"We Are A People Of Choice"

Sermon Transcript for Aug 13, 2000

By Rev. Tim McKaig

Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 30:11-20

 

It’s great to be back here at Grace Church and have the opportunity to break bread with you this morning. It’s always good to be able to have fellowship and renew acquaintances with old friends and to make new friends. Deuteronomy, Chapter 30, beginning with Verse 11: Moses is speaking to the children of Israel as they are poised and ready to enter and take possession of the Promised Land. And he says, "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 we may obey it?’ Nor is it beyond the seas so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ No, the Word is very near 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’ll live in 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’ve set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now chose 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 to your Fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now one more time. This day I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life!"

Let’s pray together. Father we thank you this morning for this time and this place. We thank you for this opportunity to worship you and for your presence with us. We pray this morning that the Holy Spirit might have his way in our lives and that we might leave this place walking closer with you than when we entered in. And so we thank you for your Word, may it be only your Word, Lord. May all the chaff be blown away. In Jesus name. Amen.

I was delighted when Pastor Mike called and asked if I’d be a part of this tent service this morning and this great heritage of our church. I began thinking about what it was that maybe God would have me to say to you this morning; even prayed about that. I began thinking about Grace Church and the church that I grew up in and the churches that I’ve served while pastoring and many of the churches where I go today to preach. And what I saw was not similarities but differences. I was beginning to get a little bit scared. I began trying to figure out ways that maybe I would back out of this gracefully. And then the Holy Spirit said, "Maybe you ought to try thinking about the similarities." So I took a piece of paper and wrote down some similarities between this church and places I have been. You know, at the end of that list there was one that just jumped out at me. See, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, or whether you attend a big church, a small church, whether you live in town or out in the country, we are all people who day by day make choices. We all have choices to make. Now we live in different places. And so some of our choices are different. We have different choices we have to make. But we are people of choice.

You know, some of the choices we make are a little mundane. A couple of years ago my wife and I, we were living in this house, and the people who owned it said they wanted to remodel it for us to help us meet our needs a little bit better. We said, "Thank you." And so, we had a contractor come in and my wife was able to design what she thought we needed. And so the day came and the contractor came and he said, "You need to go pick out some plumbing fixtures. Get some faucets." And I said, "What do I do? I’ve never gotten faucets before." He said, "Well, go over to Lowes and see if you like anything they have and get them and if you don’t go somewhere else." So we went over to Lowes and we got to the plumbing section and asked the man, "Can we go see some faucets." And he said, "Sure." He took us. My wife was walking along with him. I was lagging behind looking at other stuff because I knew I wasn’t going to make this decision. She turned the corner and went down the faucet aisle and as she turned she went, "Ahhhh". I rushed on ahead to see what she was gasping at and I turned the corner and I went, "Ahhhh". The aisle went back about that second pole there. Both sides of the aisle there were nothing but faucets. Now since I wasn’t picking out what we wanted, I just went ahead and counted - 157 different kinds of faucets!

Now, we’ve all got choices to make in life. Yeah, some of those choices are mundane. But some of the choices that we have to make are critical. The most critical choice that you will ever make in your life is what are you going to do with Jesus Christ. Are you going to allow Him to be your Savior and Lord or are you going to reject Him? Now, you know, we’re spiritual people. If you’re going to reject Jesus as your Savior and Lord, then my question is; "What are you going to choose to become your God? Because you see, we’re not going to live in a vacuum apart from spiritual things. We are going to pick something that will be the focus of our lives, that will be the ultimate thing of importance in our lives. So what’s it going to be? Who’s it going to be? I wonder who is going to be your God? Well, if Jesus is going to be your Savior or your Lord, then you get to choose how that will affect your life. Are you going to be somebody who pigeonholes church for that 60-minutes on Sunday morning or will you choose to allow the Holy Spirit to have his way in your life and choose to allow him to give guidance to your thoughts and your speech and your actions.

We’re people of choice. Every day there are choices that we have to make. Now you know what? I can’t see all of your eyes. If I could I know where you’re sitting. Somebody here is saying, "Wait a minute preacher. You’re not right. Me, I’m not going to make any choices. I’m just going to slide through life floating down the river wherever the current takes me. I’m not going to make any choices." Well, really? You just made a choice not to make any choices. We’re people who make choices every day of our lives. And the choices that you make, even this morning the choices that you make, are going to effect you for the rest of your life and, indeed, for all eternity. And they are not just going to effect you. But they’re going to effect the people who come behind you. The people whose lives you intercept now. And even the people who have come before you. We are people of choice.

