Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

• Ecclesiastes 3:1

“No man’s destiny is made for him, each man makes his own. Fatalism is the deification of moral cowardice which arises from a refusal to accept the responsibility for choosing either of the two destined ends for the human race-salvation or damnation. The power of individual choice is the secret of human responsibility. I can choose which line I will go on, but I have no power to alter the destination of that line once I have taken it-yet I always have the power to get off one line on to the other.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (November 2, from Our Portrait in Genesis)

The photo above is of a gate of an electric fence. If you are riding the fence, undecided as to whether you want to give your life to Christ, it is like riding and electric fence – not very comfortable.

The Scripture is the leading edge to the “a time to …” statements.  And at some point in our life, we have a time to choose.  If we never choose, then the choice is ours that we had never chosen God and His will at any point of our lives.  In most Billy Graham crusades, he mentions that you could die tonight, so the time is now.  I wrote recently in a fictional story how someone did not want the person who was being troubled by the weight of their sin to accept a God that they did not know, but knowing God needed to be high on their priorities.

But I have talked to many people who flip the predestination concept on its head and get fatalism.  Fatalism fails every time.  To think that you are just rotten to the core and God cannot love you or God could never be successful in cleaning up the mess you have made, you sell God short on both accounts and you deny yourself a chance at choosing.

And as Oswald Chambers says, it is a form of moral cowardice.

I told my wife, soon after getting married, that she was riding the fence, and she needed to get off the fence.  She was a loving person, and she was a tireless servant to me and the family, but it took her twenty-five years to truly accept Jesus.  She learned enough about what things not to bring into a conversation so that I never returned to the “fence-riding” analogy.  But after she became a Christian, plus a couple of years, she told me once that me saying that she could not ride the fence for the rest of her life…  That bothered her and nagged at her.  She steered conversations away from that one analogy so that I would not know that she was still riding the fence.

She had twenty-three good years after accepting Jesus, but her life had been a jumble of contradictions before that.  Our boys got false signals, but even then, the boys had their decisions to make and none of us are perfect.

What I am trying to say is that fatalism fails.  You have a choice to make and the earlier you make that choice, the less you have to unlearn, and the more honest you are with yourself.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.