Faith Life Church (Praise and Worship Team sing The Lord our God is a Good God) ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ Great is the Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great is the Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great is the Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great is the Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ Great are You Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great are You Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great are You Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ Great are You Lord ♪ ♪ Greatly to be praised ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪ ♪ For the Lord our God is a good God ♪ ♪ Praise His name ♪♪ And there is coming a day when He's going to say, everybody is going to say, "I called heaven and Earth..." And heaven and Earth is going to say, "We heard you, God. You told them it was their choice. So they can squawk and holler all they want to but heaven was there and earth was there, we heard you when You said it Lord. You said, 'It's your choice. You choose.'" Friend, if you look back in your life, back as a child when you're old enough to understand, back in junior high, high school, college, prep school, work - the choices you made, the decisions you made - decisions determine direction. Direction determines destination. Or "destiny" is a word off of the word "destination." All the things that are happening in people's lives, the places they're winding up, is that because God chose that for them and that was His foreordained plan for their life? Or does it have anything to do with the choices they made? You got religious tradition, and you have this Book. Which one do you choose? Choose. What did it actually say? Read it again, verse nineteen. "I am now giving you the choice between life and death, between God's blessing and God's curse, and I call heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Choose life." He said it's your choice. I'm going to tell you which one to choose, choose life. But is He making people choose? Is He forcing people to choose the right one? No. No, He's not. He's not. Somebody say it out loud: "God give me the choice. (Congregation repeats) It's my choice. Not His. He gave it to me." So many things are like this. This is the thing I'm believing for and I can already tell light is coming. Can you tell light is coming? This is going to change some things about how we see and how we operate. "Brother Keith you don't believe God is all-knowing and all-powerful, knows the end from the beginning, and that His plans and purposes are going to stay?" I absolutely believe every one of those things. I do. But I believe that God in His power, and in His knowledge and wisdom, gave us the choice. Could He have done it differently? I suppose so. But He didn't. In His power and ability He said, "The choice is yours." And you can't leave up to Him what He left up to you. Let me give you this example. Let's say that I'm a farmer, I've got fields and you're going to help me. And I have this field of corn and I got tractors and equipment and I have trucks and barns and silos and stuff. And I tell you that's my field, that's my stuff, that's my equipment, that's my land, my crop, but I want you to take care of it for me. I'm giving you the authority to run any of the machinery, any of the fuel you need, any of the money you need, fertilizer and seed. You take care of what needs to happen so we get a good crop. Now I'll be checking back in with you regularly. If you need help, you call on me. But you do this for me. So three weeks later somebody comes by and you're sitting on the porch. And they say, "What about the corn crop?" You say, "That's Brother Keith's corn crop." "Don't you need to get the ground ready? Don't you need to do this?" "You know, that's Brother Keith's crop and he's going to do what he's going to do. And it's up to him, it's not up to me." Is that true? That's not true. "I'm just waiting on Brother Keith." Is that true? No. Do I need to hold your hand and help you to start the tractor and tell you every which row to start on? Do I need to tell you every little detail of every second of every day? No, because you have a brain. And you can think. Right? Do you know what we're talking about here? Do we see parables like this that Jesus described? Exactly like this. Friend, He's left a lot of stuff up to us. He's given us a lot of freeway. He said, "I'm giving you the choice. Choose life." Choose life. Somebody said out loud: "I choose (Congregation repeats) I choose life." With me to Joshua please, the twenty fourth chapter. Joshua twenty- four. Joshua 24:14, and I'm going to read to you from the Easy-To-Read translation. "Then Joshua said to the people, 'Now you have heard the Lord's words. So you must respect the Lord and sincerely serve Him. Throw away the false gods that your ancestors worshiped. That was something that happened a long time ago on the other side of the Euphrates River and in Egypt. Now you must serve only the Lord. But maybe you don't want to serve the Lord.'" Are there people that don't want to serve the Lord? Lots of them. Lots of them. Maybe you don't want to serve the Lord. "You must choose for yourselves today." You have to choose. You have to choose. How many know you can choose to believe, you can choose to doubt. You can choose to receive it, you can choose to reject it. You can choose to do it, you can choose not to do it. Right? You can choose to remember it, you can choose to forget it. You can choose to come to