Choices

We all have choices to make in this world. I'm not referring to a dinner menu, but real decisions as to where we will draw the line, where we will make our stand.

The World will minimise our decisions. Satan numbs us to the passage of time in our youth. We are given arrogance and a sense of immortality which belies the fragile nature of our existence. We are only guaranteed this heartbeat.

I'll repeat that. This heartbeat.

Just for a moment, consider what you'll regret if you die right now. Who have you not told you love them? What truly important work did you not finish? What decisions about your afterlife have been ignored?

What if this world isn't everything, and like Jesus said there's another coming? What if He was right and you're wrong?

Now I'm not an evangelist. Reading these blog posts should make that clear to anyone who hasn't met me. It's not my primary calling. But I do get moved on occasion to speak about Christ as if someone hasn't met Him. For some reason, perhaps the person reading this post right now, today is one of those days.

I love CS Lewis's books. He has a way in his work of succinctly putting across an argument with grace and clarity. I often come back to Mere Christianity, and his brilliant summing up of Jesus: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

We have only three options about Jesus. That's it. Either madman, devil or God. But Satan will try to put off our choice of which. He sends smokescreens to blind us to the Truth and to either persuade us of Christ's insanity, seek to convince us He never existed or sow doubt and fear to illicit mistrust in God.

A lot of the time, fear is enough. We are afraid of death so we don't think about it, talk about it or consider what's beyond it. We blunder through life, stumbling from one sign pointing us to Christ to another and disregarding them all. Like Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty we miss even the most obvious signs placed right in our path. (Of course we don't then get to trade places later)

Christianity is not an easy walk. It takes guts to walk against the stream of sewage this World pours at us on a daily basis.

We revel in building up an idol just so we can watch it destroy itself. We hold people accountable for things they say and do, but never point that same finger at us. The rich and famous are easy targets. They even point at one another, missing the point that theirs could be the wrong opinion.

I'm considering closing my twitter account, or at least radically cutting out the number of people I follow because I follow certain people just to watch them fall myself. I laughed at Charlie Sheen's public meltdown, - and followed it on Twitter. I actually started following one or two people because of their ongoing meltdowns.

It seems that people fascinate us. They fascinate me. What someone says or does comes back to haunt them years later and out of context. Everything is held up for scrutiny, and when we say or do something out of line with the mainstream of public thought we are lambasted and ridiculed.

It takes guts to choose Christ. Every step of a Christian life opposes the World. Every word we speak against the World opens us up to ridicule. I respect the stand of people like Cliff Richard who achieve fame on the World's terms, accept Christ and then refuse to buckle under the pressure of walking His path in the face of the World.

It's a choice to follow Christ. The decision is one we all have to make eventually. God will defend the choice we make - even if it sends us to Hell.

He'd rather we choose Him.