to Him. For the Lord is your life, and He will give you many years in the land He swore to give your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So far, our reading.

There are some very important things, some very crucial things that I would love for us to reflect on this morning coming from this text. When we are faced with life decisions in life, we often wonder whether we have all the facts necessary to make the right decision, or whether we have all that it takes to accomplish that choice that we have made. But when God places before us the choice, whether we obey Him or not, like the Israelites were faced with, the choice is very clear. The choice is very clear. And there are some key points that I want to share with you this morning: four points regarding choices we make in our life.

The first thing that we see is that the choice God gives us is not too difficult to understand nor is it beyond our reach. The choice God gives us is not too difficult to understand, nor is it beyond our capacity. In this last sermon of Moses before he dies, it's not difficult, he says. It's not difficult to know God's will. God doesn't make attainment of some secret knowledge the prerequisite of a relationship and a love for Him, or a prerequisite for the blessings that He wants to give.

He doesn't make His commands like a carrot on a stick either, just always beyond the grasp, too just too difficult. Moses says it's not up in heaven so that you have to ask, who will ascend into heaven and bring it down for us and explain it to us so that we may obey?

Nor is it beyond the sea that someone needs to sail across the ocean in the world to find this secret knowledge to bring it to us. No, he says, the word is near you. It is in your heart. It is in your mouth so that you may obey it. In high school, algebra was beyond my grasp.

Some people may say amen to that. Always too difficult. Try as I might, I could gain only occasional glimpses behind the veil of mystery of axioms and theorems. My stretch was only so far. No matter how long I looked at that maths problem, it wouldn't solve itself.

I couldn't understand it. Now God is far kinder than trigonometry or calculus. God makes His will, His desires for our lives accessible. You don't need an advanced degree in theology to pick up His bible, His word, and read it. It doesn't take you or need to take you five years of cloistered spiritual meditation to break into some celestial plane so that you can understand what His commands and His will is for us.

You don't have to reach Zen or enlightenment to understand it. The clarity of God's commands, the clear meaning of His desires for us, His clear will for us is one of the characteristics of Christianity. You do not need to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to understand it. That's why you can have anyone and everyone in a church from all walks of life.

The Christian claims that anyone can open the bible, read the words of God, and be changed by its message. God's will is not too difficult to understand nor is it beyond our reach. God's will is not hidden. It's plain to see for everyone. There will be some things in our life that we don't know.

That is true. And in just the previous chapter before Deuteronomy 30, Moses says in Deuteronomy 29:29 that the secret things, they are secret things that belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us. The things revealed belong to us and our children forever, that we may follow all the words of His law. There are some things in our life that we won't know. There are some paths that we'll have to walk that we will not be told about.

But there are the secret things of God. God has that under control. The things that we need, the information we need has been given to us. And we have enough information to take that one step and then the next step.

And then the next step. We can only deal with what we do know, and those things God says are very clear. The second thing we see here is the choice is clear because the choice is close. The choice is clear because the choice is close. In verse 14, God says the word of God, which is His will, they are synonymous, is near to us.

The bible shows here that these words of God are not some pithy zen statements that we can place on our Facebook update and leave there as some wow, really nice things, and we can garner some good likes from it. These are words that change us. They live in us. They affect us. They change how we speak.

They change how we do things. These words are living. These words are effective. It reaches right down into our heart. It sticks in our mouths and it influences the way we speak, the way we treat others.

God's will, God's will, God's laws, God's requirements, that are all the same thing regarding sexual purity, regarding showing love to those around us, providing for the poor, abstaining from addictions like drugs and alcohol and gambling, respecting those with authority over us. All of those commands are to come from the heart. They are to be a part of us. They are not something lorded over us, weighing upon us. They are something that comes from within us.

The choice is clear because the choice is close. Now, if you've been reading your bible for a while, you will know that the Israelites failed to grasp this. They failed to understand how this worked. Time and time again, these commands did hang over their heads. And these laws and these commandments, although clear to them, didn't change their hearts.

It didn't inform their thinking. And time and time again, they failed and they disappointed God and they hurt God. And then in Jeremiah 31:33-34, something new is promised. God says, this is the new covenant. This is the new promise I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord.

I will put My law, My will, My desires in their minds. I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be My people. No longer will a man have to teach his neighbour or a man his brother saying, know the Lord, because they will all know Me. From the least to the greatest, declares the Lord.

For I will forgive their weakness and will remember their sins no more. There's a time coming, God says, where My desires will become My people's desires. And these desires would be propelled by something called grace. And then Jesus came and He started preaching about loving your neighbour and praying for your enemy. You've heard He said that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I tell you, pray for your enemies.

