Making Godly Decisions
In the third part of his series on living in a changing world, Tom Shrader teaches from Psalm 119 about making godly decisions when life presents unclear choices. He explains that God speaks to us through His Word, the Holy Spirit, and other people, and emphasizes the freedom believers have in many decisions rather than searching for one specific 'God's will.' Shrader encourages a process of gathering facts, praying, consulting Scripture, examining one's heart for sin, and seeking wise counsel.
“Almost everyone believes in God, but rarely do we act like we believe God.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: How to Stay Straight in a Crooked World (2012)
Recorded: October 04, 2012
Duration: 39 min
Themes: decisions, wisdom, guidance, prayer, scripture, counsel, discernment, change, facing difficult choices, seeking gods direction, navigating life transitions, young adult, new believer, struggling with uncertainty, parent making decisions, mentor seeking wisdom
Scripture: Psalm 119:1, Psalm 119:9, Psalm 119:15, Psalm 119:24, Psalm 119:33, Psalm 119:49, Psalm 119:66, Psalm 119:105, 2 Timothy 3:16, Psalm 1:1, John 14:16, John 16:7, John 17, 1 Corinthians 2:14, Philippians 1:6, Philippians 2:12-13, 1 Thessalonians 4:3
Theological Themes: biblical authority, holy spirit guidance, gods will, scripture application, spiritual discernment, divine guidance, biblical worldview, sanctification
Full Transcript
Week three, there's a progression here. So I want to take you through that. The premise is not so much the moral issue, though that's part of it, but you live in a world that's constantly changing in terms of values, for example. Something that was 30 years ago forbidden, 15 years ago kind of tolerated, is now mainstream today. Then 15 years from now, it will be kind of passé and we'll move on to the next thing. Where everything's changing, and I'm kind of a change guy, I like change. Where everything's changing so quickly, how do I find that stability?
Finding Stability Through God's Word
Step one was this: the Bible's the final authority of my life. I start there because that's that Supreme Court illustration. For us, if the Bible says to do it, do it. If it says to avoid it, avoid it. From there, we begin to form a worldview. That was week one, 2 Timothy 3:16. All scripture is inspired by God, it's good for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. I need a hook, here's my hook: The Bible tells me what's right, what's not right, how to get right, how to stay right.
That's week one, 45 minutes, support data. Those are the things that you need to understand that that Bible and the faith in that word becomes really a cornerstone for everything else. Even the idea of believing and eternal life, all that flows from that scripture.
Becoming a Lifelong Learner
Week two, we talked about now I become a lifelong learner. I shared with you what, to me, I know it's really simple, but the interview with C.J. Mahaney did with Jerry Bridges, John Piper, and Wayne Grudem, where all of them talked about starting that day, at least an hour every day, in that scripture. I gave you that not to pour guilt on you, but to go, here are these guys that, with all due respect, are way down the track from you and me.
I think of Grudem in particular. Here's my 1,250-page systematic theology, and yet every day, I'm going back to, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." That God is this infinite God who speaks to us through His word, and then now the Spirit comes along and applies that. So it's lifelong learning of God's word, but it's also being in this world that's changing constantly and keeping abreast of that.
The world is changing. Your flinch is to kind of go, I don't know if it's worth the battle. I don't know if it's worth keeping up. Things are changing so fast. The rules are changing. Technology is changing. There's a certain point at which you stop and you become irrelevant and you've made yourself that. That is not a necessity with age. That's just a byproduct of saying, I'm just not going to try anymore.
How to Make Godly Decisions
Those are week one and week two. Today gets into how do we flesh this out? How do we make godly decisions? There's a two-pronged thing: knowing what to do and then having the strength to do it.
I'm walking through AJ's, and I run into a guy. He looks familiar. I'm not good with names. He looks familiar and he says to me, "I haven't been to your thing in a while." I'm trying to figure out, okay, what is that thing? Then I realized he means this and all that stuff. He said, "I assume you heard what happened." Well, I don't know if I heard it. I don't even care about it probably, but no, I don't know what happened. He said, "I made some really stupid decisions and I violated essentially every core principle you've taught in every lesson you've ever done." And then the demise that goes with it.
