CHOICES

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary
life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it
before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you
can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it
without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from
the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.
Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity,
God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans
12:1-2

"If you decide that it's a bad thing to worship GOD, then choose a god you'd rather
serve—and do it today. Choose one of the gods your ancestors worshiped from the
country beyond The River, or one of the gods of the Amorites, on whose land you're
now living. As for me and my family, we'll worship GOD." Joshua 24:15

Don't be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest.
The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—
harvests a crop of weeds. All he'll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one
who plants in response to God, letting God's Spirit do the growth work in him,
harvests a crop of real life, eternal life. Galatians 6:6-7

This is war, and there is no neutral ground. If you're not on my side, you're the
enemy; if you're not helping, you're making things worse. Matthew 12:30

God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset
to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son.
The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and
intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his
children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called
them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting
them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he
had begun. Romans 8:29-30

Here’s the deal:

You may not think you have a lot of choices but you made a choice tonight just to come to church.
You made a choice when you decided which clothes to wear today.
You can choose whether or not to do your homework.
You will have more choices ahead, like if you want to go to college or get a job.
Which college do you want to go to?
Do you need a student loan or can you get a scholarship?

For a lot of you, though, some choices are still made for you by your parents. How many of you would
choose to stay home but your parents make you come to church? Seriously, my parents made me come
to church, I know how it is.

How many of you would drop out of school if your parents didn’t make you go?

You have a lot of choices in your life. Bro. Jeff talked about choices last week, with the kind of music
that we listen to. I think that what he said is right. No one wakes up one morning and says, “I’m going
to be addicted to crack and be a homeless person, starting right now!”

Small choices led each person addicted to drugs, or living on the street or in prison to where they ended
up. If you ask any inmate in prison, they had a choice early on, and if they had only made a different
choice here or there, they might not be where they are today.

The same is true for people who are successful or happy. If they had made different choices they
wouldn’t be where they are today either.

Some choices are forced upon us and some are of our own free will. These little choices we make now,
or baby steps are going to decide where we end up in the future.

Dieting
How many of you have ever been on a diet? Any kind of diet? Healthy foods, or to lose weight, or to
gain weight?

Here’s what happens with a diet and with some of the small choices that you make every day. When
you are on a diet, if you cheat and eat a cupcake do you automatically gain 300 pounds and can’t fit in
any of your clothes? No. But that small choice of eating a cupcake has an effect on your diet, in the long
run right?

The same thing happens when you “cheat” on your relationship with God. If you skip reading your Bible
one night, does a lightning bolt come down from the sky and strike you dead? No, but not reading your
Bible affects your relationship with God in the long run right?
If you are trying to eat healthy foods and you eat pizza and ice cream all weekend, will you be unable to
get through the door of your house? No, but in the long run it will have an effect on your health.

If you are on a date with someone and you have sex in the back seat of your car, does God pop out of
the glove box and put the cuffs on you and tell you, you are going to hell? No, but in the long run having
sex before you get married is going to have an effect on your life, right?

Mrs. Sandi is Crazy

I know these are crazy examples, but they are supposed to make you think about the choices you are
making every day. Take your every day, walking around life and present it to God as a living sacrifice to
Him.

You don’t have to listen to me right now, you can decide or choose that Mrs. Sandi is a crazy person and
she doesn’t know what she is talking about. You can ignore this advice and keep on doing what you
have been doing. But let me ask you one question. Has YOUR way worked so far? The way you have
been living your life and the choices you have been making. . . how’s that working out for you?

Baby Steps
I teach a class on customer service at my job and sometimes people think I am weird when I tell them
that they have to start with themselves if they want to help others. We spend about 3 weeks just
working on ourselves before we start talking about how to help other people. If you are unhappy with
yourself, how well do you think you can help others? Pretty pathetic isn’t it? To think of a sick person
trying to make another sick person feel better .

So how? How do we do it?

Well, just like you can’t wake up one morning and decide to be a heroin addict, you can’t wake up one
morning and decide that all your problems are going to go away. If you accepted Christ as your Savior
that’s only the first step, now for the rest of your life you have to get up every day and follow Jesus’
example. Jesus is the example that we are supposed to follow every single day.

21 DAYS
It has been proven that human behavior can take 21 days to condition. Have you ever heard that it
takes 21 days to break a bad habit? Well, it takes 21 days to make a good habit too.

You just work on one thing at a time, and then after a while you won’t have to think about working on
that one thing anymore. The Holy Spirit will show you another thing that you need to work on. And
little by little, one choice at a time you will be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

God may be telling you something YOU need to work on in your relationship with Him. Maybe it’s your
quiet time, maybe it’s something in your life you need to get rid of like the music you listen to, or a
friend who is a bad influence in your life, or maybe it’s to stop cussing, or stop smoking or stop drinking
or stop lying to your parents, get better grades. I don’t know what YOU need to work on, I only know
what I need to work on. So take a few minutes and pray and listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling you
to work on.

.. . Okay, now we are going to make a plan to work on whatever it is that the Holy Spirit is telling you to
do. We’re just going to try to work on this one thing for 21 days straight, to see if it will become a habit.
This will put most of you around the end of school if you make it. Even if you mess up a couple of times,
you’ll still be right at the end of school when this new thing should be a habit for you.

“What if I mess up?”

Then start over.
“What if I miss a day?”
Then start over.
“What if I miss 3 days in a row?”
Start tonight.
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(woo hoo half way)

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Ta da! A new habit!