IT’S YOUR CHOICE
My favorite teaching session in India is Bible Overview. It is a timeline of God’s plan of redemption from eternity past to eternity future. This blog is the introduction to the session..
On the day of Jesus’s resurrection, he traveled on the road to Emmaus. There he met 2 of His disciples but they didn’t recognize Him. They were grieving the death of Jesus and felt confused. Jesus proceeded to reveal in all the scriptures about the suffering purpose of the Messiah starting in Genesis and through the Old Testament.
The entire Bible is about Jesus. Both the Old and New Testament God reveal His plan of salvation. The story starts with the pre-existent God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. There was a time when God chose to create mankind and desired to have fellowship with us. He had to decide how He was going to make us. There were two options. He could create us without a free will and we would serve Him robotically. Or He could create us with a free will so that we could choose to serve & love Him. God gave us a free will.
There was a boy with a wooden dog. He put a rope around the dog and pulled it around. The wooden dog did everything he made it do. Then when he was older, he got a real dog. That dog was glad to see him and would run up to play with him. But sometimes the dog destroyed things and ran away. Which of those two dogs do you think the young man liked best? Of course, the real dog!
God gave us a free choice so we could choose to love Him. But mankind chose to sin and destroyed the intimate communion with perfect, Holy God. So, what did God do? He gave us a free will but volunteered to pay for our sin Himself.
He planned this before He even created the world. A free will was a part of creating us in His image. He left heaven, came to earth and pay for our sins on the cross. Fellowship restored forever. That’s the story of Redemption in the Bible.
Joshua 24:15 But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
What would your life be like if you didn’t have a free will to make choices in life? Are you using your free will to serve God, or to fulfill your own desires?
What free will choices have you made lately that please the Lord? What choices have you made which don’t please Him? What godly choices should you make today? Will you make them?
To see the rest of the story of redemption through the Bible, with magic and visuals, go to:
https://www.christiantrainingonline.org/our-ministries/india/media/bible-overview/ (English & Telugu in India)
https://www.christiantrainingonline.org/our-ministries/india/media/redemption-in-the-bible/ (English, Rockpoint Church, Doylestown, PA)
To read all the blogs in this series, https://www.christiantrainingonline.org/our-ministries/india/articles/bible-history-culture-doctrine/the-story-of-redemption/ or ask me and I’ll send them to you – jerry@schmoyer.net