That’s what Moses was saying to the Israelites. See, they were standing on the edge of the Promised Land ready to go in and take possession. But that’s not the first time they’d been there. You see, they’d been there once before. They’d come and they’d camped right on the line before going in to Canaan. And Moses had sent in spies to check out what kind of land they had and how good it was. And those spies were there 40 days and 40 nights in the land. They came back and gave this report. "The land is wonderful. The fruit is plentiful. It’s abundant. But the people are like giants and we are like grasshoppers and they are too powerful for us." Excuse me! Too powerful? You probably remember. It’s too bad the Israelites didn’t. You see, they’d forgotten how they’d been slaves in the land of Egypt and how God had heard their cries and how He’d sent Moses on down to bring them out. Moses went to Pharaoh and he said, "Let my people go." Pharaoh said, "No way!" And so God sent some plagues. Ten of them as I recall before Pharaoh was willing to relent and let the Israelites go. You know, they weren’t any more than out of town and across the border when Pharaoh realized what a mistake he’d made. And so he sent his army after the Israelites to bring them back. Well, the Israelites were moving as fast as they could; as fast as you could move several million people. And all of a sudden somebody noticed a big cloud of dust back behind them was Pharaoh’s army. They scurried a little faster. But Pharaoh’s army kept coming. It wasn’t long before the children of Israel found themselves face to face with the Red Sea. And here came Pharaoh’s army. Moses took his staff in his right hand, held it up, and the waters of the sea parted. And the Bible says that the children of Israel passed through like they were walking on dry land. Pharaoh’s army got up there and they thought, "We’re going to try that too." They got half way through or so and the walls came tumbling down and some of them did the dead man’s float.

And so now Israel, here they are poised on the land of the Promised Land, they’re facing a new enemy. They think God has gone soft. So God said, "Okay, you don’t want what I promised to give you. Come back again in about 40 years and we’ll try again. And all of a sudden Israel found itself out in the midst of the wilderness because of the choices that they had made. You know, we’ve got to be careful about the choices we make. We’ve got to be careful about the choices that we make!

I was 17 years old when I invited Jesus Christ to become my Savior. Just had graduated high school; was ready to go off to college. That was a dreadful time for me to invite Jesus to be my Savior, because you see, college came way too soon. It was a time of great the separation. When kids go off to college and they separate themselves from everything their mom and dad have tried to tell them for years and years. And they separate themselves from the church. And that was all compounded in the late 60's by the upheaval and strife in our country. And I hadn’t hidden the word in my heart. So I began to make some choices that weren’t honoring God. I began to make some choices that were, in fact, dishonoring God. Some choices, well...my faith had grown up quickly like the seeds that were spread along the rocky ground, but the choices I made helped it to die just as quickly. And I woke up one morning and I was in the wilderness. And I wondered how in the world I had gotten there and if there was any way out.

And I wandered around in the wilderness for 17 years trying to find my way out. I’m thankful God doesn’t leave us where we are and I’m thankful that he hears the prayers of the faithful saints. And I’m thankful that some of those faithful saints loved me enough to pray for me. After 17 years of wandering, 17 years of having traded abundant life in the Promised Land for the wilderness, someone came to me and helped me find my way out and back to the cross.

I was reflecting on that experience some time later and it occurred to me that there were a couple of things that maybe I could learn from that. One of those things that I learned was that you can never get farther away from God than His grace will extend or His love will extend. Even if you are in the wilderness this morning, please know that God is with you. You know the Psalmist wrote in the 139^th Psalm, "Where can I go to get away from you? Where can I go to make my escape? Can I go up in to the heavens? No, you’re there. Can I make my bed in the depths of the pit? No, you’re there." And the Psalmist concluded there was no place that we can go to get away from God. If you are in that wilderness this morning, struggling and trying to discover if God cares about you in your current state, know that He does. He loves you and wants you, desires for you to find your way out of the wilderness.

And then the second thing I learned was when you wander in the wilderness everybody has the same job. Everybody in the wilderness is a garbage collector. We collect garbage as we walk around and we put them in the trash bag. And it’s not like you see wandering down the highway. Sometimes you see people out cleaning and they get one trash bag full and they just drop it for somebody to pick up. When you’re in the wilderness wandering you collect this trash, this garbage, and even though the bag gets full you continue to carry it with you. When I came out of the wilderness after 17 years I had a bunch of trash bags full of garbage. And bless God’s heart, moment by moment and hour by hour and day by day and week by week and month by month and year by year, He cleansed me of that garbage that I had picked up in that wilderness.

But another thing I learned, He cleanses the garbage but He doesn’t change the consequences of your wilderness experience. One of the consequences I brought out of the wilderness was a daughter. She’s 22 ½ now. Just graduated from Ball State and has a lot of promise and hope for life. She loves the Lord and she loves her daddy. And I’m really thankful for that. I can’t imagine what life would be like without her. But I’ve got to tell you my life isn’t the same because of that wilderness experience and that consequence of my life.

