Navigating the Crossroads

by John Paul Jackson

Many, many people in the Body of Christ right now are struggling with important decisions that will directly or indirectly affect every step they take after this. They aren’t little, general decisions about which in-laws should be visited this Christmas; they’re the to-move-or-not-to-move decisions — occupation decisions, life decisions. A whole host of questions comes up in the process: At the cliff’s edge, do I run or take the plunge? Is this even the right cliff? Is there a “correct” way in this? What if I get it wrong? If I go right, will I be in sin? If I go left, will I successfully cut off my destiny forever?

Have you ever asked yourself questions like these before? I have. We make choices every day. We make them for the dark, and we make them for the light. We choose God, and we choose our soul, which is darkness. Sometimes we choose the soul thinking it’s spirit, and we reject the spirit because we think it’s soul. But the more we mature in Him, the more time we will spend in the light, and the choices we make will be the light and life of the world!

Said a little differently, every choice we make will either lead us toward God or away from Him. That is how He set up our world to work and function. This is why the littlest choice we make, even just a teeny one, can open the floodgates of Heaven in our life. He takes the little we give Him and makes it a great thing.

That being said, how many of us live a life that oozes a deep, abiding confidence that God really is all-powerful and, therefore, really in control of everything? If we truly believed this, we would never worry about the questions in the first paragraph. It wouldn’t be that we’d suddenly have all the right answers or know, without doubt, one thing from the next, but we would trust implicitly. Even if things didn’t turn out the way we’d anticipated, we would know that they happened the way they did for a reason.

This type of thinking evidences deep spirituality that comes only from the Holy Spirit of the Living God. All you have to do is make the right choice — one choice at a time, and it starts with choosing Jesus. There is no enlightened thinking outside of choosing Him! There is no true knowledge outside of the knowledge that comes from Him. There is no holiness; there is no righteousness; there is no lasting power of any kind outside of Him. The problem is that we have limited what He can do for us because of our unbelief. That has to change!

How many of us have a deep, underlying faith that the decision we make today is really God’s choice for us? In making it, we simply discovered God’s choice. Even if it doesn’t turn out as we wanted it to, God still chose it because He wanted us to learn something we did not know. Don’t worry about the questions you have. Is your Father able to take care of you? Yes! Take what you know and rest in Him. He is more powerful than you could ever know, and He really is in complete control of your world.

Copyright © 2006 John Paul Jackson, Streams Ministries International. All rights reserved.