A fork in the road
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the gods that your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Joshua 24:15
When you come to an intersection like the one in the picture, you have to make a choice. If you do not, you might end up driving your car into someone's bathroom. That happened at this particular intersection two times in as many years.
Robert Frost, in his poem "The Road not Taken" grapples with this idea. He made his choice, and in the last line he exults, "And that has made all the difference."
In the verse at the top of the page, the children of Israel were challenged by God to choose who they would serve. It is important to understand where the children of Israel were spiritually at this point. This was after the redemption from Egypt at the exodus, after the forty years of purging in the wilderness, and after the victorious living in conquest of the Promised Land. The children of Israel were never stronger, spiritually. The assumption is that they would have chosen to serve the LORD at this point. However, it is clear that they still had to make that choice.
According to Isaiah 43:7, we have been created to glorify God. According to Romans 4:20 it is our faith that gives glory to God. Yet, according to Romans 12:3 God has given faith to every man. So God has given us the faith that we need to glorify God by trusting Him to get us to heaven. The only thing that is left for us to do is to choose to trust Jesus to save us. It is not so much the faith that glorifies God as it is the choice to place that faith in the finished work of Jesus as our complete provision for salvation.
In like manner, God gives us everything that we need to serve Him. He gives us time, material resources, ability, opportunity, and energy to accomplish His will. However, it is our choice whether os not we use God’s resources for His work. It is really the choice that glorifies God.
A man was recently overheard saying, “If you are truly saved, you will serve the Lord.” If that is the case, then we cannot glorify God by our service, because we no longer have a choice in our service for Him. The "If you're saved you will serve" point of view is extremely dangerous, because it makes the child of God unaware that he must constantly be vigilant to the fact that he can choose to use God’s resources for selfish ends.
Pastor Jerry
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