The Fundamental Decision We All Must Face

Make a Choice

The fact that God is here and now—he is everywhere and always pursuing you, making demands and requiring things of you—means that at every moment of every day, you’re faced with a choice.

Either you can submit and surrender to the way reality is or you can try to create a fantasy of your own devising—a play in which you’re the star. You can either put God at the center of the universe in your heart or you can put yourself or something else there.

This means that we’re always faced with an ongoing series of choices that are manifestations of that fundamental choice. That choice really matters, because you take those little choices and you start to add them up over the course of your life, and they set a pathway and a trajectory.

You can either put God at the center of the universe in your heart or you can put yourself or something else there.

Two Different Paths

Lewis recognized that the road is diverging, always and everywhere, and there are two destinations. Either we’re moving toward God, toward life, toward joy, toward happiness, toward fullness or we’re moving away from God, toward hatred, toward enmity, toward misery.

Lewis on the Christian Life

Joe Rigney

Joe Rigney explores particular themes that run throughout C. S. Lewis's popular and lesser-known writings, illuminating how they help readers develop a deeper awareness of God's presence and work in their lives.

Those two pathways are determined by the fundamental choice. Reality confronts us with an absolutely unavoidable either/or. When faced with that, many people want to try to have it both ways.

We want to try and have our sin and God, too. We want heaven, but we don’t want it to cost us anything. Lewis tries to help us recognize that this is just fundamental, basic reality. You must choose to place God at the center of your life or your headed down a different path.

Joe Rigney (PhD, University of Chester) serves as a fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College. He is a husband, a father of three, and the author of a number of books, including The Things of Earth; Strangely Bright; and More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust.

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