choices
Just watched an episode from Walker, Texas Ranger. He is taking a bunch of young prison inmates through a 6 wk boot camp thing to help them change their ways. Of course we know he will succeed, but looking past that I saw something there that struck a chord with me.
The theme throughout his training thing was getting them to realize that choices have consequences, you can make easy choices, fast choices, or smart choices.
He uses this as an analogy:
You are given two choices
1: $100,000 right now
or
2: 1 penny today, doubled everyday for 30 days.
of course they all chose the $100,000 and then he showed them that after 30 days they would have gotten
$5,368,709.12. It seemed odd, so I did the math, and he is right.
But that isn't what got my attention, it is that the overall lesson is something that I have been hitting on a lot lately.
A while back I was asked to teach a 7wk course using my martial arts, I chose to teach on self-control. I didn't know what I was teaching on then, but since then I have learned a lot, and I am convinced that Self-Control is all about our choices.
Life is about choices, hundreds of times a day, every single day we are faced with choices. We always have control over our choices, the question is what do we choose? At its most basic level, every choice is between honoring God or honoring ourselves, and as Chuck Norris pointed out, there is the easy choice or the smart choice. Honoring ourselves is the easy choice, but honoring God is the smart one. With every choice there are consequences, and when we choose to honor God, He honors us back. but when we honor ourselves, He withholds His blessings.
Self-control, then, is about honoring God with our choices.
thanks for thinking about it!