Now, I care because he's a person. Here's a great example for you. We had somebody like six months ago in the church, been married to them a long time, spouse dies. We see this all the time and they leave the church. We see that all the time. We see people come from other churches and they leave the church maybe because it's too much to bear or too many memories, I don't know. But it always strikes me odd that at the time you need people the most, you pull away from the very people that have invested 30 years in you. That always strikes me as odd.
Here's this God, maybe you're here today and you've just screwed up big time. The last thing you want to do is run away from everything you know is right.
The Difference Between Believing In God and Believing God
Here's my basic premise. Almost everyone believes in God, but rarely do we act like we believe God. So I believe in Him. I'm driving down the street and I have no problem admitting this. I listen to Oprah radio a chunk. I'll always check to see what she's doing. Love Oprah, love to listen to her for illustrations, if nothing else.
I get right in a discussion and I'm only going to be in the car about three minutes and they're talking God. I don't know who the people are. I can't see them in the radio, don't have a screen. This lady is making this point about this divine power, this higher power. Then it's always this, "whatever you want to call it." Well, no, we've been through this. We know who God is. We don't have to guess. Don't have to wonder, don't have to speculate. We're told right here.
Most people, surveys keep varying, but somewhere between 91, 96% of the American people believe in God, some sort of God, some higher power. That's one thing. But they kind of had this deal with God. I believe in you. I won't bother you. Don't you bother me.
When I say believe God, I'm saying, okay, here you go. There's a bunch of you carrying around these big old honking Bibles, got them all marked up. You believe this stuff, you're in church all the time. Then all of a sudden, here's what Jesus says. Don't worry about today or tomorrow. I'll take care of you. Doesn't mean don't work. You know all of the things that go with that. But then your life is filled with sleepless nights, filled with worry.
We've got all these respectable sins. Worry, fat. Have you ever been to a Christian thing where they didn't serve you more sugar and more junk and more stuff to make you fatter and fatter and fatter? Sin, lazy. I believe God. Well,
God comes along and says, I'm going to give you this word. And I want you to understand that I'm going to tell you and give you just practical advice to life.
There's a guy who's a pretty cool guy. His name is George Washington Carver. He was born around 1860. His parents were slaves, so he was a slave. He was a little bit of a sickly boy, so he spent time in the house, not in the field. He became proficient in just looking at plants and curiosity. With that curiosity, he went to Iowa State College of Agriculture, which is now Iowa State University. From there, he began to do research, study disease, plants, all that went with it.
He received a letter from Booker T. Washington, who was the president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This is interesting. Here's part of what Washington wrote to him: "I cannot offer you money, prestige, or fame. The first two you have, the last, from the place you now occupy, you will no doubt achieve." Listen to this line: "The thing I now ask you is to give that up and come to Tuskegee."
Finally, he decides to do that. He begins to study, he does research. He begins to work with cow peas and cotton and bull weevils and ultimately, he begins to work with the peanut and then the sweet potato. He found over 300 applications for peanuts and 150 valuable applications and uses for the sweet potato.
Carver's Testimony Before Congress
In 1921, January, he was invited to testify in Washington before the Senate Ways and Means Committee. When he got there, I can imagine being invited to that—that would be a certain honor, especially if you're a mind like that and you've got stuff you want to express. They gave him 10 minutes. The 10 minutes went into two hours.
One exchange with a senator went like this. "Where did you learn all this?" His answer: "From a book." The senator: "What book?" George Washington Carver: "The Bible. God has revealed to me some of the wonders of the fruit of His earth." He goes on to say, "I asked God what to do with the peanut and He showed me."
Practical Application of Faith
It's the practical application that's way beyond just some of the things we suspect in life. It's you praying today when you go to the office before it even starts. "God, show me. God, open doors. God, teach me, lead me." I have these moments, and we were talking last week about Dr. Grudemann and not just studying His word and not just praying, but those moments of silence where often God will reveal a solution, an idea, that creativity, to begin to think about these basics.
