Choose to live... and prosper...

The question of conscience is one that we face time and time again in our lives – what about the person who finds £100 lying on the road – do you pick it up and take it home, or do you take it to the police and hand it in ? What about the little bit of gossip that you hear – do you keep it quiet or do you share it ? What about the wrong that you know someone has done – do you confront them or tell someone or do you decide it’s best to mind your own business ?

I once read a small boy’s definition of conscience – that is ‘something that makes you tell your mum you’ve done something wrong before your sister does !’ Conscience is about choice – do we follow what’s good and right or do we follow the easy path ? Do we follow what we know to be just, however hard it may be or do we turn a blind eye to an injustice ?

This last couple of weeks much of the news has been about President Trump and whether people agree with him or not and to what degree people should speak out if they really don’t. 

Day after day we are faced with challenges as to how we live – and in the Book of Deuteronomy we hear some heartfelt words of Moses – he is preparing to hand over leadership of his people to Joshua and knowing that this time is coming very near he pleads with them in the words we heard today (Deut.30:15-20). 

And the pleas he makes are about what is really important in life – what things in their consciences those people need to address. He calls on them to choose life and prosperity rather than death and adversity. It sounds an easy choice to make, but in reality it isn’t because prosperity and adversity are not measured in the terms we might measure them in… 

When I think of prosperity I think of lots of money, a nice house, a good car, lots of luxury holidays and so on, and adversity is the opposite – no money, no real possessions, life is a day to day struggle… 

Moses talks about people doing right being prosperous – people who obey God’s commandments, people who don’t just pay heed to them but follow them in the way they live. And we would probably all hope to be in that category, but again it often isn’t as easy as that. 

Just as prosperity and adversity are not easily measured in human terms, neither is what is right and what is wrong… Doing right all the time will mean a difficult life occasionally… Doing right all the time will mean some people won’t like us… Doing right all the time will often alienate friends who might choose a quiet life, or an easy option. 

Jesus was the perfect example of someone who did right all the time – in his earthly ministry he went about meeting people, encouraging them, healing them, defending them. He spoke up for those who were being treated badly, he spoke up for those who didn’t have a voice in society. He offered his life as an example of what love really means… 

And in human terms, certainly in 21st century terms, he couldn’t be described as having a life of prosperity – and yet he obviously had everything… He had life in all its fullness. And that’s what he is offering for all people.

In our gospel reading (Matt 5:21-37) Jesus lays out some pretty tough teaching. He talks about murder being a sin – something well accepted by the Pharisees in his audience, but he went further suggesting that even feeling angry enough to murder was as bad… 

He carries on in that way – the teaching is tough as I said, but what he was trying to do was to ask people to recognise where they get things wrong, to stop making excuses that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been or it didn’t really do much harm. Jesus wants us as we are – he knows us, he understands us with all of our faults and failings – and he loves us…. 

There is a need to weigh up the cost of discipleship, a need to recognise that following Jesus demands everything we have, but we’re also to recognise it offers everything we can hope to be… 

In the film ‘Love actually’ at the beginning, Hugh Grant speaks and describes the fact that actually love is by far the most important emotion – when people are faced with separation or death, it’s very rarely words of bitterness or hatred they want to express – instead they want to see loved ones and tell them they love them. 

Whatever enemies a person may have, wasting time on them when there’s little time left is pointless. That is the point Jesus is making – come to me as you are, but seek to be changed… Jesus doesn’t want us to think the cost of following him will be too great, but he wants us to know that it won’t always be easy and we shouldn’t expect it to be. 

And it is those end of life thoughts that Moses is expressing. He is speaking to people that he cares about very deeply, and he knows they, like all of us, are prone to mistakes just as he was, and so he pleads with them to think about their futures and those futures were to begin there and then. 

And that is true for us all. God cares what we have done or failed to do in the past, but it’s not important for the future. God cares if we’ve been hurt, or if we’ve hurt others, but those things are to be put in the past as we step out afresh… 

Life is full of choices and the biggest we can make is whether to choose life itself… Life in God’s terms is not made by the amount of things we own, or how popular we are, but it is in relationships. Life is fulfilled in seeking to do what’s right for as many people as we can. Life is about serving others and offering them hope and strength and peace and encouragement and healing, and it’s in doing those things that we can find true peace ourselves. 

Many people think that doing right means keeping to all kinds of rules and regulations. Many people will criticise the church because they think it means being good all the time – they see God as sitting in heaven saying ‘don’t’ or ‘thou shalt not’, but that is not God’s way. 

God has offered us the wonderful gift of freewill because he wants us to truly understand love. He wants us to know how it feels to care for someone and be cared for. That is the gift of life that he offers… Choose life and prosperity means to choose the way of knowing that we live, secure in his love and care, and that we live as part of a huge family of humanity, a family we will constantly seek the best for… 

The late Anglican Priest David Watson wrote in his book ‘Discipleship’ about choice – he wrote, ‘The Christian church today suffers from large numbers of people who feel that they have made a ‘decision for Christ’, or from those who think they have chosen to join a certain church’. He continued, ‘Such man-centred notions spell spiritual death or at least barren sterility… It is only when we begin to see ourselves as chosen, called and commissioned by Christ that we shall have any real sense of our responsibility to present ourselves to him ‘as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.’

It’s a long quote but it sums up the choice we make for Christ – it is not simply to be for him or against, to follow him or not, but to recognise his love for us and the fact that he is calling us, choosing us, commissioning us into a closer relationship with him. 

When Moses appealed to his people to choose life and prosperity he knew that he faced the end of his earthly life, and he knew there was no more important choice than to choose to recognise God’s hand upon his life and to respond to his love.

Our choice in life is very simple – it is not to opt for a simple life, but to opt for the only choice that offers real life and true prosperity… AMEN