Make the Better Choice Every Day!

9th Sunday after Pentecost, 7/17/16
Luke 10:38-42


Make the Better Choice Every Day!
I. Choose Jesus who serves you.
II. Choose Jesus who feeds you.
III. Choose Jesus who saves you.


Do you consider yourself to be an average person in most aspects of your life? Most of us here today probably do. We try to live moderate lives, avoiding extremes on either end of things. We’re average people.

If that’s true about you and you’ve been awake for three hours, you’ve made 38 choices already today just regarding food. Can that be true? According to research, we average 226 choices regarding food each day. I’ll assume you don’t make any of those choices while you sleep. If you sleep six hours, and you’ve an average person during the 18 hours you’re awake, then you make roughly twelve food choices per hour. Amazing, isn’t it? And we’re only talking about food choices. Consider all the other choices you make during your day and the number boggles the mind.

We have before us this morning the account of Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha. A portion of his time there likely involved a meal, which meant that food choices needed to be made. But there were other choices to make that day. Martha made hers and Mary did, too. And Jesus concludes this account by stating, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken from her.”
Choices. If Jesus were a guest in your home, what choices would be placed in front of you and, once you had made those choices, would Jesus say of you what he stated regarding Mary? Better yet, what choices does Jesus expect us to make? And not just for a day, but every day?

Let’s ponder this familiar Bible event for a few minutes. Let’s turn Jesus’ statement about Mary’s choice into an encouragement for us. Make the better choice every day. Just what is that choice? Follow along and we’ll find out.

Part I.

Have you ever been a “Martha”? We all have. Someone important to us is coming to visit us. We want things to be just right and there seem to be a million things to do. So we spend each waking hour preparing for their arrival. We short ourselves on sleep and literally wear ourselves out getting ready. And why? Because it’s an indication of what that person and their visit mean to us.

Martha literally had the Son of God in her house. The promised Messiah. King David’s greater Son. There were far more things to do to host this Divine Guest than she could do herself. She wanted to make sure everything was just right because she loved Jesus and wanted to serve him in this way. But she couldn’t do everything by herself and thus her question, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Martha thought this event was an opportunity for her and her sister, Mary, to serve Jesus.

But recall what Jesus once stated about himself. “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt. 20:28). Jesus could have used his almighty power to subjugate every single human being. In fact, that’s what his fellow Jews were hoping he would do—create a grand and glorious nation of Jews who ruled the entire world. But that’s not why the Son of God left the glories of heaven and took on human flesh and blood and lived among his sinful creatures.

No, he came to serve them—every single sinful one of them. As he sat in the home of Mary and Martha he was doing just that. He was perfectly carrying out the will of his Father. He was perfectly engaged in the work he had come to do: sharing the message that he was the world’s Savior from sin.

And it wouldn’t be long before Jesus would complete that work on Calvary’s cross. Think about that for a moment. In most of the work that we do, we expect some benefit to come our way—monetary or otherwise. Jesus engages in the most critical and difficult work in all of history—a work that no one else could have done—and he gets nothing out of it himself. He does it all for sinners, the vast majority of whom want nothing to do with him. He does it solely because of who he is—the God of perfect love and boundless grace. He served you as your Savior and he still serves you as your glorified and ascended Savior.

You have choices to make in your life. Make the better choice every day! Choose Jesus who serves you.

One of the reasons you’re here in worship today is that you know and believe that Jesus came to serve you all the way to death on the cross. He never demands that we do a single thing to earn our way to eternal life. It’s his gift to us by faith in him. But there are times in our lives when we get things turned around spiritually. We wrongly think that our serving him is more important than he serving us. It happens when serving our Lord is driven by sinful pride, when we want others to notice what we’re doing for the Lord, when we think our serving him is worth more than the service others are rendering. That’s when the “Martha” comes out in us. Our service to the Lord Jesus never earned us anything. If we thought it did, it became something ugly in the sight of Jesus. But the sin of pride-filled service was paid for along with all other sins when Jesus served us by suffering and dying. His goal was for us to live with him eternally. Choose Jesus every day.

Part II.

It’s a safe assumption that a major portion of Martha’s preparations for Jesus centered on food. It’s likely that the aroma of cooking and baking filled her home. That aroma only deepened the desire to eat.

But there was a far better food already available that day and it satisfied an eternally critical hunger. That food was in the person and work of Jesus, the Bread of Life. Mary chose to engage in divine dining. Our text states, “Mary…sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.” Her position sitting on the floor while Jesus likely sat on a chair was the common teacher-student posture. Their conversation that day didn’t revolve around politics or the latest social issues. Mary realized she had the opportunity right then and there to hear the word of God from the mouth of God himself and she was all ears. Jesus was the master teacher, able to make life applications of his timeless word like none of the Jewish rabbis could. The spiritual truths he shared no doubt centered on himself as the promised Savior and about life in his kingdom, truths that Jesus never tired of sharing.

As Mary listened, her faith in Jesus, although already exemplary and strong, grew deeper. She came to a deeper understanding of his purpose on earth, a purpose so many of her fellow-Jews misunderstood and rejected. That knowledge and faith caused her to understand more clearly her purpose in God’s kingdom and what her Lord Jesus had in store for her. She chose to have Jesus feed her soul on the Bread of Life.

What better choice could there be at that moment? What better choice could there be for us? Choose Jesus who feeds you.

“What does God think about this particular event or opportunity in my life? I wonder what God wants me to do in this situation?” Countless Christians have asked those questions countless times. But God doesn’t shout his answers from heaven. Instead, he shares his written word with us. That words centers on Jesus, the Bread of Life. Are you hungry for that Bread? Do you find your life in it? Or, is it only something you snack on occasionally, when there’s nothing else that needs your attention, when you have some extra time? Spiritual hunger doesn’t cause an ache in your stomach. It causes an ache in your heart from sin and guilt. Spiritual hunger occurs when Jesus is only standing on the sideline of your life, not the center of it. Spiritual hunger results in confusion and anxiety, doubt and anger, materialism and self-centeredness. The Bread of Life is the answer to all those sins and sins’ results. That Bread is a Savior who died for you even though your devotion and commitment to him and his word isn’t what it should be. Choose Jesus who feeds you!

Part III.

Devotion. Commitment. Your connection to Christ. Those are issues any and every Christian deals with. That’s because our natural sinful propensity is to take our relationship with Christ for granted. We so easily focus on what’s happening in our lives. We can get overwhelmed just with daily living. So we get lulled to spiritual sleep. We’re easily distracted. We’re in danger of disconnecting from Christ completely.

So, realize what’s at stake. Realize that without Christ, you really have nothing. Remember the rich fool in one of Jesus’ parables. He spent his time and effort making life easy for himself here on earth without any thought of what would happen when he dies. It’s so easy to make that mistake. It won’t happen when you choose Jesus every day because he saves you for eternal life with him.

One final word about choices. The only reason you have the opportunity to spend time with Jesus and his word each day is due to the truth that he chose you to be his child by faith in him. He bought you back from sin, death and hell with his holy life and his holy blood. By his grace he brought you to faith in him and made you a member of his holy kingdom. And now an important part of life in that kingdom—now that Jesus has chosen you—is for you to make daily choices that reflect that Jesus has chosen you first. May the truth that Jesus chose to serve you with his life and death, that Jesus chose to feed you, that Jesus chose to save you from hell’s punishment, fill you with the desire to make the better choice every day. Choose Jesus, only Jesus! Amen.