So open your Bibles. We're going to look at, I think, just two passages today. It's the longest chapter in the Bible. So if somebody says to you, "Let's memorize a chapter," do not pick Psalm 119. It is long. Kind of a reoccurring theme is God's word and the value of it, the strength of it.
How God Speaks to Us
A granddaughter and I are driving. She's about eight years old. I said to her, "Does God ever talk to you? Does God speak to you?" And she said to me, "Yes." I said, "How?" Here was her answer—she's eight: "Through His word, through the Holy Spirit, through people."
About a week later, I said to her, because that blew me away, that surprised me a little bit, I said, "Does God ever speak to you?" And she said, "Yes." I said, "How?" And she goes, "I don't really know."
So does God speak to you and me? Yeah, how? Through His word, through the Holy Spirit, through people.
Life as a Maze
Come back to this premise now. Life at times is a maze. Not amazing, a maze. I'm not sure what to do. Do I turn left here? Do I go over there? We begin to apply common sense to it. You become that mentor, that person that people come to. It may just be your family. It may be common sense. It may be advice. Who made you so smart? How did you get there? How do you begin to sort things out?
The theme for this weekend with the Scottsdale Bible guys is legacy. How do I pass on a legacy? My point to them is really simple: You got one. It's not mandatory. It's inevitable that you have a legacy. The further away you get, it can just be one simple thing. I can just say a name. There's a name that's popped up in the news again. So all I have to do is say, "Monica Lewinsky"—there's a legacy. We've got to be close to Billy Graham dying. He's got to die here pretty soon. Keeps teasing us with this. So I say, "Billy Graham"—you have a legacy.
Your Legacy
You have one too. You have one at the office. It may be good, it may be bad.
I had this wonderful moment the other day where I announced at church on Sunday that I'm not going to be the primary teacher after the first of the year. So we're in a staff meeting, 33 pastors, 33 guys, and they decided to—it was like my funeral without me dying. It was interesting for me. I found myself having a hard time enjoying the moment completely because all I could think of is maybe 50 people who could be here who could rain on this parade completely. I have a legacy in one set of my life. I have a legacy in another set of my life.
You have this idea of legacy. You have these people that are coming to you and they're coming to you for advice all the time. Some of it's common sense. Some of it you pull out of this word.
Practical Advice for Young People
We're finding more and more young men and women who graduate from high school—we're a middle class church—whose kids don't want to go to college. I'm not a big college guy. I mean, if you want to be a welder, I wouldn't take out a lot of student loans. I'd just figure out how to do it and do it. If you want to be a brain surgeon, that's a different story.
But what I'll tell them all the time is here's what they do. And I said, don't do this: Don't go to MCC and take six hours because you're going to drop three and after five years, you're going to be a second semester freshman and frustrated. Go to the administration office, ask them how many hours you can take, set a goal of getting out of there and get yourself options. Now that's just my experience. It doesn't mean at all that it's necessarily right.
We had a guy that used to come to this study, the one we did
out East. He came in one day and had made a decision to tattoo, literally, a spider on his cheek. From that went a web that went all over. Now, to me, that's probably going to limit some career options for you, I don't know. My friend Jerry, who doesn't always have a filter, said, "You should have tattooed 'I will work for minimum wage all my life' right on your forehead." Well, I don't know because in some industries that might be an asset. But there are some things that you look at and you go, "Okay, here's some common sense."
But now I want to look at life in its totality. You want to understand what's important. Psalm 119, we'll just hopscotch through here. Verse one: "How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord." Now, when we see the word law, testimony, commands, precepts, He's talking here about His word. Remember what we saw last week, Psalm 1, verse one? "How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of the sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And in His law, he meditates day and night."
Finding Purity Through God's Word
Verse nine: "How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping it according to your word." Verse 15, we're still in Psalm 119: "I will meditate on your precepts and regard your ways. I shall delight in your statues and not forget your word." Verse 24: "Your testimonies also are my delight. They're my counselors." Verse 33, here's a prayer for you every morning: "Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it till the end."
