We usually return home from the Feast of Tabernacles with renewed spiritual vigor. Even so, past experience shows us that not everyone who kept the Feast with us in past years was with us this year. Do we have high hopes that we are present at next year's Feast? Hope alone, while positive, isn't enough to ensure that we are present at next year's Feast.

The choice we make daily is obvious: We must choose whether we will go in the direction of God's way or live in the ways of the world. Deuteronomy 30:19 proposes this clearly: "I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live." This is virtually an exact copy of the choice God set before Adam and Eve in the two trees.

We also decide daily whether we will develop our relationship with God zealously or merely casually. Here are our choices:

1. To make little or no effort and likely become swept away and reabsorbed into the world and the ways we know so well and feel comfortable with, or

2. To strive against the natural flow of this world and the current of our carnal inclinations, seeking resolutely and consistently to strengthen the relationship that God opened to us.

The second choice is truly seeking God. It is not a matter of looking for God as if to find Him, but endeavoring to be like Him. With our calling we now have access to our heavenly Father and the tree of life, and we have a relationship to build upon, which gives us every opportunity to go on to everlasting life. God has willed, though, that our development into His image must take place within this world.

God is not in the business of saving people just for the sake of saving them. He is saving humanity and creating His character in them. Our responsibility in this process of becoming one with God is to seek Him with all our heart.

If we do not seek God continually with all our heart, we through spiritual idleness and ease will gradually becomes morally indifferent, tolerant of our lack of spiritual drive, and ultimately hardened to God and sin. In the process, we will become blind to our spiritual state. Of course, we would not notoriously immoral, but rather like the Laodicean who is a person straddling the proverbial fence.

Loyalty cannot be divided between Christ and the world. Our purpose must be undivided singleness of mind, energetically given to seeking God, His Kingdom, and His righteousness as our first priority. This is how we can work out our salvation (Philippians 2:12), thus ensuring that we can escape the plague of Laodiceanism and attend the Feast of Tabernacles again next year.

With these thoughts I wish everyone a rewarding Sabbath!