So God says to us, "Today I set before you life and death, blessings and curses, prosperity and destruction. Now choose life!" Did you notice there’s no middle ground there? Life, death...no middle ground. No fence sitting. Fence sitting is a fine art you know. You’ve got to stay perfectly balanced or you’ll fall off on one side or the other. You can’t afford to fall off on the wrong side. About 11 or 12 years ago I was serving three little churches down on the Ohio River and we had a youth group of about twenty people. And we took those teenagers on a retreat one weekend. I’d gotten a friend of mine from the seminary to come up and be the retreat leader. And we did the spiritual stuff, you know, on the first night and before we could send the kids to bed they said, "We’ve got to play our favorite game--sardines." I see a couple of smiles. Have you played sardines? It’s a glorified hide and seek only there’s one hider and everybody seeks. And you play it in the dark. It makes it a little more challenging. So you seek the hider and then when you find him or her you hide with them. So down at the end of the game you get 15 or 20 kids hiding underneath a sink. Hence the name--sardines. Well, Kirby, our retreat leader, was the one to hide. And he hid and we began to look for him. Normally within 10 or 15 minutes we’ve always found the hider and everybody’s in there and we’re all giggling. We looked for Kirby for 10 or 15 minutes; no sign of him. We looked for him for 20 or 30 minutes; no sign of him. Then at about 45 minutes we knew that somebody had found him because, you know, when somebody finds him the noise level begins to increase. Well, after about an hour we had all hidden with him. And there were 22 or 23 of us crammed in to a stall in the boy’s bathroom. See, Kirby had hidden on the middle partition between the two stalls. Do you know how wide those partitions are? He had been up there hiding, sitting for over an hour before he finally got down. And he shared a couple of things with us. You can’t sit on a really narrow ledge on a fence very long before your sitter gets sore. And when your sitter gets sore it’s really easy to fall off. Don’t fall off on the wrong side.

God said. "Today I set before you life and death, blessing and curses. Now choose life!" He didn’t take a chance on us. Don’t take a chance on life. He didn’t take a chance on us. He sent Jesus, His beloved, only begotten Son to die on Calvary’s cross so that you and I might have life. And then He sent his Holy Spirit that we might be guided through the day to day activity of life so that we might make choices that honor Him. Now choose life! In all of the choices that you make, all the choices that you make that will shape your life, choose life, and blessings, and prosperity.

A couple of year’s ago I was preaching a youth camp meeting over on the Indiana/Illinois line. It was Camp Illiana. My wife and youngest daughter, Katie, did not go with me and so every night after the services were over and after my responsibilities for the evening was done, I’d sneak up to the kitchen and I’d call home. I don’t do very well when I’m gone from home for very long and so I needed that life line connected. And Annetta had just put Katie to bed. Katie was 5 ½ almost 6 at the time. And she said, "I’ve got to tell you what Katie said tonight. We’d gone to bed and she’d had her bible story and prayed. The bible story that night was the story of Jesus’ ascension. You know how Jesus took His followers and disciples out to the Mount of Ascension and He sort of got elevated and the disciples jaws descended down to the ground. And these two guys in white said, "Men of Galilee what’s going on, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you know that this same Jesus who has just ascended into the heavens will come again some day?" The room was quite; Annetta was just walking out. Katie said, "Mom, is that true?" Annetta said, "Is what true?" And Katie said, "That Jesus is going to come again?" And Annetta said, "Yes it is honey. It’s in the Bible so we know it’s true." Katie said, "Can He come tomorrow?" And Annetta said, "Well, honey, we don’t know the time when He will come again; but, yes, He could come tomorrow." And Katie got out of bed and got on her knees and said, "Mom, I need to pray again. I need to pray that in case Jesus comes tomorrow, I’ll make better choices then than I did today."

Isn’t that what life’s about? Isn’t that what this faith journey we’re on is all about? Trying to make better choices tomorrow than we did today? Trying to make more Godly choices today than we did yesterday! God says, "Now choose life! Choose life and all its abundance. Following after me. I’ve given you the Savior and I’ve given you the Spirit, now choose life!"

I’m going to pray and then Darla’s going to come sing again. And just as you’re sitting here, as you’re listening to the prayer, as you are praying the song with Darla, I’d just like to ask you to reflect on what it is that is going on in your life now. And ask God if you’re making wise choices. Now listen, I’m not ignorant of who I’m talking to today. I know there are more preachers in this church than there are in some towns! And I know that there are more people devoted to Christ than there are in a lot of places. And yet I’ve just got to tell you. I issued this challenge in the first service and I was sitting right here listening to Darla sing and Jesus said to me, "Tim, there’s something in your heart that offends me. You’ve made a bad choice. Choose me instead." You listen. Listen to the song and ask God to show you about the choices that you are making and listen so that you might choose life.

Let’s pray: Father, thank you for your Word and for your blessing of it. May it be sealed in our hearts for our time of need. And if that time of need is right now, Lord will your Holy Spirit come to life in a way that we’ve not experienced; that we’ve not seen. And enable us with strength and courage and wisdom to choose life, to choose you, and to choose those choices that honor you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.