I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH, CHOOSE LIFE!

IN THE DAYS OF HIS POWER SERIES.

TOPIC: I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH, CHOOSE LIFE!

COMPILED EDITED BY:-
Rev. Innocent Peace-Udochukwu
President Living Fountain Ministries Int’l LIFOM.

“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:”
Deuteronomy 30:19

Life is full of choices. In-fact, living a godly life is a moment by moment choice. God speaks through Moses, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today…”

The word “Deuteronomy” means “The second giving of the Law.” You can find the Ten Commandments listed here as well as Exodus. But the audiences are different. In Exodus 20, God gives the Law to Israel as they begin their 40 years in the wilderness. In Deuteronomy, Moses is presenting the law to the next generation— those who would enter into the Promised Land. Those not born when the Law was given the first time.

Life is a gift from God. It is always a gift from God. There is never a time when life is not a gift from God. It is God who made us, God who gives us life, and God who promises to sustain that life that He has granted to us no matter what.
When Adam and Eve were created they were not spoken into being as was the rest of Creation. God fashioned Adam out of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.
Because man was alone, God made a helper for him from his rib, who came out of the womb of man, and God called her woman, and gave her to the man. Together, as male and female, they bore and reflected the image of God Himself. They were holy. They were eternal. They had face to face communication with the Lord who had made them. They were God’s stewards in the garden, having dominion over all of the creation.
There was no distinction between “earthly life” and “eternal life.” It was one and the same.
But something happened to this eternal life and fellowship with God that Adam and Eve possessed.
God expressly commanded them not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the garden. But along comes Satan, inhabiting a serpent, tricking Eve up by asking a simple question… “Did God really say you should not eat of that tree?” That’s all it took to get the wheels spinning in her brain to the point where she convinced herself that God was holding back on her, and she makes a choice to disobey God. Adam, likewise, is pulled into this situation by Satan and Eve, and he, too, eats of the literally forbidden fruit. In doing so, Adam and Eve chose death.
It wasn’t Satan’s fault; it was theirs.
That eternal life that they had? It ended.

They believed Satan’s Lie: “You will be like God, you shall not die”, but the truth was “You shall not be like God, you shall die.” Ironically, they already were like God and by their decision eternally gave up the image of God. Eternal consequences from choosing death. And they didn’t just choose death for themselves, but for all mankind. They chose death in your place before you had a say in it.
Ah, but there was still eternal life. God cannot “uncreate” what He has already made. To do so would contradict Who He is and the creation He made. Now for humans, so it seems, there would be two lives— earthly and eternal that would be eternally divorced from each other. Their once-eternally, never ending life would now end in death. Returning to the dust from which they came. And eternal life? That would be spent with the devil and his angels eternally in hell, forever separated from God in heaven.
For reasons only known to the Father, driven by His love for His now fallen Creation, God sends His only begotten Son into the world to reunite eternal life with our physical life by rejoining us to Himself through the Sacrifice and forgiveness of sins given to us by Jesus, received through faith in Christ alone. Without Christ, those who do not believe in this only way to the Father, eternal life and physical life remain forever separated with the conclusion being damnation on the Last Day.

MAKE THE CHOICE TO FOLLOW GOD INSTEAD OF YOUR FEELINGS.

”And you will make a new start, listening obediently to God, keeping all His commandments that I’m commanding you today.” – Deuteronomy 30:8

1. Listen Constantly
2. Obey Immediately
3. MAKE THE CHOICE TO SPEAK AND ACT IN FAITH EVEN WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE IT.

”This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you to understand, and it is not beyond your reach. It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down s …

“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose 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”
(Deuteronomy 30:19-20).

His words are simple: Choose life! Choose life that you may live. Or you can choose death and you will die. It is a decision that must be made over and over again. Will we serve the Lord and live or will we turn away and die?

“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”—Philippians 1:21

How ominously these words follow each other in the text—”live,” “die.” There is but a comma between them, and surely as it is in the words so is it in reality. How brief the distance between life and death! In fact there is none. Life is but death’s vestibule, and our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave.

For me to live is Christ.” The believer did not always live to Christ. When he was first born into this world he was a slave of sin, and an heir of wrath, even as others. Though he may have afterwards become the greatest of saints, yet until divine grace hath entered his heart, he is “in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity.” He only begins to live to Christ when God the Holy Spirit convinceth him of his sin, and of his desperate evil nature, and when by grace he is brought to see the dying Saviour making a propitiation for his guilt. From that moment when by faith he sees the slaughtered victim of Calvary, and casts his whole life on him, to be saved, to be redeemed, to be preserved, and to be blest by the virtue of his atonement and the greatness of his grace, from that moment the man begins to live to Christ.
And now shall we tell you as briefly as we can what living to Christ means.
It means, first, that the life of a Christian derives its parentage from Christ. “For me to live is Christ.” The righteous man has two lives. He has one which he inherited from his parents; he looks back to an ancestral race of which he is the branch, and he traces his life to the parent stock; but he has a second life, a life spiritual, a life which is as much above mere mental life, as mental life is above the life of the animal or the plant; and for the source of this spiritual life he looks not to father or mother, nor to priest nor man, nor to himself, but he looks to Christ. He says, “O Lord Jesus, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace, thou art my spiritual parent; unless thy Spirit had breathed into my nostrils the breath of a new, holy and spiritual life, I had been to this day “dead in trespasses and sins.” I owe my third principle, my spirit, to the implantation of thy grace. I had a body and a soul by my parents, I have received the third principle, the spirit from thee, and in thee I live, and move, and have my being. My new, my best, my highest my most heavenly life, is wholly derived from thee. To thee I ascribe it. My life is hid with Christ in God. It is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.” And so the Christian says, “For me to live is Christ,” because for me to live is to live a life whose parentage is not of human origin, but of divine, even of Christ himself. Again he intended to say, that Christ was the sustenance of his life, the food his newborn spirit fed upon.

The apostle also meant, that the fashion of his life was Christ. I suppose that every man living has a model by which he endeavors to shape his life. When we start in life, we generally select some person, or persons, whose combined virtues shall be to us the mirror of perfection. “Now,” says Paul, “if you ask me after what fashion I mould my life, and what is the model by which I would sculpture my being, I tell you, it is Christ. I have no fashion, no form, no model by which to shape my being, except the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Turn ye, turn ye; why will ye die, O house of Israel?” Christ is preached to you. “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Believe on him and live, ye guilty, vile, perishing; believe and live. But this know—if ye reject my message, and despise my Master, in that day when he shall judge the world in righteousness by that man, Jesus Christ, I must be a swift witness against you. I have told you—tat your soul’s peril reject it. Receive my message, and you are saved; reject it—take the responsibility on your own head. Behold, my skirts are clear of your blood. If ye be damned, it is not for want of warning. Oh God grant, ye may not perish.

SHALOM!

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