Best Choice

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much, and hello again, radio friends. How in the world are you? Yes, this is your friend, Dr. Cook and I’m speaking with you as usual from the little room at the end of the hall, on the second floor of the big white house. And I trust everything’s going all right at your house and if perhaps, some of you have struck a rough day today, just look up and remind your blessed Lord that you belong to Him. I find great comfort when the pressures of life attack me, just to look heavenwards and say, “Lord, I’m your boy. Help me now.”

I tell our young people here at the college “Pray your way through the day. Pray when you wake up. Pray when you greet your family or friends for the first time in the morning. Pray when you enter your class. Pray before you answer the phone – you don’t know who’s on the other end of the wire. Pray before you open an envelope – you don’t know if it’s a check, or a bill, or an anonymous letter. Pray before you go on a date – you’ll have less prayer to do during and after. Pray before you hire or before you transfer a person or before you fire. Pray before you sign a contract. Pray your way through the day.”

And when the day is finished, you can turn out the pocketful of memories before the Lord who loves you and who bought you with His precious blood. And you can just say, “Good night, Lord,” and drift off to peaceful sleep because all day long, you’ve been walking with your Lord. You want to try that? If you’ve never learned that blessed technique of praying your way through the day, try it on for size. I assure you, things will go better for you. You and I are looking at Deuteronomy 6, verse 24.

We just got into it the last time we got together. “The Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.” The reason for God’s commands are His concern for your well-being. Stop just a moment with me to meditate on the fact that God wants you to make it, for our good always. God wants you to make it. Somebody is thinking sourly, “Nothing ever works right for me. My plans are always thwarted, my dreams are always coming crashing down or on my feet. Nothing ever works right.”

I’ve heard people say that and sometimes you look at their life, it seems to be true. Well a couple of comments need to be made on this, I think. This is a little detour but enjoy it with me, will you? First of all, your mind believes what you tell it. If you say, “I can’t,” your subconscious mind says, “Okay, you can’t.” If you say, “Everything goes wrong,” your subconscious mind says, “Okay, everything goes wrong.” Your mind believes what you tell it. And so you and I have to learn the affirmations of faith that is to say to say confidently, “I belong to Jesus Christ. I am a child of God. God wants me to make good. God wants me to be a success. God wants my needs to be fulfilled. And God wants me to be full of joy.”

“Now, the God of peace fill you with all joy and peace and believing that you may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost,” Paul says in Romans. God wants you to have joy and peace and hope in abundance. Not only that, but you can realize that God can do way beyond anything you can imagine. Ephesians 3:20 says, “Unto him that is able, that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.” So that God wants you to make it, He wants you to make good, He wants you to be filled with joy and peace and hope, and He wants to go beyond anything you can ask Him. Isn’t that wonderful?

Now, then, what you and I need is to start believing that and affirming it. Your mind believes what you say. Remember this, if you say “I can’t,” your mind says, “All right, you can’t.” If you say, “I feel terrible,” your mind says, “Okay, you feel terrible.” And so what we need, you and I, is to affirm confidently what God already says is true. We need to affirm confidently what God already says is true. One of those truths is that God has planned for your good always. The reason for God’s commands is His concern for your success. Do you believe that?

The reason for God’s commands is his concern for your success. I’ll take a little illustration that may come home to some of you. You’ve been vaguely troubled by certain symptoms and pains and what-not and you go to the doctor. And the doctor says, “You know, the trouble with you is you are too heavy and you have high blood pressure.” “Now,” he said, “If you want to live, I’m going to tell you what to do.” Okay now, here’s the doctor telling you that you can’t have anything with salt in it.

You have to give up drinking coffee and tea. You have to go on a diet that will limit you to 1200 or 1400 calories a day. You have to start exercising and taking walks and what-not. And he is giving you commands, isn’t he? And you may not like the idea very well. George Edstrum, my friend of many years ago used to say sadly, “Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” Well, it does seem as though the doctor is circumscribing your life with commands that are going to rob you of certain thing you enjoy. Yes, he is. But do you know why?

