At church today, I noticed a small poster in one of the youth classrooms. The image on the poster, originally featured in the September 2016 New Era magazine, contrasts two remotes: one representing God's "system," and the other representing Satan's. The first thing I noticed about the two remotes is that the one representing Satan's plan had more buttons on it. It gives you more options. This, at first, seems appealing. But upon closer inspection, the options the evil remote gives you are all terrible. They let you choose what kind of addiction you want, what kinds of lies you want to tell, and how you want to cheat. None of these are things I actually want. And that got me thinking: What good is it to have a lot of options if most, if not all, of those options are bad?
I like having options, but having a lot of terrible options isn't helpful. If you have 100 options, and only one of them is acceptable, while the other 99 are things that you would never choose, then you practically only have one option. But really, how many options does a person actually need? If, given all the options in the universe, you would choose to do one thing, then isn't that one option the only one you really need?
The gospel can seem limiting, with its relatively few options for acceptable behavior, but giving us more freedom may not be a good thing. The fewer options we have, the more likely we are to choose the one that's best for us, as long as the best option is among the options we're given. God doesn't give us as many options as Satan does, but the options God gives us are all good ones. God's options are the ones we would choose if we had all the options in the universe and were wise enough to only pick the best. As it turns out, I don't need a lot of options; I just need a handful of good ones.
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