Choices

The practical challenges of your life and mine appear in a never ending series of choices.  Choices about mundane things and choices about things we believe are important.  Should I speak to this person?  Should I go here or there?  Should I follow this or that opportunity?  Should I buy this or that?  Should I marry?  Should I divorce?  Should I smoke, drink, curse, have an affair, look at this pornography, or take this drug?  Imbedded in every choice is an element of right or wrong with respect to pleasing God.   It is not to say that right and wrong is always an issue of good and evil, although some choices are like that.

For Christians it’s about pleasing God and pleasing God should guide our choices.  To make that kind of choice I need spiritual discernment.  As I have lived my life over the past six decades, I’ve confronted a never-ending series of choices.  It has become increasingly obvious that my ability to make choices that are pleasing to God is directly related to my knowledge and training in the truth of Christ.   This is actually one of the main indicators of mature Christianity.  Consider Hebrews 5:14 -  “But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. (NASB)”

Ironically, God never intended man, as he was created, to have to struggle with issues of right and wrong.  Man was created as a vessel for the Spirit of God.  The created Adam was created with the life of God in him, which gave him an awareness of what God was saying and what God was doing.  Adam’s human spirit was ‘alive’ to God.  After Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the forbidden tree, their spirit died to God and they lost their supernatural, direct connection to the perfect, divine, Body of Truth.  They became spiritually dead to God.  Their rebellion (sin) against God was the cause.

It is interesting to see that the fruit of the forbidden tree was called the ‘fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.’  Prior to their rebellion, Adam and Eve never had to consider there was such a thing as good and evil, or right and wrong.  After they rebelled, the knowledge of the concept of good and evil became their curse and the rest of us have been struggling and failing with choices of right and wrong ever since.