My friends, you were chosen to be free. So don’t use your freedom as an excuse to do anything you want. Use it as an opportunity to serve each other with love. – Galatians 5:13 (CEV)
Choices – we make them every single day. Every single day we make multiple choices. Some of these are influenced by outside forces and others we make based on our knowledge and experience. Whatever the choice is, it affects our life one way or another.
When we make the wrong choices, we tend to blame others. We forget that we made the choice and not others. They may have said or done something to make us make the wrong choice but in the end, the ultimate decision was ours to make.
The ultimate decision when making a choice has always and will always be ours. Even if you believe that you were made to make a choice, you have always had the freedom to choose something else. Freedom to say, do and think what we want us to do, is what makes us unique.
The freedom to make choices is a right we all have. When that right is taken away, we rebel and try to win it back. Having the freedom to choose is very important and God knew that when he created us.
When God created us, he gave us free will to make decisions and to choose which way to go. He didn’t want us to abuse this gift but to use it instead to help others and to do the right thing. Right from the start, we were faced with choices, and they were all good ones until the first bad choice was made.
In the Garden of Eden, Eve was influenced to make a bad choice. She forgot that it was she who made the ultimate choice, not the serpent and she could have said no. Adam did the same thing – he forgot that it was his choice to eat, and he blamed Eve. No one wanted to admit that it was their own choices that got them into trouble.
Every choice we make has consequences. These consequences affect our lives and sometimes change them from the course God had originally planned for us. We need to learn to make the right choices in order to get a course correction. There will be many course corrections throughout our lives because we fail to make the right choices. Sometimes we make choices that seem right but in the end are wrong.
Why do we keep making the wrong choices? There are many answers to this question. A lot of times we make a choice that looks good to us. Other times we are forced into making wrong decision by those who think they know what is best for us. No matter the reason why we make bad choices, the fact is that we do, simply because we are human.
As humans, we need to acknowledge that we need to learn how to make the right choices. We also need to recognise that in some cases, what is right for one person may not be right another. Knowing this and more, God still gave us the freedom to make choices. He understands that making wrong choices is a part of life and hopes that we will learn from them. Learning from the choices we make will help us to use our freedom to choose better. Making better choices ultimately gives us the opportunity to serve each other in love.
Originally published August 2019