James wrote,

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:13, 14 NIV84).

I have heard many pastors over the years encouraging people not to put off their choice for truth, God, Christ, and salvation because they don’t know the future—that something might happen and they could die before they make their choice for Him. 

There is reality-based wisdom in that idea, but more often than not, such a declaration leads to a choice made out of fear of the unknown, the future, punishment, or missing out. People often hear such appeals and make a choice to avoid something scary rather than embrace something winsome, a flight from punishment rather than a reasoned choice based on understanding the truth and experiencing God’s love. 

So, my purpose here is not to suggest the danger in putting off your choice is because you might not be here tomorrow; instead, I am focusing on a deeper reality, how God built our hearts and minds to function, and what happens to us in our minds, brains, motives, and hearts when we delay. 

How We Become Who We Are

We are living beings created in the image of God with the capacity to think, understand, choose, and act. And as long as we are alive, we are in a constant state of change, being shaped by our choices and how we internalize life’s experiences.

As we go through life, we are constantly faced with new experiences, perspectives, and reality-based feedback on how our decision-making, methods, priorities, values, and perspectives are working. God is the source of truth and is constantly shining His truth and love down upon the world, upon every heart and mind, and that truth will always confront error, distortion, misunderstanding, and falsehood—the falsehoods of ideas but also the false and unhealthy methods and practices we have that are out of harmony with how God built life.

These reality-based experiences—feeling pain when touching a hot stove, being rejected when using intimidation and coercion to demand affection, exhausting self in legal religion but finding no inner peace, etc.—confront our unhealthy and false ideas and methods with reality and provide opportunity for growth, for learning, for updating, for maturing. If we are open to learning, sensitive to truth, and willing to be corrected, we are the wise described in Proverbs, and we identify with Paul, who wrote:

We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope (Romans 5:3–4 NIV84).

We rejoice not because we like suffering, but because we understand reality, that we are born defective, animated by a spirit of fear, and begin encoding, internalizing, into our brains our own fear-based interpretations of life. These conclusions and internalizations are designed to bring us comfort, security, a sense of safety, but when animated by the spirit of fear and survival, they always distort experiences, and we encode error, making us more fearful and selfish.

God loves us and wants to save us, which means to heal and restore within us His perfection, His truth, His love, His reality, His methods—as Hebrews states about the New Covenant:

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people (Hebrews 8:10 NIV84).

God is the God of reality, of truth, of love, and we are free beings born in sin, conceived in iniquity (Psalm 51:5). We are born with a condition inherited from Adam, which we did not choose, which causes us to inherently distort reality in ever more corrupted ways that take us further from life and health. As Paul wrote,

Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men (Romans 5:12 NIV84).

We are not born guilty; we are born terminal, infected with a spirit of fear that did not come from God, but Adam (2 Timothy 1:7), and that animating motive is corrosive and drives us to selfishness and ever-increasing distortions.

Therefore, in love, God provides the solution to this problem in the person of Jesus Christ. His Son, incarnate, took up our very condition inherited through David and Mary (Romans 1:3), but His humanity did not have an earthly corrupt father—no, Jesus’ humanity was conceived by the Holy Spirit. In the humanity of Jesus, a new, second, sinless breath of life, spirit, entered the species, and in the person of Jesus, He lived sinlessly and, at the cross, purged the spirit of fear that Adam brought upon the race.

Through that reality-based reordering, restructuring, editing, correcting, cleansing, purging of the human species by Christ’s free-will choice to sacrifice Himself to accomplish this outcome, the human species was restored to perfection in the person of Jesus. He is the new head of humanity, the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-47), the proverbial Vine, and we are invited to be the branches who are grafted into Christ through trust (John 15:5). And when we surrender in trust, we receive the indwelling Holy Spirit who brings us a new life, the life of Christ (John 3:3; Galatians 2:20), and we are reborn new creatures in Christ.

When We Delay

What does this have to do with delaying our decisions for truth? Everything—because of how reality works.

