Attitude Choices

Your attitude makes all the difference in the world.  Regardless of the situation or circumstances you find yourself in you have a choice, you can choose to have a good or bad attitude!  I am not advocating that the choice will always be an easy one but you always have the ability to choose.

If you are poor, sick, tired, rich, fat, thin, beautiful or plain you still have a choice about what your attitude will be like, good or bad.  One thing the Lord never took away from us is a free will to choose and to make our own choices.  To be honest I think it would be better if the Lord made all our choices for us but I think that would be called manipulation and the Lord doesn’t act that way.  

Today I want to talk about a rich man who had a choice and the choice he made would affect his whole life, like many of our choices do.  This story that Jesus told is found in Luke 16:19–31, it is the story about a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus, a beggar.  The problem wasn’t that the man was rich and had a lot of money and possessions, no it was his attitude, he chose to be selfish and not share his wealth.  Lazarus sat at his gate full of sores and hungry but the rich man gave him nothing, having no compassion for this beggar whatsoever, while Lazarus longed to eat the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table.  Like I said there is nothing wrong with being rich having all kinds of money and material things, it is how you choose to handle your riches.  Money can be a curse or a blessing depending on the person’s choices that have it.  In this case it sounds like this man hoarded his money and thought of no one but himself.

This reminds me of a story about a man that was rich, called J.C. Penney, he owned the J. C. Penney stores you may remember them.  When he was converted to Christianity he started paying ten percent of his money for tithes and living on ninety percent, but as time went on he started paying ninety percent of his income for tithes and living on ten percent.  It seems like he had his priorities in the right place.

The man in Jesus’ story had his priorities all wrong he put his money before anything else.  His bad choice cost him dearly, he ended up in Sheol and the poor man ended up being carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom.  The rich man had ample opportunity to help Lazarus when he was living in luxury but didn’t, but in verse 25 of this story he wants Lazarus to help him by dipping the tip of his finger in water and cooling his tongue.  Finally in verses 27 and 28 the rich man started thinking about someone else besides himself, he thought about his five brothers, not wanting them to end up where he was, but it was much too late.

What about you?  If you are reading this and you live in the United States, you may be one of the richest people in the world.  Don’t compare yourself to the richest people in the world but compare yourself to the poorest people and you are considered rich.  There are poor people and beggars all around, what are you doing to alleviate someone else’s pain and misery?  Have you been showing compassion or selfishness?  What kind of choices have you made in this area?  

One of the reasons the Lord blesses us is so we can bless others, the Word says in Acts 20:35, Paul speaking, “In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”

The choices the rich man made in this story brought about some horrible consequences, now you have some choices to make, I hope you make the right ones.  Don’t let bad attitudes rob you of great blessings.  God bless you and yours and may you have a great day!!