The One Free Choice

Delivered at Immanuel Church, Tel Aviv — February 14, 2026

Readings: Psalm 119:1–16 · Deuteronomy 30:15–20 · 1 Corinthians 2:6–13

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I

How free are you? Truly, honestly — how free? You woke up this morning and had breakfast. If you drink coffee, you had coffee. You drove the same roads, walked the same streets, or took the same bus. And in a few hours, you will go home, and you will do what you do on Saturday afternoon, because that is what you do on Saturday afternoon. How much of that did you actually choose?

There is a well-known atheist writer, Sam Harris, who wrote a short book called Free Will. His argument is simple: free will is an illusion. We are biological machines. Our choices — big and small — are determined by our genes, our upbringing, and our neural wiring. We are, he says, no more free than a computer running its code.

Long before, Martin Luther wrote a book called The Bondage of the Will. And Luther said something that sounds, on the surface, remarkably similar: the human will is not free. It is in bondage. In everyday things, Luther leaves us with that — which coffee to buy, which road to take — yes, you have a kind of freedom. But in the things that matter for eternity — turning toward God, trusting His promise, loving Him with your whole heart — the will that is apart from God cannot do it. Not because it is a machine, as Harris thinks, but because it is captive. Captive to sin, to the old Adam, to a nature that curves inward on itself.

Sam Harris looks at this and concludes: therefore, there is no freedom. Luther looks at the same bondage and says: therefore you need God.

So, again, where is your freedom, your power of will?

II

Today's reading from Deuteronomy seems to offer the answer. Moses stands before the people and declares:

"See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction... Now choose life."

Life or death. Two options. Not which coffee to buy or which party to support. The one real choice: God, or not God. Life, or death.

This sounds like freedom. Finally! A choice that matters, a choice that is truly ours.

And if it were that simple — if we could just choose life, just like that — then every sermon could be very short, and we would save much time in church. "Love God. Do not sin." Done. Go home.

But here Luther's insight cuts deep. "Choose life" sounds like an invitation. But it is a commandment. It is the law. And what the Law demands, the bound will cannot deliver. You cannot wake up tomorrow and choose life — real life, life as God means it — any more than you can lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own boots.

Why? Because "life" in God's vocabulary is not what we think it means. When we hear "choose life," we hear: choose my life. My health. My family. My safety. My people. And of course, these matter. But the will that curves inward on itself can only orbit the self. It can choose individual survival. It cannot choose life.

And yet God was not cruel to set this choice before His people. Just verses before Moses says, "choose life," God makes a promise that changes the spirit of the commandment itself:

"The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live."

God commands what He Himself will provide. He does not say "choose life" and then walk away. He promises to perform the heart surgery that makes the choice possible. Already in Deuteronomy, there is a whisper of the Gospel hidden inside the Law: your choosing will be held by something greater than your will.

III

God promised the heart surgery. But how? When? Paul gives us the answer:

"What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived — the things God has prepared for those who love him — these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit."

Now, it may sound like Paul is simply continuing where Moses left off: choose life, love God, and you will be richly rewarded. It sounds like a condition — the things God has prepared for those who love him.

But that is not what Paul is saying. Look at the shape of it. He does not say: go and find these things. He does not say: earn these things by loving harder. He says: no eye has seen them. No ear has heard them. No human mind has conceived them. In other words — you could not have gotten here on your own. Not by effort, not by wisdom, not by willpower. These things were beyond you entirely.

And then: God has prepared them. God has revealed them. The Spirit has given them. Every verb belongs to God. This is not a reward for obedience. This is a gift you receive freely — now. Right here, in the middle of your failure, in the middle of your inability to choose life the way Moses commanded.

The righteousness that surpasses anything we could produce on our own is not a higher human effort. It is a different kind entirely. It is Christ's righteousness, received, not achieved. This is the Gospel. Not "try harder." Not "choose better." But: God has done what you could not conceive, and He gives it freely.

