Choosing Life Everyday

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.

What would it have been like to sit on those Moabite plains, as Moses reaches the climax of his sermon? Here’s their revered leader, pastor, miracle-worker and overseer, preaching his guts out and imploring them to choose the Lord. To choose his ways. To choose life.

As I think about those people sat there, I’m struck that they don’t sit in a vacuum, immune from the messiness of life. Moses is preaching these words to a group of people who cradle a combined generational grief. He’s speaking to people who will have felt the weighty brokenness of death, disease and destruction. A people who carry the weight of marital breakdowns, miscarriages and malicious thoughts.

This is a people who don’t carry immunity to life’s burdens. On the contrary, the last thirty chapters have been a testimony to the weight of their sin, past, present and future, and all the consequences that accompany them in that. And yet, in the messiness of that life, Moses pleads with them to choose life. To choose the Lord, who is their very life.

And so too for us. It can feel abstract and distant to hear the words ‘choose life’. And yet, in the midst of life’s troughs and peaks, we are to choose the one who is indeed ‘the way, the truth, the life.’ Not just in the big decisions. But crucially in the small, everyday moments where I have a choice to choose his ways or my own. I have a choice to depend on my own strength or his. I have a choice to choose sin, or to choose him.

In the crucible of life’s pressures and tensions, choosing life is an everyday thing. And as I do so, however costly and hard it may feel at the time, I am choosing to hold fast to the one who is Life himself. I am choosing to listen to the voice of the one who holds all eternity in his grasp. I am choosing the Lord who is my very life. And there is no better choice to make.