Verse 49: "Remember the word to your servant in which you have made me hope." Now, the word hope is a word that repeats throughout scripture. The hope here is not "I hope Iowa wins a ballgame." The hope here is the anticipation of a future event that will certainly happen. That's our hope. Our hope is in the Lord. We know one day He will return. We know to be absent from the body is to be present with Him. We know He'll never leave us or forsake us. That's what I mean. Even as circumstances might make us feel like He has, it's not believing in God, it's believing God. He said He didn't. You may feel abandoned. You may look around. You may see these circumstances just overwhelming, but He didn't leave you or forsake you.
God's Word as Our Guide
Just stay in here and hopefully it whets your appetite for this chapter. Verse 66: "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in your commandments. All your commandments are faithful." Verse 105: "Your word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path. I have sworn and I will confirm it that I will keep your righteous ordinances."
That's the theme that we've talked about: in this world, how do I stay straight? How do I stay on path? Well, I come back to this word over and over and over again to begin to see things as they really are. There are competing worldviews, right? If I close this deal, if I get this girl, if I get that degree, our life is filled with those things that in essence have said, "I'm going to be your idol. I'm going to be your God. If you get this, you'll be happy." There may be momentary, better said temporary satisfaction, but ultimately, and this is really important, all false gods never fail to fail.
So when Paul talks in 1 Timothy 6 about the uncertainty of riches, here's what he's saying. You think having that will make you happy. You can buy a house, but that doesn't mean it's a home. All those kinds of things. The Bible comes along and says, "Listen, there are going to be those moments of exhilaration and I'm going to give you these blessings and those are from God and enjoy them." We love the gift and tend to worship the gift, but not the gift giver. We tend to love the blessing, but not the one who blesses us.
Seeing Through God's Perspective
But the Bible comes along and all of a sudden, now I have this owner's operator manual for my life, but not only for my life, for all of the world around me. I begin to see that everything that looks permanent to me is really temporary. But it's not, and this is so important, it's not just about getting to heaven. So Christians are so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good. My experience has been the opposite. We're so earthly minded, we're no heavenly good. We're so hung up in the things of the day.
This is not a message that says what you do every day is not important. What you do today is very important, but the significant lives in how you do it. It occurred to me coming in today that common sense and some informational knowledge and integrity, those three things become really important. We tend to put too much emphasis on "He's so smart." I hear this all the time. "He's so smart, he went to Harvard. He's so smart, he did it." We've tried all these smart guys. It's not, and I'm not anti-intellectual. I'm saying just smart, if I don't put common sense and integrity with that, smart isn't going to help me.
I was reading the other day, and I can't remember now who it was. Don't think Plato or Socrates, or it was like a Woody Allen or somebody. But he said a genius is someone who builds the Brooklyn Bridge and then tries to buy it. It's this lack of, I can build a car, but I don't know where my keys are.
How God Speaks to Us
So how does God speak to you? You're getting ready to make a decision in life. How does He speak to you? Well, He'll speak through His word. Here's the second thing: through the Holy Spirit. So if you have your Bible, it's John 14, 15, 16, 17. If you're someone who has been around this stuff for a while, you'll find that we go back to this passage over and over again. It would do you well to master the gospel of John chapters 14, 15, 16, 17.
So the setting, the context is this: Jesus is with His disciples, He's going to be crucified the next day, they've had communion together, He has given them a new commandment. Look at the end of John 13, "A new commandment I give you," verse 34, "that you love..."
The Promise of the Holy Spirit
By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another. When Jesus gets to John 14, if you have a red-lettered Bible meaning the words of Jesus are in red, you're going to see that chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 are almost all red-lettered. Jesus is now sitting down, and it's His last moments with His boys before what is going to be an excruciating event, not just for Him but for them. They've fully invested three years in Him, they've heard Him teach, and they sense something is about to happen.
