Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our Reading titled Choosing Life was written by Karen Pimpo.

Nathan grew up in a Christ-believing household, but he started to stray away from his childhood faith as a college student into things like drinking and partying.

God brought me back to himself when I didn't deserve it, he said.

In time, Nathan spent a summer sharing Jesus with strangers on the streets of major U.S. cities

and is now completing a residency in youth ministry at his church.

Nathan's goal is to help young people avoid wasting time not living for Christ.

Like Nathan, the Israelite leader Moses had a heart for the next generation.

Knowing he would soon relinquish leadership, Moses delivered God's good regulations to the people

and then lists the results of either

obedience or disobedience. Blessing and life for obedience, cursing and death for disobedience.

Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, he told them in Deuteronomy chapter 30,

for the Lord is your life. Moses urged them to love God,

listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. Choosing sin brings consequences, but when we surrender our lives

to God again, he will surely have mercy and restore us. This promise was fulfilled throughout the people of Israel's

history, but also by Jesus' final work on the cross to bring us into fellowship with God.

We too have a choice today and are free to choose life.

Today's our daily bread devotional scripture reading is from Deuteronomy chapter 30 verses 11 through 20. Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you

or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, who will ascend into heaven to get it and

proclaim it to us so we may obey it?

Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, who will cross the sea to get it and

proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?

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