‘Cause he wants you to live instead to die. It’s that simple. Your physician wants you to live and be healthy rather than to become ill and die. And so the reason for his commands is his concern for your well-being. Now you multiply that a million, million times and bring it on over into the heavenly spheres, and you have exactly what God has in mind. These statutes, He commanded us to do all these things for our good, always. The reason for God’s commands lies in His concern for your well-being.

Believe that with all your heart and the next time you’re tempted to argue with God about something, just remember, He knows far better than you do, and He’s doing it for your good. Now, then, going a little farther, not only is it true that God wants you to succeed. He does. And not only is it true that His commands arise out of His concern that you should succeed and that you should experience well-being. And that’s true. But it is also true that when you obey God’s will, you receive the best possible arrangement for your life.

Now, I have to relearn and relearn and relearn that lesson. I don’t know about you but, I seem to forget from time to time the fact that doing God’s will gives you the best deal in life. And I drift off into my own desires. Do you ever do that? And yet here’s the lesson, the one lesson that you and I need to learn thoroughly so that our consecration will be based on the realization that when we give ourself completely to God, He gives us Himself in the best possible relationships of life for our good always.

A friend of mine, when he was in college many years ago, was desperately in love with a girl who couldn’t even see him. She wouldn’t say hello to him, wouldn’t notice him, and yet he had lost his heart completely to her. Oh, how he cried and prayed and said, “Oh, God, make her notice me. Make her fall in love with me.” But nothing happened. Finally, in sheer desperation, he transferred out of that college and went to another college. And as time passed, he forgot his heartbreak and fell in love with another lovely Christian girl and married her subsequently.

He, then, became a professional evangelist travelling from state to state and from meeting to meeting, winning souls and encouraging believers. Twenty years went by. Now, and he told this story in a public meeting so I’m not revealing any secrets. Now, he had a meeting in some small town in Florida. Now, when you have a meeting in a small town, what happens is that you stay with one family and then you eat your meals at other different families day after day. So it was that the minister said, “Now, today, we’re going to have dinner at so and so’s house. She went to school with you.”

“Oh,” my friend said, “I don’t remember anybody by that name going to school with me.” “Oh,” he said, “her maiden name was such and such,” then, it hit my friend, as my father used to say, like a thousand bricks on a rotten pumpkin. It just hit him. This was the lady with whom he had been so desperately in love, the one who couldn’t even see him and would give him no notice, whatever, the one who had broken his heart. And he thought to himself, “Do I have to go through this again? Do I have to tear open the old scars again?”

And he just hated to do it but there was no way to get out of it. And so the minister and he walked up the stairs to the front porch of this home in the little southern town and knocked on the door and the husband who had taken off work so he could be there at noon, came to the door and greeted them cordially, said to my minister friend, “Oh, come on in I want you to meet my wife. She went to school with you.” And there was that stunned moment of silence when my friend was afraid even to look up for fear that his heart would break all over again.

And then, he said, he took one look at her and I remember he said, with a broad grin as he told this story one day, he said, “I took one look at her and my heart began to sing ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’” It took 20 years for him to realize that God had done the right thing for Him. Oh, beloved, listen. Have you learned to trust God to give you the best possible deal in life? How afraid we are? How afraid we are to trust God to give us the best.

Merv Roselle told one day in a meeting that I was attending how his daughter had insisted on getting a little dime store necklace that she was so attracted by. And she insisted and pleaded and coaxed and begged and finally, they said, “All right.” And so she took some of her allowance money and she bought the little necklace at the Five and Dime, and wore it so proudly for a few days until the thin plating on the metal wore off and then there began to be that little green line of tarnish around her neck where the metal was being tarnished. And she was disappointed, of course. And then came her birthday. And when her birthday came, mother and daddy brought out a pearl necklace that they had been saving up for that they had bought for the little girl. And the gold in it was real and the pearls were real and she was delighted.

But then she remembered the dime store necklace and she looked up at them and said with some embarrassment, “I guess I should have waited, daddy, to get what you had for me.” I think we have to look up oftentimes and say “Father God, I guess I should have waited to get what you had for me.” Oh, God gives His best to those who leave the choice with Him. Your best possible deal in life will be yours when you trust our Blessed Lord.

Dear Father today, help us to get Thy best for our lives, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!