He begins this in chapter 14, verse 1: "Don't let your heart be troubled." These are going to be difficult times, and He understands that. He said, "I'm going to My Father's house of many mansions. I'm going to go and prepare a place for you, and if it was not true I wouldn't tell you. And if I go I'll come back and I'll get you. You know the way." And when Thomas says, "We don't know," Jesus responds in verse 5: "I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me."
In the midst of all of this uncertainty, in the midst of these trials and difficult times that will come, we know at least from tradition that every one of these guys now in this room suffers a martyr's death except for John—John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, which probably means the other ones hated him.
The Helper Who Comes
Here's what Jesus says in John 14:16: "I'll ask the Father and He will give you another, a Helper, that He may be with you forever. It's the Spirit of truth." He's talking about the Holy Spirit. He says, "I won't leave you as an orphan. Abide in Me and I in you." That's the whole theme of this. "I'll give you this another, this Holy Spirit."
In fact, He says in John 16:7, "I tell you the truth, it's to your advantage that I go away." Now that in and of itself seems like an odd statement to me. If right now Jesus could walk in these doors, I would easily give Him this position and we would all be better off. We would be awestruck and we would say it can't get any better than that. But He says to these guys, "No, I need to go away because there's this power, this other that's coming, the Helper, the Holy Spirit of God."
A Personal Reflection on Teaching
When we were at Cannon Beach, I was teaching in the morning, Brian Loritz was teaching at night, and then we would end every night by Brian and I and either a couple of others or at least Sandy going out to have something to eat and talk. One afternoon, because I wanted to talk to Brian on our own, I said, "Let's go to lunch."
He asks me this question: "You've taught now for 25 years, taught for 22 years at this church, you're at the end of this. What would you teach and put an emphasis on if you were to start over that you didn't do in these 22 years?" I thought that was really an interesting question. What was even more interesting to me is I had an answer. I mean, that stunned me and it came out. I didn't think about it.
I said, "There's no question what I would teach about if I could teach more to a group of conservative evangelicals—that's a lot of you—I would teach about the Holy Spirit."
Why We Don't Talk About the Spirit
There's a sense in which I'm a little bit of a product of when I came along. God saved me in 1980, and at that time there were all these, in my mind, distortions and manifestations of the Holy Spirit. We've been through all sorts of things, and there was the laughter time and all the others. I fear people like me who saw what we consider these abuses talk a lot about the Father and the Son and not much about the Holy Spirit.
Yet when I really get into this, I'm looking and I'm going, "The power that I have is in the Holy Spirit." All of a sudden it's the Holy Spirit. When Paul writes this in 1 Corinthians 2:14, "The natural man cannot understand spiritual things," so Thomas Jefferson, who's way smarter than any of us—but I'll keep it with me—Thomas Jefferson is way smarter than I am. He can read this same word and I can read it, but I have in me the Spirit of God that allows me to understand. He can't get it. To him it's just a code of ethics, which is fine, but it's far more than that. It's the path to salvation and life.
The Moment Everything Changes
You're sitting down and there's a testimonial here all the time: "Been in church all my life, and then all of a sudden one day BAM, the lights came on. One day there was an aha moment. One day all of a sudden I heard about it, but BAM, there it is."
I'm driving down Scottsdale Road at McCormick Ranch the other day, driving on the way to meet Jamie, and I look over to the right. There's an office building there, and it was in that building at about 8:30 on March 6, 1980, that all of a sudden God saved me. I had heard for all my life that Christ died for me, but that's like a historic event. It didn't have a connect. All of a sudden, BAM. What happened? It's the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit's Ongoing Work
But the Holy Spirit doesn't just move me into God's kingdom; He keeps me there. Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, "He who began a good work in you will continue it till the day of Christ Jesus." You are sealed. That imagery is in there—the hot wax, the seal. Don't tamper with this. You're sealed. It shows possession. The Holy Spirit is the one.
Philippians chapter 2, verses 12 and 13, says that God is at work in you both to will and to do His will. Who is that? It's the Holy Spirit. Along comes the Spirit of God who indwells you, empowers you. The term we don't use much is sanctification—He makes you more like Christ, delivers you from the darkness, delivers you into the light, and then opens your eyes to be able to see this truth. All of a sudden He begins the process of transforming you.
