Our Goals/Our Choices

February 9

We can make our own choices. We get to choose how we react to all that happens to us. Henry Marsh, The Breakthrough Factor

Henry Marsh has a point. We can react to a degree in a manner of our own choosing, but the reality is that we are pre-programed to respond to certain things in certain ways. For example, most of us try to assume our responsibilities rather than shirk them. Most of us establish our routine around serving the needs of those we love instead of simply endeavoring to facilitate our own desires. We may plan and strive to achieve long-range goals, but we don't do it in the vacuum of our own wants. We include those we love in our projected endeavors.

The Bible affirms us in this for it says the person who neglects his own is “…worse than an infidel,” I Timothy 5:8. The Lord doesn't expect His followers to be selfish in their pursuit of happiness. He anticipates that we will pattern ourselves after His example of loving sacrifice. Of course that does not mean we are to neglect our heart-felt aspirations. No, it simply means we weigh them in the balance of His Word and His revealed truth. If what we are striving to achieve will bring ultimate glory to Jesus, the likelihood is that it will bring good to us--and to those we love.

If our goals serve merely our own worldly ends, they will not satisfy us in our attainment of them but will leave us still longing for the peace and joy, they promised but which no mere human endeavor can fully supply. As we are told in Proverbs 20:17, “Stolen bread tastes sweet, but it turns to gravel in the mouth.” Anything we have acquired through dubious means will leave us feeling empty and void of any real satisfaction.

Our lives, our work, our relationships, our goals, if they are to bring us fulfillment, must be placed on the altar before the Lord. We pray over them, we surrender them to Him, and we allow Him to facilitate them according to His perfect plan. Our ultimate choice, then, is not to simply the pick the course of action that would most successfully accomplish our self-realization but to choose that which would best serve the Lord's glory. When we have, as the Word says in John 12:32, allowed Him to be lifted up, He will then draw all men unto Himself. When those around us have been drawn to Jesus by our words and by our actions; when our goals serve His goal of revealing His love and His salvation to others, then we have chosen rightly in an eternal sense.