The Cheeseburger Gym

I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days . . . Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Imagine I’m joining a gym and must pick between two very different options. One gym’s advertisement features photos of models who look like they sit on the couch and eat a lot of cheeseburgers. The other gym, however, uses photos of models who look like they exercise and eat well. Because I value physical fitness, I’m not going to pick the cheeseburger-eating gym. Frankly, I don’t want to look like I eat a lot of cheeseburgers. When, however, I’m sitting at the restaurant later in the day, eyeing the menu, the world looks very different. Suddenly, my appetite demands the same thing I just said that I don’t want to look like I eat.

This is my life problem and cheeseburgers are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If I would sit and plan out what I wanted my life to be like, I’d choose all healthy things. I want to be in good shape. I want to be a good husband and father. I desire to be a good physician. And I truly intend to live in faith and recovery. I want to experience the blessed life for which God created me. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is doing the actual things that lead to that life that I say that I want, because in any given moment, I simply want to eat the metaphorical cheeseburger.

In my addiction, I knew what it would take to get sober. That wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was rather quite a simple concept – I just needed to abandon my way to follow God’s way, changing everything about my life. This simple concept though, was profoundly difficult to actually do.

I imagine the Israelites learned something similar from today’s passage. In it, God laid before them a simple choice. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. If they followed themselves, death. If they followed God, life. I’m sure they found this to be a simple plan and had every intention of following it. Then life happened though, and the reality of following God wasn’t so easy. Their own nature constantly derailed their good intentions, as they found it was much easier to simply live as they pleased.

We face a similar predicament. Yes, we desire the life for which God created us, but in any given moment, we’d rather just do whatever we want. Authentic life though, is found only in following God. As I said, simple in concept, difficult to do.