Over 1600 years ago in his writing Confessions, Saint Augustine penned these words. “For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?”
I have come to recognize that without the leading of the Holy Spirit, I am determined to choose failure. In fact, I am the author of my own failure.
I am the one who plans my own destruction. When left to my own choices, my own sense of right and wrong, my own sense of morality leads me to disappointment and defeat.
I choose the wrong friends, the wrong habits, the wrong purchases, the wrong directions. All of these seem right to me for the particular seasons of my life.
My colleagues and cohorts applauded my decisions as cool, contemporary and correct. They applauded me because it affirmed their choices and, after all, no one wants to be the one left out of ‘group-think’
The Bible reminds me that choosing my own way is to choose the way of death.
Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Again, in Deuteronomy 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:
Over 1600 years later, I still need to choose life based upon my Creator’s terms. To choose life is to confess that I am lost without Christ. To do otherwise is to choose my own damnation and eternal separation from my Creator God.