Aliel Cunningham

Have you ever heard someone say they are experiencing, “decision fatigue”? Throughout our day we have countless decisions we are making from choices as basic and mundane as which route we choose to take on our way to work and what we end up making for dinner to more heart searching questions like what is it we choose to prioritize and focus on accomplishing in the day or how do we choose to respond to those asking for our attention? In each of these situations, we end up choosing a course of action or a response. We are constantly trying to choose the best way forward toward achieving our day’s goals or larger lifelong aims. 

But many times in our walk with God, there is no clear way forward. And we may not even be sure of what His purposes are for our present circumstances. It seems like a fog has settled over the path and we are not sure whether we should keep moving ahead in faith or whether we need to stay still and wait for God to show up and make a way where there seems to be no way to move forward.

If we are aware of this dilemma in our day to day life, it shows that we are awake to the reality that our choices matter to God. What we choose to do or not do, what we choose to say or not say and the motive behind our words and actions reveal our heart’s posture toward God and those around us. If I am weighing the choices I am making and asking God to help me choose rightly, I am actively participating in His invitation to walk by faith. 

The book of James has a lot to say about our how our choice of actions and our words reveal what is in our hearts and he picks up on this theme of whether we are operating on autopilot or intentionally bringing our choices to God and acknowledging His lordship over our life decisions.

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.”

James 4:13-14a

This passage goes onto talk about how our attitude toward our choices reveal whether we assume that our life choices are ours to make or whether we submit them to God’s leading and direction inviting Him to be present in our every day moments, our God-with-us. Whether we realize it or not, we all have areas of our life in which we operate more or less on autopilot and truly it is a gift from God to be able to do some actions automatically without having to think much about them – muscle memory takes over when I start to drive a car, ride a bike, wash the dishes, and so on. But all the time I am engaged with these tasks, my mind is thinking about something… and the question is whether I am allowing God to be a part of that mental conversation or not.

As long as we are in conversation with God as we go from choice to choice, and moment to moment, we are aware of our need for Him to be our guide every part of our day. James is addressing the pitfall we so often fall into when we no longer take the time to bring our decisions to God in continual conversation. 

Without the training of the Spirit in our lives, our default assumption is that we are our own masters and our own saviors. As in the famous words of William Ernest Henley in the poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

This was the downfall of Adam and Eve in the garden – a reaching out and grasping after knowledge so that we could rule our own lives and say for ourselves what is good and bad, what is desirable and not, and what choices we will make to get what we want without having to submit to God’s way of doing things. Earlier in chapter 4, James talks about this desire we have to rule our own lives and not have to acknowledge that there is One who is greater than we are. One who will judge both our choices and our motives.

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

James 4:1-3

James is concerned with a life that reflects the lived reality of Christ in our choices. This is where the true test of our faith is meted out in the rubber meets the road moments of our day. We all have goals or desires that we are seeking to realize throughout our days, months, and years. Embedded in these goals and desires are what we understand to be “good” things. If ‘self’ is still on the throne of our lives, then we will seek to obtain what is “good” by our own means instead of looking to God.

This is what James is talking about here. The quarrels and fighting and covetousness is evidence of a self-ruled, self-confident life rather than God-ruled, God-trusting life. The cross is the place where we die to the notion that we can save ourselves and we look to the one true Savior to draw near and work out our deliverance in His own way and His own timing. In Isaiah 43:11, God declares that He alone is the Lord and “apart from Me there is no other savior.” In practical terms, are walking by faith with God as we make decisions throughout the day or are we running on autopilot trying to be our own savior?

Every true act of faith will be a death to ourselves as the savior of the situation and a choosing to put our lives into the care of the true Savior and wait for Him to direct our steps into the path of peace that surpasses all understanding.

This is the death that must take place if we are to embody the wisdom of Solomon in Proverbs 3:5-6, and trust in the Lord with all our hearts and refuse to lean on our own (very limited) understanding. Jesus told his disciples, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) This is a difficult pill to swallow. Nothing? Really? Surely, I could accomplish something in my own efforts. We begin to think that surely there must be a division of labor – things I do with God and things I do on my own. This segmenting of our lives into two spheres – one in which we act with God and one without God is not sustainable. As Jesus said, “A divided kingdom ends in ruin.” (Matthew 12:25). 

Our life is a mini kingdom and as with any kingdom, you must have only one ruler or there will be strife in the kingdom until there is only one ruler. So, every day we have the choice to esteem ourselves (or some other source of salvation) as the ruler and follow in the Enemy’s footsteps when he rebelled against God’s rulership over his life or we can choose to put to death our own self rule and esteem God as the only true ruler of the kingdom and the only rescuer of our life story. This puts us in the pathway that Jesus walked when He refused to act on His own entrusting His life to the Father saying, “not my will, but Yours be done.” This refusal to chart our own path and submit to God’s ways of working in our life that rarely make sense to us is a hard death to endure. However, if we follow in Christ’s steps and we submit all of our life choices to the cross, and give up trying to run our lives ourselves, the rewards of Christ are also ours! We are resurrected in newness of life that is bound up with His unending life – the source of Life itself! 

“The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.”

C.S. Lewis

Whenever you are in your day, consider whose steps you are following in. Are you, this moment, trying to figure out a solution on your own or are you talking to God about your situation and entrusting your life into His hands? When we take time to “know” Him in all our ways and invite Him into our daily choices, He builds relationship with us. Not only does He want to be our guide along the journey, He wants to use every circumstance to draw us close and grow us in our intimacy with Him. But He leaves the choice up to us. 

So the only decision we really need to focus on day by day is whether we are walking toward God or away from God, with Him or ahead of Him. Every choice we make today will be a choice that is oriented by our direction in relationship to God. Jesus is the center of Life itself and so necessarily every choice that is made apart from Him is a choice toward self-rule and self-destruction and every choice that is made with Him is a choice that acknowledges His kingdom rule and brings life and life more abundantly in Christ. (John 10:10).

“Choose you this day”, Joshua told the children of Israel, “whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Joshua 24:15

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