This post was first published on Monday, October 27, 2008 in my private blog. It is being reproduced here in its entirety because the topic of this post qualifies it to be housed here. It is an account of an event attended and enjoyed, and to freshen it up a bit, I am attaching an audio clip of this post verbatim. For your reading, listening, and viewing pleasure! Special thanks to Scott and Beth Trossen for inviting us to the Phil Keaggy concert.
Click here for an audio recording of this post:
Isn’t that great to know? Or, I should say, comforting to know. In the broadest possible sense of that title, isn’t it absolutely liberating to know that you – and you alone – have that right of choice.
And in a more narrow and specific sense, isn’t it also great to know that the choice to believe or not to believe – in a God who loves me so much that he came down to earth to take upon himself the entire human condition, and then offered himself up as a sacrifice – for the perfect atonement – in order that I might simply believe in this supreme act of love and thereby receive the gift of forgiveness and eternal life, is a choice that is solely mine?
And furthermore, to also believe that this God would do all this had I been the only one on the face of this Earth. And that this God knows that I could not save myself, or else he would have certainly laid out a to-do list for me. (And BTW, no, those ten commandments didn’t work out, which is why God went to Plan B which meant coming down to Earth in the flesh!).Â
And that this God expects from me only two things in return: to believe in this plan to save me, i.e., my soul, and to love him back. Nothing else. Plain and simple. Call it the 1-2-3 plan: 1-God loves me. 2-He wants me to be reconciled with him. 3-He has a plan for this. But the choice to believe this or not is mine alone.
And so I choose to believe.  Call me a “Jesus-Lover” if you wish.  I won’t wince. I’ll claim, instead, the title with pride and joy. Seriously.
And in line with this whole notion of choice, and more importantly, the choice to believe in Jesus Christ as the one and only way to eternal life, and also to the very meaning of terrestrial life,  I found it very refreshing the other day to be in the midst of a very large crowd that felt the same way. It was at a concert of this mind-blowing guitarist of a guy by the name of Phil Keaggy.  I could wax poetic about his impossible guitar-playing skills and his melodious voice (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Keaggy), but what was most impressive to me was his unabashed declaration of his personal faith.
His repertoire for the evening included a rendition of the Beatles’ famous Here Comes The Sun which carried the alternate meaning of Son, as in Jesus, the Son of God.
And Phil Keaggy said something else that caught in the cobwebs of my mind that evening: he said, to paraphrase loosely: someone by the name of George MacDonald (apparently a big influencer on the writer, thinker and theologian, C.S. Lewis) was known to have said: God is the perfect gentleman; he would never force you to spend an eternity with him!Â
Meaning, of course, that the choice is yours:  to believe and accept God’s free gift, no strings attached, or not to believe. God doesn’t force you one way or the other. He presents himself to you, and then allows you to make up your mind about him.Â
Perhaps the simplicity of this offering is what is baffling to many: how could it be that nothing else is required – you mean, there’s no pilgrimage to be made, no alms to be given, no set of rules to live by? Yeah, you got that right. There’s nothing. Because once you choose to believe in this gracious God who’s giving you everything for free, you do what you do (or don’t do) out of love, not out of fear.Â
Not because you are trying hard to earn your salvation and therefore trying to get as many brownie-points as possible, but because you believe that it is the least that you can do in return to show your love for him! Nothing convoluted about that concept really – no arm-twisting at play here to get you to love your neighbor – you now do it because you want to!Â
I’d been thinking of this and matters such as these when a friend said to me recently something about believing in a pantheon of gods since they’re all one and the same anyway, aren’t they? And I said to him in as gentle but firm a voice as possible that I didn’t think so. No, I didn’t think so, because I don’t believe so. I then went on to say something about having the courage of my convictions to believe in what I did.Â
I also shared another thing that actually ties into this whole concept of choice. I told him about the renowned mathematician Blaise Pascal’s famous “wager” that essentially states that you have nothing to lose by virtue of believing in the existence of God.Â
Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets. And bet on God. Because you’ve got nothing to lose.Â
Pascal writes: Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false?  If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists. Â
So! May it be that we exercise our power to choose. And may it be that we might be able to put aside Reason for a while – our able and wily consort (she won’t let up otherwise!) – in order to consider instead the simplicity as well as the magnitude of concepts such as Grace and Love. Â
Because the choice to do so is ours and ours alone.Â
[P.S.:Â About these pictures:Â the one without the guitar is Pascal; Keaggy’s the one with the beret!]