Our brains are the physical organs from which our consciousness and individuality emerge. But our choices, our conclusions, how we internalize life experiences, react back upon the brain, encoding (yes, making real-time structural changes in the molecules of our brains) our choices. And what we choose to believe, value, prioritize, love, and prefer becomes self-sustaining structures in our brains that resist change.

Further, our encoded choices become predictive models on how we interpret new experiences—if we are encoding falsehood, it becomes hard for us to recognize truth. Further, our encoding changes the frequency, the resonance, the harmonic vibration of the quantum elements of our brains, thereby making us either more sensitive or less sensitive to the Spirit of truth and love.

When we know the truth but reject it, we literally change our brains in such a way that it becomes harder for us to recognize the truth the next time. But when we encode truth and love, we become more sensitive to truth and love, more sensitive to the Holy Spirit. We can hear the still small voice more easily.

But if we encode lies, fear, selfishness, denial, we become less sensitive to the Holy Spirit; our consciences become dulled, and we don’t hear the still small voice of God as easily. God must raise His voice, events must get more intense, to get through to us, and if we resist again and say no again, we deepen the encoding errors into our brains; we become ever more out of harmony with truth and love and more aligned with the corruption of this world.

Delay doesn’t mean we are cast off by God; it doesn’t mean we are, at that moment, lost or that God changes, but it does mean we are hurting ourselves, making it harder for God to reach us, and we are also making ourselves sicker so that if/when we finally do surrender, do choose the truth, the pain, the suffering, the difficulty of being set free will be harder on us—that is how reality works.

Finally, I want to differentiate the saying “no, I don’t want to follow truth now; I will follow it later” attitude with the person who delays, not out of rejection, not out of wanting to stay in sin, but out of uncertainty, confusion, and honest questioning in the struggle to be free of old encoding, old allegiances, old attachments. That is a natural process of healing, and as long as one remains actively pursuing the truth, they remain aligned with God.

But often, truth presents, and your heart and mind respond to it and you see elements of application that are right for you. You haven’t said no to the truth, but you haven’t said yes either, because your “yes” would mean a price, a cost—you might have to break up a dysfunctional relationship, you might have to quit a job, you might have to change careers, or sell a property—and you are struggling to apply the truth for a variety of reasons.

You see the truth; you want to accept it; you haven’t rejected it, but you are struggling to find a way to apply it that won’t cost what you think it will cost. And sometimes this is framed as, “How can I apply this truth without offending” this person or that person? Abraham struggled in this way when told to sacrifice Isaac. He didn’t reject the truth; he wrestled through his discomfort to be able to apply the truth.

When truth comes to bear, one is not wrong to consider how to accept and apply it to their life in the most gracious, loving way—how do I let my family know I am no longer agnostic, that I have given my heart to Jesus?

A person in this position, which may last a while, is not at peace (Abraham wasn’t), as the truth and the Holy Spirit are constantly moving upon them. When the old patterns, attachments, methods, and motives present, they are convicted this isn’t right. They experience greater distress, anxiety, worry, pressure, maybe even exhaustion, burnout, fatigue, as it is exhausting to try and hold two opposing values, priorities—clinging to something out of fear of the result while pursuing Jesus and the truth out of love for Him. Those in a state of indecision will continue to experience burnout until they make their choice for truth or reject it. When they choose the truth, no matter the cost, and trust Jesus, a huge burden lifts. Their heart is freed from that struggle, and their brain literally changes, resulting in their spirit shifting to be ever more in harmony with God. They are settled on that point and experience a period of joy, peace, and relief within themselves, even if they lose a relationship, position, or object of value. And then the next advancement of truth comes because when we live in relationship with the source of infinite truth, we are on an eternal journey of growth and development.

But if they eventually cling to the old and persistently reject the truth, they slowly lose the urgency, sensitivity, and desire for the truth and will come to wonder why they ever thought it was something worth following in the first place.

That is how reality works, and that is why delaying decisions for truth is dangerous (even if delaying one’s choice is done to consider the most gracious way to implement the truth). So I encourage you to choose today to apply whatever truth God has laid on your heart, to experience His healing, the reordering of your brain, the cleansing of your heart, the transformation of your character, and the abundant life promised to all who surrender in trust to God.