Choosing Life
Choosing Life: How Your Heart and Your Words Work Together
There is a moment that many believers experience early in their faith journey that shapes everything that comes after. It is the moment when the fire of new belief meets the reality of everyday life, and the question arises: does this actually work? Does the Word of God actually change things? Does what I say and what I believe actually matter in a practical, tangible way?
The answer is yes. But the how behind that answer is more nuanced, more rooted, and more powerful than many people first realize.
The Foundation: A Real Encounter
There is a difference between an experience and an encounter. You can have an experience with something and walk away largely unchanged. But an encounter leaves marks. It rewires something on the inside. When a person truly comes to faith in Christ, not as a religious exercise or a cultural habit, but as a genuine surrender of the heart, something changes that cannot be undone. The old hatred, the old identity, the old operating system begins to give way to something entirely new.
This is not just poetic language. It is the reality of what Scripture describes as being born again. And one of the first things that shifts in a genuinely transformed life is an insatiable hunger for the Word of God. That hunger is not accidental. It is the new nature reaching for the food it was made to consume.
The Power of Words, Rightly Understood
One of the most misunderstood and misapplied teachings in Christian circles involves the relationship between faith, words, and outcomes. On one extreme, some reduce it to a kind of spiritual vending machine, as if saying the right phrases in the right order produces guaranteed results. On the other extreme, some dismiss the idea entirely, treating the connection between belief, confession, and experience as nothing more than positive thinking dressed in religious language.
Both extremes miss the point.
Proverbs 18:20-21 makes a striking claim: a person's innermost being will be filled with the fruit of their lips, and death and life are in the power of the tongue. This is not a motivational slogan. It is a spiritual principle embedded in the fabric of how God designed human beings to operate. What we consistently speak, rooted in what we consistently believe, shapes the trajectory of our lives.
But notice the key phrase: rooted in what we believe. The words are not the engine. They are the exhaust. The engine is the heart.
Deuteronomy 30 and the Choice Set Before Us
In Deuteronomy 30:19, God makes one of the most straightforward declarations in all of Scripture. Through Moses, He tells the people that He has set before them life and death, blessing and cursing, and then He tells them to choose life. The fact that He has to tell them to choose life reveals something important about human nature: left to our own defaults, we drift toward the negative. We complain. We catastrophize. We rehearse what is wrong rather than what God has said is true.
The passage goes further in verses 11 through 14, pointing out that the word of God is not hidden, not inaccessible, not locked away in some distant place requiring extraordinary effort to reach. It is near. It is in the mouth and in the heart. This is not a minor detail. God is saying that the very thing needed to walk in life and blessing is already within reach. The question is whether we will engage with it at the level of the heart, not just the intellect.
The Difference Between the Head and the Heart
This is where many believers get stuck. They learn the promises of God. They can quote the scriptures. They know that 1 Peter 2:24 affirms that healing was accomplished through Christ's suffering, that Philippians 4:19 speaks of God supplying every need, that Romans 8:37 declares believers to be more than conquerors. They know these things in their minds. But knowing something in the mind and believing it in the heart are two different things entirely.
Jesus addressed this directly in Mark 11:23, where He described the possibility of speaking to a mountain and seeing it move, with the condition being that the person does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they are saying will come to pass. The mouth and the heart are linked. The confession flows from the conviction. When the conviction is genuine, the confession carries weight.
This is also the pattern Paul lays out in Romans 10:9-10, where salvation itself is connected to believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth. If God entrusted the most eternally significant decision a human being can make to the combination of heart belief and verbal confession, it stands to reason that other dimensions of the Christian life operate on the same principle.
Agreeing With God, Not Denying Reality
A critical clarification deserves emphasis here. Walking in faith is not the same as denying reality. If someone is sick, pretending they are not sick is not faith. It is denial, and it is not what Scripture teaches. The correct posture is to acknowledge what is true in the natural while aligning with what God has declared to be true in the spirit. The difference sounds like this: not "I am not sick," but "I am sick, and yet the Word of God says that by His stripes I am healed, so I am going to agree with God."
That is the working definition of what it means to walk in the word of faith. It is simply agreeing with what God says. Confession, as Hebrews 3:1 implies in its description of Christ as the high priest of our profession, means saying the same thing God says. It is alignment, not incantation.
The Invitation
The invitation standing before every believer is the same one Moses placed before the people of Israel: choose life. Not as a one-time decision, but as a daily orientation of the heart. Let the Word of God move from the page to the mind, from the mind to the heart, and from the heart to the mouth. When that process is genuine, something shifts. Not because of the power of the words themselves, but because of the power of the God those words are aligned with.
