Every day of our lives are filled with choices.  Choices in what we eat, what we wear, what music we listen too, who we interact with and how, whether we pray or how, and many many other things.  We live a life full of choices.  I wrote last week about motives.  I looking at the choices we make in life, we have test our motives.  Do they come out of faith or do they come from some other area in life or even the enemy?  We then have to make the choice, usually on our own, of how we will act.

This could be anything.  Here are some of my recent choices  I choose where I worship, not based on it being the right churchy thing to do, but because I believe God has drawn my family and me there for our growth together and to connect with other believers in the body of Christ.  I chose to go to Colorado for Wild At Heart, not because I just wanted to get away from home and take a trip, but because I sincerely believe God called me there to restore my heart.  I enrolled in seminary/counseling studies not because I just wanted to go to school again, who really does, but because I believe God, having now restored my heart, is now calling me to something bigger than myself and this is the next step.

We all have to make a choices and then we have to live with whatever consequences come from those choices, good or bad.  I was listening to a Ransomed Heart audio session from a previous Boot Camp and it reminded me about something we all have to face.  Defining our life and how we live through the choices we make.  John Eldredge made a good point about life.  He said, “A life lived in fear, compromise, self-preservation, and/or capitulation is not a life at all.”  I’ve realized that many of us, including myself, spend much of our life making choices based on compromise of values, faith, and principles.  We fear rocking the boat and making waves in the world around us.

I was sitting the other day and just reading through my journal on past things I wrote and even my notes from Wild At Heart.  I was reminded of something.  On our first morning, we had our first session and then given time to go be with God on our own.  During part of that time, I just put everything in backpack I was carrying and started walking.  I walked down the road leading out of camp and contemplating the question of who I had been as a man up till then.  Then it hit me while walking on that path.  That dirt road covered in snow and ice, that I nearly busted my tail on a few times.  I had spent most of my life walking the more traveled path.  The well worm path that most people find themselves on.  I had been comfortable there and could easily hide there.  God told me that I needed to get off of that path and start taking the one less traveled.  The icy, rough, and unknown path.  The path that leads to him.  “Two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the one less traveled.”

So since coming home, I have made the choice to no longer compromise. To longer live in doubt, fear, self-preservation, and capitulation.  I made the choice to take the path less traveled.  To stand up for the freedom I am offered in Christ.  To help fight for the hearts of others so they can find freedom in Christ.  To not run from the attacks of post-modern thought and the enemy, but stand-up and face it head on.  “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:7)”

At Wild At Heart, John gives Jesus as a big example of someone who stood to fight.  Also looked a William Wallace in Braveheart drawing the parallels between the two.  The story of William Wallace told in Braveheart is inspired straight out of Scripture and Jesus’s life and purpose.  Jesus picked a fight with Pharisees and religion, calling them out for hypocrites they were.  William Wallace picked a fight with the English.  Jesus fought and gave his life to free the hearts of all man kind.  Wallace fought and died to win freedom for Scotland.  The point here is that we have to choose whether we are going to stand on our faith and principles fighting for who we are and for the hearts of others or if we are going to sit by and hide letting the world tell us what we need to do and think and feel.

You see, we all have to choose.  Jesus could made so many different choices through his life on earth, but then his purpose would have never been fulfilled and we would not be set free from the law, sin, and death.  Just think, what if he gave in to Satan in the wilderness.  What if he denied his deity with the Pharisees after being arrested to avoid the Cross? Wallace could have chosen to live in peace and not fought.  He could have stood by and done nothing.  Robert The Bruce could have capitulated to Longshanks later after becoming king and not fought to eventually when freedom.

Bottom line…we have to choose.  We have to a long look at our lives, our direction, our faith, and calling and decide if we are living in fear, compromise, self-preservation, or capitulation.  Spend time in prayer on this.  Ask God to show you where you are compromising and not being who you are meant to be.  This will reveal so much and then you have to make the choice yourself, he gives us the free will and choice, of whether to do something about that and follow where he’s leading.  You make the choice.