He said and talked about looking at the plank in your own eye rather than the splinter in your brother's eye. And Jesus spoke about the law coming from the inside rather than from the outside. He said, you can be white and shiny from the outside like whitewashed tombs, but dead bones on the inside. And while it seemed to be in contrast to the Old Testament and it got a lot of controversy, people began realising once they looked at their bibles again that there's no difference between what Moses said and what Jesus said. What was spoken of by Moses before entering the promised land was that God would make His commands so clear and so reasonable that no one would have an excuse for doing it.

And so we have a critical choice, Moses says in verses 15 to 18. And that's our third point. The choice is critical because of its eternal consequences. This is a choice, Moses says, involving life and death. This is a choice involving life and death.

Not whether your bum looks big in that dress. All choices fade away. They're all frivolous when eternity is set before us. What we do, where we work, even who we marry, pales in comparison to this: the choice of life and death.

And an eternal one at that. These choices in verse 15 put both quantity as well as quality at stake. It's not just whether we live or die, but whether there is ultimate success in life. Let's have a look. See, I set before you today, Moses says, life and prosperity, death and destruction.

For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws. Then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. Your choice is critical because to make the wrong choice carries with it disastrous consequence. This is not a choice between ice cream or cake for dessert. This choice deals with the universal desire, the common thread of existence, to live, to abound, to prosper.

Whether we live as God's children or whether we live as rebels, as terrorists against God's kingdom. This is the choice before us. In our country today, stress and anxiety and depression are on the rise. Statistics say that depression in industrialised countries, western countries, doubles every ten years. Suicide in western countries are among the highest causes of death for youths.

Quite literally, the choice of death seems to be preferred. Quite literally, the choice of death seems to be preferred. I read of a young boy who was at a camp and spoke about the uselessness of life. While at camp, he went on and on about wanting to die until his counsellor said to him, come on, let's go. If you want to die, I will help you.

Counsellor took the boy up on the side of a mountain where there was a visitor's cabin with a balcony hanging over the edge of the mountain cliff. The counsellor said, if you want to die then, I'll help you. I'll hold you by your ankles out over the balcony and I will drop you on your head. The kid reluctantly said, okay. Even though the counsellor could see that he was starting to quickly change his mind.

Counsellor took the boy by the ankles, held him over the edge of the balcony, when all of a sudden the kid yelled, stop. I don't want to die. The counsellor pulled him back and sat him down. And while the kid's heart was racing, the counsellor said to him, listen, I know you don't want to die. That's not the problem.

The problem is you don't know how to live. You don't know how to live. Moses said, I set before you life and death. If we don't know how to choose life, then by default, we will choose death. We choose death when we dismiss God's word as not being integral in our life.

We choose it when we don't want to read and understand God's character. We choose death when we desire nothing more than getting what we want, when we want it, regardless of what God desires for our life. We choose death when we say that God's will is not the most important thing in our life. But if the choice is so easy, if God's word is so close, we might ask, why then is there disobedience? If God's word is so close and if it's so clear, why is there disobedience?

Why do people make the wrong choice? Why do people choose death? This is a question not only for those who today don't know Christ as their ultimate satisfaction and as their saviour, but for us who claim to have accepted Him as Lord and saviour. Why do we disobey? Well, just because the choice is clear doesn't necessarily make the choice easy.

I know. I might know the basics of how to run a marathon. I might know that you have to swing your arms and lift your legs. I may even choose to run a marathon, but I will never get into first place. Yet in the marathon of life, God demands perfection. He demands first place.

This leads us to our last point. The choice is critical because of its demands. The choice between life and death is a choice of obedience. While we may be able to affirm what is right and wrong, we often fail to obey. We can say, yes, that is right, and yes, that sounds good, but we fail to obey because there's another force at work in our lives.

It's called sin. And Romans 1 says that while we knew all these things about God, while we knew that He was our creator, while we may even know that He loves us, while we know He is worthy of our worship, Romans 1:25 says we exchange that truth of God for a lie and worship and serve created things rather than the creator. We exchange the truth of God for a lie. Rather than obeying the creator's original design for our lives, which are marked out clearly, we choose to go off the grid and short circuit our lives.

Instead of doing things to bring God glory, we do things to bring ourselves glory. We intentionally choose to do the wrong thing even though we know it's wrong. Well, someone might say, I may not do everything right, but God looks at my heart and He knows that I love Him. Remember what it means to love God. And again, the context explains everything.

Deuteronomy 6:5 says, this is how you love God. Love God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. That is how you love God. Jesus even said that in John 14:15, if you love Me, you will keep My commands. If you love Me, you will keep My commands.

To love Jesus is to be obedient. Every year, we have to pay taxes. Right? And what a joy it is when tax time comes around. Yet when we pay the taxes, the tax man all he asks for is our obedience.