That is a life worth choosing every single day.
There is a moment that many believers experience early in their faith journey that shapes everything that comes after. It is the moment when the fire of new belief meets the reality of everyday life, and the question arises: does this actually work? Does the Word of God actually change things? Does what I say and what I believe actually matter in a practical, tangible way?
The answer is yes. But the how behind that answer is more nuanced, more rooted, and more powerful than many people first realize.
The Foundation: A Real Encounter
There is a difference between an experience and an encounter. You can have an experience with something and walk away largely unchanged. But an encounter leaves marks. It rewires something on the inside. When a person truly comes to faith in Christ, not as a religious exercise or a cultural habit, but as a genuine surrender of the heart, something changes that cannot be undone. The old hatred, the old identity, the old operating system begins to give way to something entirely new.
This is not just poetic language. It is the reality of what Scripture describes as being born again. And one of the first things that shifts in a genuinely transformed life is an insatiable hunger for the Word of God. That hunger is not accidental. It is the new nature reaching for the food it was made to consume.
The Power of Words, Rightly Understood
One of the most misunderstood and misapplied teachings in Christian circles involves the relationship between faith, words, and outcomes. On one extreme, some reduce it to a kind of spiritual vending machine, as if saying the right phrases in the right order produces guaranteed results. On the other extreme, some dismiss the idea entirely, treating the connection between belief, confession, and experience as nothing more than positive thinking dressed in religious language.
Both extremes miss the point.
Proverbs 18:20-21 makes a striking claim: a person's innermost being will be filled with the fruit of their lips, and death and life are in the power of the tongue. This is not a motivational slogan. It is a spiritual principle embedded in the fabric of how God designed human beings to operate. What we consistently speak, rooted in what we consistently believe, shapes the trajectory of our lives.
But notice the key phrase: rooted in what we believe. The words are not the engine. They are the exhaust. The engine is the heart.
Deuteronomy 30 and the Choice Set Before Us
In Deuteronomy 30:19, God makes one of the most straightforward declarations in all of Scripture. Through Moses, He tells the people that He has set before them life and death, blessing and cursing, and then He tells them to choose life. The fact that He has to tell them to choose life reveals something important about human nature: left to our own defaults, we drift toward the negative. We complain. We catastrophize. We rehearse what is wrong rather than what God has said is true.
The passage goes further in verses 11 through 14, pointing out that the word of God is not hidden, not inaccessible, not locked away in some distant place requiring extraordinary effort to reach. It is near. It is in the mouth and in the heart. This is not a minor detail. God is saying that the very thing needed to walk in life and blessing is already within reach. The question is whether we will engage with it at the level of the heart, not just the intellect.
The Difference Between the Head and the Heart
This is where many believers get stuck. They learn the promises of God. They can quote the scriptures. They know that 1 Peter 2:24 affirms that healing was accomplished through Christ's suffering, that Philippians 4:19 speaks of God supplying every need, that Romans 8:37 declares believers to be more than conquerors. They know these things in their minds. But knowing something in the mind and believing it in the heart are two different things entirely.
Jesus addressed this directly in Mark 11:23, where He described the possibility of speaking to a mountain and seeing it move, with the condition being that the person does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they are saying will come to pass. The mouth and the heart are linked. The confession flows from the conviction. When the conviction is genuine, the confession carries weight.
This is also the pattern Paul lays out in Romans 10:9-10, where salvation itself is connected to believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth. If God entrusted the most eternally significant decision a human being can make to the combination of heart belief and verbal confession, it stands to reason that other dimensions of the Christian life operate on the same principle.
Agreeing With God, Not Denying Reality
A critical clarification deserves emphasis here. Walking in faith is not the same as denying reality. If someone is sick, pretending they are not sick is not faith. It is denial, and it is not what Scripture teaches. The correct posture is to acknowledge what is true in the natural while aligning with what God has declared to be true in the spirit. The difference sounds like this: not "I am not sick," but "I am sick, and yet the Word of God says that by His stripes I am healed, so I am going to agree with God."
That is the working definition of what it means to walk in the word of faith. It is simply agreeing with what God says. Confession, as Hebrews 3:1 implies in its description of Christ as the high priest of our profession, means saying the same thing God says. It is alignment, not incantation.
The Invitation
The invitation standing before every believer is the same one Moses placed before the people of Israel: choose life. Not as a one-time decision, but as a daily orientation of the heart. Let the Word of God move from the page to the mind, from the mind to the heart, and from the heart to the mouth. When that process is genuine, something shifts. Not because of the power of the words themselves, but because of the power of the God those words are aligned with.
That is a life worth choosing every single day.
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