Choice! What a big part of our life. The choices we make or don’t make can significantly impact what we experience in the heavenly realms. Many times they determine the outcome of our search for God’s will. Choices we make will affect our lives in many ways and often the lives of others. Choices can change the direction of your future. One day you are moving in a good direction, and the next day you are moving backward because of choice. (Or vice versa)
The fact that you can make choices is amazing. Having that God-given ability can help or hurt you, so use it wisely. Sometimes your bad choices bring you into hard times that you could have avoided with better choices. But then there are those good choices that lead you right into the hands of God. Choice carries a lot of effects. For this reason, God looks to test you so you can learn to make the right choices and leave the bad ones behind.
Learning how to choose correctly may take time and much proving, but in the end, if you are found faithful and obedient, your walk with God won’t just be a matter of hope; it will be your inheritance in Him.
It’s hard to understand the mind of God sometimes when your eyes have blinders on them. Not seeing the end of something can be unsettling to people that strive to have complete control over their own lives. But to walk in the fullness of God, there must be a removal of all the things that oppose God, including making bad choices.
As much as God wants you to know yourself, He also wants to know you. He already knows His words will not fail Him; they are faithful in every way. His word is what is predestined; it’s you He needs to know. When God puts His word in your heart, He knows you have been given everything you need to walk in the Spirit. But that doesn’t mean you will. He must test you to see if you will join yourself in His word and make the right choices. When you join yourself to Jesus Christ, the Word, you become one with Him, and that’s when He looks at you and sees His word. That’s when God knows you will do the right things even though you sometimes fail.
Don’t get me wrong, God understands everything, which also includes His understanding that people often love the world much more than they love joining themselves to His word. He knows flesh is corruptible and the carnal mind is an enemy. These, of course, are the things that people on earth join themselves to other than Jesus Christ. Because of this, God has to know your choices as a human and what you will do. He knows your heart, and He knows your spirit, which is all predictable to Him. But He will put you to the test to see if your time is now or later. You have a lot to do with that decision.
One of God’s greatest attributes is that He gave us a will to choose. That means we can take as much of God or as little of Him as we prefer. Even God has to honor His word and allow us to choose life or death. Prophecy can fail because of choices. When we are tested we will provoke prophecy to work or cause it to fail. The good news is that in Jesus, prophecy is completed. That means if it fails in you one time, God is good at returning to you and giving you another chance to make the right choices so that you can join Jesus in your finished version. Until God has completed all of His works in you there will be parts of you that are being regenerated everyday. Remember, it's the wicked that God says He doesn't know, so the fact that God wants to know you is a very good thing.
That said, how God chooses to prove a person can be a conflict of interest for many people. God’s methods of humbling and proving you can be very trying to the mind if you don’t understand what is happening. These methods can bring up many questions that need to be answered. But if they are not with the right intent, these questions can distract you from what God desires to reveal to you. Taking a test is for the purpose of showing you if you're passing or failing. Testing is a good thing; embrace every one.
Two examples.
Let’s look at a couple of examples where God used testing to get to know His people.
Look at God’s people Israel, who, after being in slavery in Egypt for so long, could not trust God. But He knew they couldn’t trust Him, and their thoughts were weak. So after sending them a mighty prophet who would deliver them from slavery and declare a promise of a new life and new land, God began to test them. He had to put them in a place of proving so that when they got to the land of promise, they could choose to believe God and go in and possess that land.
He led them straight into the wilderness to prove them. They still had the mind of captivity and didn’t know how to believe in God yet. He had not fully established Himself to them, nor had they proved themselves to Him. He needed to know if they would be obedient to hear His promise and trust Him. He needed them to believe His every word without questioning everything He did or why He did it.
So to allow this proving to take place in them, God choose the wilderness for their route to the promise. Deuteronomy 8:2 says, “And you shall remember all the way which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, and to prove you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments, or not.”
God wanted to know what was in their heart. Could they keep His commandments? Could they trust Him? God had to know. He couldn’t give Israel a full inheritance unless they were able to trust Him and follow His every word.
Unfortunately, they murmured and complained about everything in the wilderness. Israel refused to enter God’s promises because of unbelief and rejected His desire to prove them. Read Chapter 8, and you will see that God never failed His people. He did everything to cause them to believe His wonderful works. That generation was not fit to receive the promises of God. Paul tells us that they would have entered into His rest if they had only believed His word and made the right choices. Are you like that generation, or will you let God prove you and know what is in your heart?
Abraham, on the other hand, was a completely different example. He was the father of Jesus because when God proved him, He was found faithful. God told Him to take his only son up the mountain and make Him a sacrifice. Because he believed in the Lord, he obeyed, trusting God would provide for him. When he got there and raised his hand to slay his son, the angel of the Lord called out of heaven, stopped him, and said, “Now I know… that you fear God”. God proved Abraham with the one precious thing in his life. His faith in God was counted as righteousness unto the Lord. This is why Abraham is the father of all those who believes.
God wants to know you.
Maybe you’ve never considered that God is getting to know you. To that, I would say, look inside yourself. When you find the word that God put in your heart, you will begin to see that the word is getting to know you as much as you are getting to know Him. The relationship between you and the word of God is a daily fellowship. Join yourself to Him and show Him that you will follow as He leads you, until you are completely changed into His likeness.
God has to know some things about you. Are you willing to be tested and proven in your beliefs? The proving will determine your choice. It will bring you to a decision. Will you agree with the devil’s lies, or will you agree with the witness of God? Will you give up when everything around you speaks the opposite of what God said, or will you walk by the word of the Lord and not stagger at His promises? Will you be seduced by a lie, or will you love the truth? Will you trust God in all things and believe God, though many forsake Him? What will you do? God wants to know!
God has to know what choices you will make before He tells you His most intimate secrets.
Before God can trust you with His most precious promises and reveals His greatest secrets, God has to know one thing; do you believe and trust Him at His word? Can He trust you with the secrets that govern heaven and the earth? Will you love His commandments and keep them? Can you obey the word of the Lord without looking back? Will you sacrifice your life for His will? Can you prove that what you say is true? God wants to know. Take God’s test and find out what’s true about yourself.
How can God give you the secrets from the foundation of the world if He can’t trust you with simple obedience?
God will ensure you have been given every opportunity to be restored to Him in the fullness of truth. But every lie has to be purged from your mind so that you can truly see God as He is. Any doubt about God that rests in your heart has to be cleaned and removed. God loves you and doesn’t want to hurt you. Proving you is a great way to reveal who you are and where you are in God’s story.
Learn how to trust God so you can walk in absolute confidence that the Lord is God and that He loves you as much as He loves Himself. Are you ready to be proven? God is watching, and He wants to know if you’re prepared to join Him and finish the story He gave you in the beginning.
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