You don't have to love it. In fact, we often don't love it. But you can take your tax form, spit on it, stomp on it, drag it through the mud, and as long as it is legible, you can take it with a grumble in your heart, dump it into the mailbox, and the ATO is happy. Yet with God, it's not simply the cheque that we have to write. It's the heart attitude as well. But someone might ask, if God gives us a clear and critical choice to make and so many people get it wrong, does it mean that there is something defective in the commands we are to follow?

If so many people get it wrong, is abstaining from premarital sex or even extramarital sex with other people just a pipe dream? Was God crazy to expect it from us? Are the commands not to gossip or slander or to idolise people just a nice feel good sentiment? Is it just to make society a little bit nicer and friendlier?

Aren't these commands defective in and of themselves? Don't they point to a different ancient culture that had different expectations to what we have now? Now in an enlightened western world, hasn't things changed? Is there a problem with their commands? Well, the answer is steak.

Steak tastes great to a healthy person. I love steak. But with someone who has the flu, the results are horrible. Steak is chewy. It's moist. It sticks between your teeth. But the problem isn't the steak.

The steak doesn't cause the illness. It only points out the flu. God's commands are not the problem. The problem lies with our heart. So how do we overcome the problem of our hearts that gets revealed in our brokenness and our imperfection when held up to these commands?

How do we overcome the problem of our hearts? The answer is found in verse 19. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you, that I've set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now, choose life so that you and your children may live. Choose life.

Don't be deceived into thinking that sin is the easier, better road to travel on. It's not. It leads to destruction. It leads to death. It leads to unhappiness, and you're setting yourself up against God, who's the eternal giver of life.

Choose life, Moses says. Choosing life is not about our own morality. Don't get me wrong either. It's not about reducing Christianity to a choice between doing what is good versus bad, right versus wrong. Rather, the choice is between our sin, which only and always brings death, and a righteousness, which is the only way to life.

Too often people imagine the choice in Deuteronomy as well as in the rest of the bible as a choice between committing sin and living properly. But death in the bible is not running headlong into sin. Death in the bible is trying to be good without God. Trying to be good without God. And again, Paul makes this clear in the book of Romans.

If you want to do it yourself, he says, you must obey all of God's commandments. All of them. Perfectly, all the time. But friends, we need another option. We need another option.

That choice, the only path to life, we find is found in the one who perfectly was obedient for us. We didn't need to climb our way to heaven to find fellowship with God. Why? Because God came down to us. We didn't need to go down into the depths of the sea to find righteousness with God because Christ went into the depths of sin and death and rose again victoriously.

What is then necessary? What is our choice today? It's the same: to choose life. To choose life. And it was Jesus who said of Himself, I am the way.

I am the truth. I am the life. Everyone who wants to come to God the Father, everyone who wants to satisfy themselves in the glory and the majesty of who He is, needs to come through Me. He needs to come to Me. The choice this morning is to confess your need of Him, to believe in His work on the cross, and to obey His commands to follow Him.

Then, now as justified people, we are declared righteous and perfect. During World War Two, Winston Churchill was faced with a choice. The British secret service had broken the Nazi code and had informed Churchill that the Germans were going to bomb the city of Coventry. He had two choices. Firstly, to evacuate the citizens, save hundreds of lives at the expense of indicating to the Germans that the code was broken, or, two, to take no action, which would kill hundreds but keep the information flowing and possibly save many more lives.

Churchill famously chose the second option. The choice of sacrifice was deemed necessary. Some died so that many others would live. God chose the death of His son so that we might live. So that we would be declared obedient, not based on our own record, not based on our own efforts, but in having our sin paid for by Jesus and His death on the cross.

The choice is before us again this morning. Because of Christ's death, God, who is your life, will empower you, will empower you and can empower you to choose life. God chose the death of His son so that He might enable you to choose life. So choose it and flee from death. Let's pray.

Almighty God, it is difficult to know what to say. It is so clear, and because of it, we stand condemned. The choice is before us, God. And this morning, we hear a message which is, for many of us, not unfamiliar, and for many of us nice to hear. But this is a big choice and a big decision.

And it's not something that we can do lightly. It's not something that can just be dealt with with a convenient altar call, a short sinner's prayer. Like the Israelites, we stand on the precipice between Egypt and the promise, between life and death. Thank you, Lord, for that option.

Thank you that we're not simply condemned to turn back into the wilderness. This morning, Lord, if we have stuff that we need to deal with, if there's sin in our life that cannot go on, we bring it to You. We tell you and we ask You, Lord, to kill it, to destroy it, to cut it out like cancer. We choose life, Lord. We choose You.

Thank you for Jesus. Thank you for Your son. Change our hearts, we pray, Lord. Amen.