Choosing Life

Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our reading, titled Choosing Life, was written by Karen Pimpo. Nathan grew up in a Christ-believing household, but he started to stray away from his childhood faith as a college student into things like drinking and partying. God brought me back to himself when I didn't deserve it, he said. In time, Nathan spent a summer sharing Jesus with strangers on the streets of major U.S. cities and is now completing a residency in youth ministry at his church. Nathan's goal is to help young people avoid wasting time not living for Christ. Like Nathan, the Israelite leader Moses had a heart for the next generation. Knowing he would soon relinquish leadership, Moses delivered God's good regulations to the people and then lists the results of either obedience or disobedience, blessing and life for obedience, cursing and death for disobedience. Now choose life so that you and your children may live, he told them in Deuteronomy chapter 30, for the Lord is your life. Moses urged them to love God, listen to his voice and hold fast to him. Choosing sin brings consequences, but when we surrender our lives to God again, he will surely have mercy and restore us. This promise was fulfilled throughout the people of Israel's history, but also by Jesus's final work on the cross to bring us into fellowship with God.

We too have a choice today and are free to choose life. Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Deuteronomy chapter 30 verses 11 through 20. Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it? Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask, who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?

No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him and to keep his commands, decrees and laws. Then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.

You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call the heavens and the 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 your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Let's pray. Gracious Jesus, we thank you for the life giving freedom of knowing you and following you. Help us to listen to your voice and hold fast to you that we and future generations may experience the fullness of life found only in you. Thank you, Lord. It's in your name that we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening today. My name is Toni Collier and today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.