"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants." Deuteronomy 30:19

Our lives consists of choices. We face decisions everyday. Our choices move us closer to fulfilling God’s purpose for us or farther away from it. Like most people, my life has consisted of both good and bad choices. I have come to appreciate the blessings of my good choices while having deep regrets for the bad choices I have made.

Sometimes our choices require sacrifice. We cannot talk about choices without appreciating the choices that our Heavenly Father and that Jesus made. In order to save us from the sins we have committed, the Father had to make the choice to offer up His own Son to be brutalized and murdered cruelly.

 Jesus had to choose to suffer and lay down His life to pay our penalty and to make eternal life possible. Jesus said, -"No one takes My life, but I lay it down willingly." These choices required sacrifice, suffering and death, but it was the only way to bring life to us.

Only the love of God can generate the power to make such sacrificial choices. But to love us in this way God had to turn from Jesus for a time, and Jesus had to become sin and the curse. Jesus was an innocent man but received and bore our sins. At the moment our sins were placed upon His shoulders He became our sins, -"He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." (2 Cor.5) It was at this very moment when Jesus cried out from the agony of the cross, -"My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me."

It doing this He was proclaiming Himself to be the Messiah. People had been mocking Him and saying, -"If you are really the Son of God, save Yourself!" "You who saved others, can you not save yourself?!" Whether these men knew it or not they were quoting from Psalm 22 which was always regarded as a prophecy of Messiah. It must have stunned the crowd to hear Jesus respond back with verse one which says, -"My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"Because God is a just Judge, His wrath had to be satisfied and was poured out in full strength upon Jesus.

Since we have been saved and reconciled by so great a sacrifice, we need not be subject to our old sin nature. We have become a new creation in Christ Jesus. Through Christ, the love of God richly lives in us. This love empowers us to made good choices.

The choices we make from here to eternity will determine the legacy of our lives.