It struck me that at the beginning of the year most people make choices. They choose to make New Year’s Resolutions.
I wonder how many of those resolutions include Loosing Weight and/or getting fit? I wonder how many of those people made the same resolution last year too, possibly even the year?
Me too. Every year starts the same. I have the same conversation with myself about my weight. I must loose weight, and I decide to do something and every year I find little or no change! So why is that? Why is it that I (we) find ourselves in the cycle of making right choices but not seeing them through?
As I pondered this I began to think about what really stops me doing the things I have decided to do regardless of what it is. It could be to loose weight, or get fit, but it could just as easily be for you something like to get a new job, to move house, start a new business. What stops us?
Surely there is more to it than just MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICES … I mean I have made the right choice to loose weight right … but I don’t … so there must be more to it than that!
When we think about making choices we often boil it down to right and wrong. It comes down to making the right choice or the wrong choice doesn’t it?
What God showed me was that my problem, be it with my weight, or making decisions to connect to people who don’t know Jesus is not choosing the right from the wrong, but the right from the convenient!
It takes courage to make the right choice. It takes courage to stick with it, to change but so often its not that we chose to the wrong thing, but we choose to do the convenient thing. Making the right choice to speak to someone about Jesus, to connect with them, takes courage but to let the opportunity go is easier. The convenient option is simpler, less stressful, easier and less demanding so we, without thinking often, take the easy option rather than the right option.
Every single day we make choices that determine if we are courageous or cowardly. I would say that in any given day you have 10s, 100s maybe even 1000s of situations where you choose between the right thing and the convenient thing. Having made New Years Resolutions or set your goals and objectives for the year you will have many, many opportunities to stick to your conviction or to allow yourself to cave in for the sake of comfort, greed, approval or an easier life. As you consider those resolutions, goals and objectives you can be sure that each day you will have opportunities to take a carefully thought out risk, or to crawl into a shrinking shell of safety, security and inactivity.
You can choose to go out of your way to connect with people so as to connect them with Jesus or you can chose the soft option and just connect with your Christian mates. You can choose to call the visitor to the church you met on Sunday or you can take convenient option and assume someone else will do it. You can chose to meet up with the visitor to your cell during the week, or give them a call so they feel welcome or you can choose the more convenient solution and wait for them to ask you.
These choices come our way everyday, in rapid succession. We face them so frequently that we forget that we are even making them, and we sometimes find ourselves going with the flow instead of carefully making courageous choices.
2 Timothy 1:7 (NRSV)
for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
So you think Timothy was a shrinking violate? Or was he a good man just like you and me, but like all of us often chose the convenient over the right! I wonder if his tendency was to take the easy road rather than the right road. Made the cowardly decision rather than the bold one?
This is why so many of us make the same new years resolutions each and every year … because we so often choose the convenient rather than take courage and do what’s right! We can choose to believe God and trust him, even though we do not always understand his ways, or we can cower in corners of doubt, fear and cowardice.
Lets make this year the one where not only do we decide but we also brush away the convenient alternatives as they come throughout the year. Lets make this the year where we chose to believe God and operate in that spirit of power rather than the cowardliness of convenience!