Jerry Bridges writes, "We know that to some degree we can change our conduct, but we can't change our heart—that is the deep inner core of our being. Only the Holy Spirit can do this." So the Holy Spirit comes along, and I'm going to give you three things here. The Holy Spirit all of a sudden...
God exposes your sin to you until you get to that moment where you're just overwhelmed by your sin. You're just struck by how sinful you really are. So I'm constantly pushing all the time and going, here's this thing that you did. Whatever it is, let's say it's some sin, big, little, small, whatever. Here's the question you need to ask yourself: why did I do that?
So I'm talking to a guy. He's a pastor and he was telling me that this guy came up to him and said, "Did you get my email?" And he said no, I didn't get it, when in fact he had. So now we push. I said, "Why would you do that?" And he said, "Because I know that a good pastor is going to get an email and read an email and return an email." And see the pride that's riddled in all that.
Now what happens is you start to answer that why question. God just exposes your sin to you. So that could be Judas or that could be Peter. God exposes your sin to you, but rather than run out and hang yourself, all of a sudden you go, "Wait a minute, I need to change." That's the Holy Spirit that puts in you this desire to change and then gives you the strength to change.
Internal Change Over External Behavior
It's not about external behavior. It's a change from the inside out. We can focus on "he doesn't do that anymore" or "she doesn't do this anymore," and that's the Pharisees. We want to talk about behavior, but it's a change from the inside out. The Holy Spirit exposes your sin to you and then gives you a desire to change and then gives you the ability to change, the strength to change.
So what does Jesus say? "Abide in me." What does that mean? To rely on Him, to rely on His power.
How God Leads Us
How does God begin to lead? Well through the Holy Spirit. And then the last thing is God speaks to me through His word and through the Holy Spirit and through people, through others. The Holy Spirit speaks to you, empowers you, leads you.
Again, I don't know if you have ever thought of this, but the Great Commandment: love God with all your heart, soul, mind; love your neighbors as yourself. The Great Commission: go make disciples, teaching. Both of those require contact with people.
Engaging Rather Than Withdrawing
If there's something that we see in a Christian movement that is particularly alarming, it's men and women who, as they observe the world rather than encounter the world, withdraw from the world.
So I said to you John 14, 15, 16, 17. John 17 is actually the Lord's Prayer where He prays, and here's what He says: "Father, just as you sent me into the world, I'm sending them into the world." He doesn't say withdraw from the world. He says encounter the world. Not only can't you hide, you shouldn't hide. It's that expression of love and that communication of the gospel to the world that's entrusted to us.
There should be a steady flow of needy people in your life, that mentor-protege relationship. There should be people in your life that are serving that role, if you will, as mentor. It's not age specific.
The Role of Mentors
I did a funeral for a lady, neat gal. Husband was 75, and he wanted to speak at this and he did. And he did a great job. And he said, "I'd like you to meet my mentor." And he points out to a guy from our staff who's 29 years old. Seventy-five, twenty-nine. Not an age thing. Not a chronological issue.
We need people around us, and now they know us. They know the good. They know the bad. They know the ugly. In my life, when Larry died, I lost my mentor. And in a sense, never replaced him. I replaced him more with a team than an individual.
What happened the other day in that room with those young pastors was interesting to me because it allowed me to see kind of the fruit of my labor. And I was struck by a couple of things. I was struck by just being available. One of the key roles, especially for a group like this with a lot of years on you, a lot of wisdom, a lot of been there, done that, I can take that been there, done that and go, "Been there, done that, tried it, it doesn't work." Or I can take it and go, "Been there, done that. Let me take you through the process and nurture you along the way."
Making Godly Decisions
So here you go. We set all this up for five minutes. God speaks to me through His word. He speaks to me through the Holy Spirit. He speaks to me through other people. Now I have a decision to make. How do I make godly decisions?