church and hear messages like these, or you can choose to layup in the bed and forget about it. You can choose to believe que sera sera, whatever will be will be, and it ain't up to me. Or you can believe this. I said, you can believe this. How many understand this is radically different for much of the church world, isn't it? I told you about the guy pointing the finger in my face. You'll find this. People who are religious minded and legalistic, but don't know God, are very demanding. You'll find out about them. They're demanding. They're out to police the body. They're going to straighten everybody out whether they like it or not. "God is sovereign!" You could tell by the way they say it, they don't know Him. They don't know Him at all. This is how the Pharisees sounded. This is how the Sadducees sounded; head full of knowledge, nothing in their heart. Now I'm not going to pretend to tell you that neither me or you are going to understand now or in the next six months all about God's wisdom, and His plans, and His abilities, and His power. He is awesome. I said, He is awesome. He's amazing. He's amazing. But, these sweeping, blanket statements that He is running everything and controlling everything, it's just not true. Scriptures contradict it. He said, "You choose." You choose. He said in verse fifteen, "You must choose for yourselves. Today you must decide who you will serve. Will you serve the gods that your ancestors worshiped when they lived on the other side of the Euphrates River?" Was it gods will when their forefathers chose to do that? If they chose to do it now, would be the will of God? Will God let them do something that is not His will? Yes. "Or will you serve the gods of the Amorites who lived in this land? You must choose for yourselves." Tell your neighbor. Say: "You must choose for yourself." Congregation: You must choose for yourself. You must choose for yourself. Because God is not going to choose for you. I can't, and your momma and daddy can't, your brothers and sisters can't. Tell the person on the other side of you: "You must choose for yourself." Congregation: You must choose for yourself. You have to choose, you have to choose for yourself. Do you or not? You have to choose for yourselves, but I like what Joshua said here. "But as for me and my house," my bunch, my family, "we," we have made our choice, we've made our choice. We, "Will serve the Lord." We're going to believe Him, we're going to love Him, we're going to pursue Him, we're going to hear Him, we're going to receive Him, we're going to obey Him, and it's going to be well with our soul. We're going to be blessed when we come in, when we go out, blessed in our basket and store, blessed what our hand finds to do. Blessed. Blessed! Blessed! Friends, can you see? You make the right decisions, you get the right results. You get the wrong decision, make the wrong decision, you get wrong, bad results. And if you're consistently getting bad results, what should you look at? Look at your choices. Get a revelation - you zigged when you should have zagged. You did this when you should've done that. Come on, really now. If things were going good and you're making progress and it quit and you just started going down, down, down - how many know you need to look back and go whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What happened here? Because the path of the just doesn't get darker and darker, it gets brighter and brighter to the full-day Sun. I know I was praying for a young man, this was several years ago. I prayed for him several times. And boy, his life is going from bad to worse. And then much worse. And he came on my heart again one day when I was teaching at Rhema and I was in my office one afternoon I got off my chair in and knelt down and I started praying for him and said God... And it was like the Lord didn't want to hear it. He spoke to my heart, I don't mean I heard a voice, but He spoke to my heart strongly. He said, "I gave him two things to do. I told him get a job, and keep it. I told him to go to church, and be faithful. And until he does those things, nothing will change." And I got up off the floor and sat down in my chair. How many understand there's a lot of stuff we don't know. We don't know what God has told people or the choices that they made and haven't made, but how many understand and believe that God is never at fault. He is never lax for not helping somebody. What He is, is long- suffering and patient while folks persistently make the wrong choices. Oh, but His mercy endures forever. How many know His mercy endures forever - as long as there is breath, there's hope. And God is on the throne. So I just sat down and said Lord, I just ask You for mercy. And I prayed another prayer. I said Lord, grant him repentance to the acknowledging of the truth that he may recover himself out of the snare of the devil. Repentance is a gift. Thank You Lord. Look with me in Philippians, the first chapter. Philippians one, Paul is speaking by the Spirit and he has already - if you read Romans, you read verses First and Second Corinthians and the other epistles, you'll see that man, he had been through some stuff. He recounts in Corinthians about all the times he was beaten, shipwrecked, betrayed and all that kind of thing. He had been in jail. But none of that - those things described was suffering because he messed up, that was him doing what the Lord told him to do. But in the middle of it he had grace. He was healed, he was raised from the dead, he had financial and material needs met, right? He was redeemed from the curse the law, though he was suffering for his faith and obedience. But now towards the end of his life in Philippians 1:20, "According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death." We talked about that in our last series, Victory Over Death. "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Let me read this to from the New Century version, the NCV. "To me the only important thing about living is Christ, and dying would be profit for me. If," somebody say: "If." Congregation: If. If, there's that word. If, "I continue living in my body, I will be able to work for the Lord. I do not know what to choose - living or dying." All kind of theologians would jump on Paul at this point, wouldn't they? They would say, "Paul, Paul, Paul. 