My God given right

“I call heaven and earth to witness this day against you that I have set before you life and death, the blessings and the curses; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

“Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies. Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their cry” (Psalm 34:12-15 and Peter also quoted it in 1Peter 3:10-12)

I had to do some soul searching the last two days, and in a specific area of my life I discovered deep at the bottom there was fear. This fear motivated every decision, thought, action, attitude in that specific are of my life.

If in anything I do, my foundation is not God, there’s no point for me to carry on building, because it will either all crumble to the ground here, or it will be burnt under His eyes, when I get to finally see Him. (1 Corinthians 3:11-15)

I am an eternal creature. My body dies but I- the sould never will. So why would I want to spend my days building something that has not got an eternal foundation. Do I take anything with me from here which is not eternal?

God Gave us free will, this desire to be free to choose. If anyone would tell us at any point that we no longer have it, we would fight to keep it, because we understand and we know that this is a God given right- a gift. God loves our free will, and we bring joy to His heart when we use it to choose good, because He knows we can always opt not to do that.

He wants us to seek His Face, to seek His guidance in all the aspects of our lives, to put His Word in our hearts and get to know Him, but there comes a day when He wants us to use all these “tools” and choose, make a decision. If we sit there and wait for Him to choose for us, why did He even give us free will? Do we need it?

Philip Yancey talks about the difference between approaching God in a childish or a childlike manner. By childish we understand someone who can’t tie his own shoe laces, whom can’t be trusted with any kind of responsibility. Childlike, is what Yeshua meant when He told us that we have to be like children in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven- full of trust.

If all I do is wait for God to make decisions in my place, I personally think is a way of avoiding the responsibility of my own choice. If I say God took me to a certain place and I don’t like it there, then I can blame God for it, because after all He’s the one who brought me there, all I’ve done was follow, right? But if I am the one who chooses, then I have only me to blame and that’s hard to carry. “Yeah, but if I am the one who chooses then where do I get to see His grace, His mercy, His guidance, where do I get to use my trust in Him?”

Lets say I have to make a decision about something. I walk with God everyday, I think I know His character (a little bit at least), I read His Word, I pray, I fast and I seek His will for that specific situation. The time comes for me to give an answer/ make a decision and I still can’t say 100% I know what I’m suppose to do. I get to use my faith and prove my trust in God, when I take the step and I believe He will bless my step. That very moment is when, even though I am a bit nervous, I feel peace and trust, because I know that not even for a second do I step alone. I believe He loves me enough to sustain me every day of my life. And if the step I happened to take proves not to be the best one, it’s all part of the lesson called life, and I have within my grasp His mercy and His grace which can turn any bad thing for good.

Many times I will choose well and the result will not be good for me. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t choose good, it just means that I live in a world a bit alien to the things of God, which most of the time stands against the things I stand for. Therefore trouble is part of the journey, as Yeshua already warned us.

I think there are two ways a human can relate to God- as a child or as an adult. There seem to be three phases in the human life- childhood, adulthood and parenthood. We will never be God’s “parents”- so we only have two options left. My friend, Tina, sent me a song yesterday. The lyrics were “Dancing with my Father God in fields of grace.” I love that thought, because this is something I could never do with my earthly father. I feel many times I’m relating to God as a child and I absolutely cherish that feeling of comfort, safety- like nothing in this universe can touch me- pure joy…but I want more than that. I want more than feelings. I want God to speak to me. To be able to tell me anything He wishes, because I will not turn my back and I will not run away or rebel. In short, I want God to be able to trust me not to take off whenever things are hard, because I don’t like it. I would love to be an adult in God with the joy of a child. I want to use this free will that He gave me and choose good, choose to bless, seek peace and chase it. And at the end when I’ll stand before Him and He will ask me “What have you done with your life, Emma?” to be able to tell Him. “I waisted a lot of it, Adonai sheli. I rebelled, I fought You, I fell and I ran away, but a day came along when I began to use all that You’ve given me and I chose good and life For Your Name’s sake.”

I come from a very much Christian background, the sort of Christian background where you just do it, you don’t ask questions. I am very familiar with the doctrine “God must live through me,” and in its true biblical sense, I love this idea. It seems to have its main foundation on apostle Paul’s letter to Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!(Galatians 2:20-21)

All over his letters to the churches he planted, apostle Paul talks about a life which has its roots in God’s Spirit, where I no longer do the things I used to do- “works of the flesh” but instead for the sake of the One who sacrificed everything for me, I choose good, blessing, life- “the works of the Spirit”. He does not tell us we are dead. He actually says ”The life I live in the body, I live by faith”. That implies I am still alive and kicking, not paralysed in one place not doing anything or making any choices.

What has been crucified with Christ? What is it that’s dead? The old Emma- the Emma that lived only for her own desires. Nowhere do I find these verses telling me I no longer exist, they actually tell me I am alive but I don’t live for myself anymore, I live for Yeshua, trusting completely in what He did for me. And I do not live this life trying to impress Him or gain His approval. I simply live everyday for His sake, seeking to choose good rather than evil.

“Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16b-17)

We all live and make choices every single day. The difference between me and those who do not believe in God, is that I live and choose out of love for God, they live and choose for their own sake.