Choice By Choice

Who are those who fear the LORD? He will show them the path they should choose.

Psalm 25:12

Life is all about choices. Any given day is defined by the hundreds of choices you make about how to spend it. Every single action you take or don’t take is a choice made, a path chosen. How precious is the promise that God will show you the path to choose. A reverent and worshipful heart—the fear of the Lord—will open your mind to his leading.

Life is a whole lot of “small.” Have you noticed? Mostly minutiae and details and ordinariness, punctuated by some drama here and there. If most of life is made up of small moments, then most of obedience must be made up of small acts of obedience. The path of obedience is going to take us off the beaten path and lead us into adventures of faith.

Consider the lame man whom Jesus healed in John 5:1-9. Jesus was in Jerusalem for a feast—probably the Feast of Tabernacles. We find Jesus in a location called the pool of Bethesda, where tradition held that an angel would trouble the water and the first to enter it would be healed.

This location was likely not Jesus’ destination. He is most likely to have cut through it on his way elsewhere. It was a location jam-packed with people in need, none of them seeking out Jesus. But Jesus showed up anyway. He was always alert for the Spirit’s spotlight to fall on someone who just happened to be on his way.

A woman at a well in Samaria. A widowed mother on her way to bury her only son. A man with a palsied hand. A beggar who had been blind from birth. And the lame man at the pool of Bethesda.

They didn’t call out to Jesus; Jesus called out to them. What made him notice these “invisible” lost causes?

Jesus answered that question for us: “The Son . . . does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does” (John 5:19). He was obeying the Father.

Father, show me the right path. Minute by minute, lead me off the beaten path and into the ways of faith.

Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.

A. W. Tozer(1897–1963), American preacher and author