'Gawd' is sovereign. And for you to imagine that you have anything to do with when you die is preposterous." Apparently he didn't know that. And if he didn't know it, you don't need to know it, right? "No, no, no. God is in control. And it is appointed unto man a time to die." That's a misquote of the Scriptures. The Scripture didn't say that. "It's been appointed to man once to die." Not a time. We've already shared Scriptures that showed you can add to or cut in half. "And Paul when your number's up, maybe 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, maybe early in the morning on a Saturday, when your number is up..." Apparently not. I said apparently not. Because Paul is saying, "Which one I'm going to choose, I don't know. Yet." Can you accept this? Keep reading. "It is hard to choose between the two," he said. He's acting like he actually has something to do with this. Isn't he? "I want to leave this life and be with Christ, which is much better, but you need me," you need help. (Laughter) Others have been in that same dilemma many times in this day and age. "I'm ready to go, I would like to get out of here," and then they look at their family and friends and people that they minister to and go, "Boy, you still got a way to go, don't you? I mean, you do need a lot of help." Go? Stay? Go? Stay? Which one will I choose? Is that Bible? Is that New Testament? Is it or not? How many understand if it wasn't true, it wouldn't be in here. If Paul had nothing to do with this and none of it was up to him, and he had no choice or say in the matter of when and how, this could not be in here. If God is in complete control, there can be no if. We definitely got an if. Don't we? "It's hard to choose," he said, "between the two. I wot not which I should choose," the King James says. "I want to leave this life and be this Christ which is much better, but you need me here in the body." And you see him make his decision here. Verse twenty-five. "Since I am sure of this, I know I will stay with you to help you grow and have joy in your faith. You will be very happy in Christ Jesus when I am with you again." He said, "Man, I want to go. I want to go. I want to check out my mansion. I want to see Jesus. I want to see my loved ones. I'm getting tired of this stinking place. But, I could help you. You need my help. But it would be so great to go. But look at you. Okay. I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay. I'm going to live and declare the works of God. I'm going to stay and work some more and help you." Now see, with a lot of folks they find that kind of talk insulting to God that a man is going to stand up and say, "No, I'm going to stay. I'm going to live. I'm going to stay a while longer. I choose to live. I choose to stay." That meant getting through some things, getting through the hardships of prison or any challenges that would come against him and his body or mind, anything else. You have to win some battles. You have to overcome. Right? But do you believe that when you choose in line with God's plan and will, when you and He want the same thing - You and He want the same thing, for the same reasons, for the same end and purpose and plan, you become invincible. You become unconquerable. Because who's bigger than God? But can you choose to leave Him and forsake Him and do your own thing? Can you choose to give up and quit when you know you should keep going and do something else? Can you choose to rebel? Have your own way when you know you should hook and submit and follow through? Oh, yeah. You do, I do, every day. We have a will. We have choices to make, don't we? Every day in the world you can choose right, you can choose wrong. I like what Joshua said, don't you? Let's say it again. Together: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Stand on your feet everybody. "Father I pray for every person in this room or watching by Internet or watching anywhere, that has never publicly confessed You, never made that decision once and for all to give their life to You, that You would draw them powerfully right now by Your Spirit to make the further move. Anybody that has left You and needs to come back to You, draw them, help them to see how far off and cold they have become, that You love them still, You'll forgive them, it can be better than it's ever been, if they make the right choice and come back to You. We ask You to draw these in Jesus' name." Everybody say: "Father God (Congregation repeats) I believe in You. I believe in Your son Jesus, that He died on the cross, He paid the full price for all my sins. I believe You've raised Him from the dead. He's alive right now, King of kings, Lord of lords, soon to come again. Jesus, I boldly proclaim You, confess You Lord of my life. As You help me, I choose to follow You and live for You all my days. Hallelujah."
