Choose Ye This Day
As for me and my house
Listen
Start by listening to Choose Ye This Day from Hold the Line. The words are on the song’s page.
The message
Joshua was an old man when he gathered all the tribes of Israel at Shechem. They had come through the wilderness, crossed the Jordan and settled the land they had been promised. He had led them through all of it. And with the time he had left, he didn't give them a battle plan. He gave them a choice. Serve the Lord, or choose the gods of the people around you, but choose, and choose this day. Then he told them where he stood: "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say, "I hope my family turns out all right." He made the decision before the trouble came, and he made it for his household. That's what the father in this song does. The world is on his doorstep with its banners and its gold, calling to his children and his wife, saying lay your shield down and live an easy life. And he draws a line across his threshold.
Here's what I want us to understand about that line. Agency is not a small thing in the plan of salvation. It's the whole reason there was a war in heaven. Lehi taught that we are "free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death." Read that carefully. Liberty doesn't come from choosing in the abstract. It comes through the Mediator. Every real choice for God is a choice for Jesus Christ, because He is the only way the choosing can lead anywhere good.
Israel promised to serve the Lord, and Joshua didn't let that promise drift. He wrote it in the book of the law and set up a great stone under an oak, and he told them the stone would be a witness, because it had heard every word. In the song the father does the same thing. He carves it on the lintel, burns it into the wood over the door, so every time his children pass under it they'll know where their family stood.
We have stones like that. When we were baptized we took upon us the name of Jesus Christ. King Benjamin's people did the same, and he told them that because of that covenant they would be called the children of Christ, His sons and His daughters, because He had spiritually begotten them. Every Sunday we renew it. We take the bread and the water and promise to always remember Him and keep His commandments, and He promises that we may always have His Spirit to be with us. That's not a ritual we sit through. That's the line being drawn again.
The song makes a promise in its second pre-chorus: "The Lord will keep the house of any man who keeps the line / And the gates of hell won't break a door that He calls mine." That echoes what Jesus said of His own church, that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. You can't keep your family safe by yourself. But you can choose Him, out loud, at your own front door, and He keeps what is given to Him. Every other battle on this album starts right here.
Ponder
If the choice you made at baptism had to be proven only by how your home ran this past week, with no words allowed, what would the evidence say, and what is the one thing you would put away to make it say more?
Try this tonight
Write "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" on a card and put it on or beside a door your family walks through every day. Let it be your stone of witness.