IV

So what does this look like? What does it look like when the bound will meets the living God?

A senior pastor once shared an observation with me. He said that people come to faith carrying all kinds of identities and convictions. Someone arrives as a committed socialist. Someone else as a fierce nationalist. One person defines herself by her politics, another by his ethnicity, another by the cause she has given her life to. Jew and Arab. Left and right. Religious and secular. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. These are not small things — they shape how people see the world, whom they trust, and whom they fear.

And then, he said, something strange happens. Over time, in the life of the church, those identities begin to loosen. Not because the church demands it. But because something deeper is quietly replacing what sat at the centre.

Why? What is doing this?

Jesus tells us:

"Your Father in heaven causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

God does not pick sides. Everyone is loved by God just the same. And when that truth begins to work on you, the old walls start to crack — not because you decided to tear them down, but because they cannot stand in the presence of a God who refuses to recognize them.

But the world demands the opposite. Pick a side. Pick your faction in the conflict. And the moment you do, you belong to that side. You adopt its enemies, its logic, its hatreds. You think you chose freely, but now the side is choosing for you. Sometimes it is not even a choice: you are put in a box with others who share your skin colour or your passport, and the box decides what you are allowed to think, to feel, to pray for.

This is bondage upon bondage. Inside, the will pulls inward. Outside, the world narrows it further. And somewhere in the middle, Moses is still saying: choose life. How?

Not by choosing your life. But by choosing life. Life as God sees it. Life that includes everyone, even the ones your nature tells you to exclude. Life that is bigger than survival, bigger than your side, bigger than the lines the world has drawn.

Here in Israel, we feel this more sharply than most. When you hear the siren, when you rush to the shelter — there is nothing more natural than to pray for yourself, for your people. God hears that prayer. He does not scold you for it.

But death is not only the rocket. Death is also the hatred that grows in your heart while you sit in the shelter. Death is when the enemy stops being a human being in your mind. Death is when the prayer on your lips narrows until there is no room left in it for anyone but yourself.

When the siren sounds, what prayer rises to your lips? Let us be honest. It is not hard to find comfort in the prayers of Joshua's time — prayers for victory, prayers for the destruction of enemies, prayers that God would crush those who threaten His people. Those prayers are in the Bible. They are real. And in the moment of terror, they come naturally.

But we are not in Joshua's time. We are on this side of the cross. And Christ calls us somewhere we would not go on our own:

"Lord, grant peace. Lord, remove the hatred from my heart. Lord, remove hatred from their hearts. Give them a good life, let them see their children back, and let me see mine. Give us peace and spare our lives."

Notice how the Lord's Prayer teaches us to pray in exactly this direction. It begins at the top: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The first words out of our mouths are not about us. They are about God's name, God's kingdom, God's will — for the whole earth. Only then does the prayer move closer: give us bread, forgive us, deliver us. The blueprint is universal first, personal second. The prayer trains us to see as God sees: from the whole, down to the one.

That is not how we naturally pray. That is how we ought to pray. And the distance between those two — between the prayer that rises on its own and the prayer Christ sets before us — that distance is the exact measure of our bondage.

But when that second prayer begins to form — even weakly, even reluctantly, even through gritted teeth — know that it did not come from you. That is a product of grace. That is the Spirit doing what you could not do for yourself.

That is the heart surgery God promised in Deuteronomy, performed by the Spirit Paul proclaims. In that moment, you are not choosing your life. You are choosing life. And you are free — truly free — perhaps for the first time.

V

Brothers and sisters: you are not as free as you think. Most of your choices are made by habit, by nature, by the world's demands. And the one choice that matters — life or death, God or not God — is too great for our bound hearts to make alone. Even our prayers reveal it: we orbit ourselves.

But God has prepared what no eye has seen. The Spirit reveals what no mind could conceive. And in that revelation, you find yourself — miracle — choosing life. Not your life. Life. Not by your strength. By His.

Choose life. But know that even your choosing is held by the One who chose you first.

Amen.