choices on Life and Death

The choice is before us: life or death. Let us choose life so that we may live. To Jesus we cry: Cleanse us, oh Lord! By the mercy of Christ we are made clean. This is the hope that we proclai...

In the north of England, there's a beautiful garden. It's full of delicate wildflowers, extravagant blossoms, verdant climbing vines, and tumbling water features. Like so many gems of English ...

Pastor: See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways,...

“It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms...

Almighty and loving God, all of us here today are hurting. Some of us are hurting as the result of circumstances beyond our control. Some of us are hurting because of our own choices. Some of us are f...

In The Sickness unto Death , Kierkegaard describes a “moment” familiar to all of us. It is the “little tiny transition from having understood to doing.” Here’s what he says about it: …if a person d...

The new life is not a matter of mere moral reformation, but of spiritual transformation.

Life just gives you time and space—it’s up to you to fill it.

Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearls. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments ar...

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the ...

The pioneering work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has been popularized in recent years by the gamut of notable thinkers, including Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and, in this cas...

All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened...

Your decisions . . . along with your responses to other people’s decisions, which are also your decisions...are about the only thing you can control in life, which means your decisions are how you con...

Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...

Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we...

Richard Mouw, the former president of Fuller Seminary and a professor of philosophy, shares an amusing anecdote from a lecture by the esteemed Catholic ethicist Charles Curran. During his talk, Curran...

God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: You are always and forever for us: We can’t run away from Your presence; nor out-sin Your amazing grace and forgiveness. We can’t exhaust Your unconditional love nor ...

Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...

What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

We are our choices.

At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over.

How do you define what it means to “make a sacrifice?” We say we sacrifice for our family, or sacrifice for our careers. We speak of Jesus sacrificing himself so that we can experience eternal life. A...

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Change will happen whether you like it or not. Positive change, however, requires choice. You can choose to accept natural change or you can choose to fight it. . . . The power to choose is yours. The...

I’ve decided if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. . . . I would not only go barefoot earlier in spring and stay out lat...

Attitude is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, money, circumstances, than failures and success, than what other people think, say, or do. It is more importa...

One of the saddest, most depressing movies I’ve ever seen would have to be Sophie’s Choice. I was a kid when it came out, so I didn’t see it until much later, after I was grown. By that time, I had he...