Well, let's just acknowledge that we make thousands of decisions every day that obviously don't require a lot of thought. So you drive up, the light's red, you stop. It's green, you go. I can't imagine you're driving up to a red light going, "Father, open my eyes, fill me with your spirit. What should I do?" So there's decisions like that. There's a whole variety of decisions of different importance.
But along comes these decisions that are not expressly dealt with in the scripture. But they're these wonderful life decisions. Where should I work? Should I marry? And there's great freedom in there. Most times, that's when we tend to tighten up.
The Golf Club Illustration
We were flipping the other night, and there's a movie on about Bobby Jones. And I remember a bunch about Bobby Jones. But I remember I went through this moment in my life, maybe 15 years ago, where I got a book by Bobby Jones, and then Ben Hogan's classic, and Jack Nicklaus. I probably had five or six books on golf.
And all of them were different, but the one thing they all had in common was the pressure point with your hands on the club. And it was all that idea, and you've heard it, of being able to hold a bird in your hand but not crush it. And the point, and each one of them said this, that the tighter you hold the club, the more restricted those muscles are, the less likely you are to swing. All the fluidity is gone. All the tension is there.
The Mistake We Make with God's Will
Along comes these decisions, and it's like us grabbing a club. And almost always, based on the same mistake. Along comes this opportunity. Who to marry, whether to marry, where to live, kids, college, whatever it is. And in our mind, at least we give mental assent to it, whether it's true or not, I don't know. In our mind, we go, "I want to find what? God's will for this."
to give you is real freedom. When we go to the scripture, remember this is the final authority, and God begins to give us His will, it is either one of two. It's either His moral will, that's the most frequent one. So here you go, you want the will of God, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, this is the will of God. Your sanctification, that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality. That is God's will. God's moral will, do this, don't do this. Or God's sovereign will, which by definition is His mysterious will.
That's not the way we use the word. We use the word this way. I want to know, does God want me to work at Intel, Digital, Honeywell? And here's what I'm going to tell you. I don't think that God has that knowable, individual will, so you're not just looking for a needle in a haystack, in my view, you're just kicking around in a haystack. All you're going to do is sneeze and get runny eyes. It's not in there, you can't find it.
A Process for Making Good Decisions
Well how do I make decisions? Here's what I go through. Number one, I gather the facts. Number two, I pray. Number three, I go to the scripture and I ask the Holy Spirit to reveal, not just the scripture to me, but how does that apply to my life. I examine my life, is there something in me now that would make making a decision not wise? Is there sin? I've had a lot of people who've advised me over the last six, eight months, boy now's just not a good time to make big decisions. And I'm looking back and I'm saying, I'm making these big decisions at the speed of light. So I don't know. And then I'll talk to my friends. You know me, what do you think?
So I get a call from a guy and he said, you know, we've listened to you, we've been to your church, we've watched you online. We have a church, we need a pastor. We would be interested in knowing, would you come up and be our pastor? And I said, up, what's up? Where's up? Is it Anthem is up? Well, no, he said, no, Minneapolis. I said, I'm not interested. And he said, well, do you want to pray about it? I said, I don't need to pray about it. God isn't going to call me to Minneapolis. And he said, and you can hear, and he went back and forth and you can hear the relief in his voice saying, God spared us from this ungodly guy. And I'm saying, listen, I don't want to go to Minneapolis. I don't want to be there. Look at the freedom in all of this.
So I get a call from a guy comes to one of the studies. He's a great guy. He said, can we have breakfast? I said, sure. He picks a spot. It was a fancy spot, a lot of money involved in this. And so he said, I don't have time to just chitchat. He said, here's the deal. I believe God's called me to Portland. What do you think? And I said, okay, here's what I think. I think you're paying for this to begin with because you're, what are you doing now? You're wasting my time. You're telling me God's called you to do this. There's something wrong with you. If you even care what I think, I think you ought to call allied van lines or Mayflower, whoever it is, and move your little can to Portland as fast as you can. Look at that. So you then have to go through. And we ended up with like a two hour conversation with me parsing this out and say, how are you convinced God's called you to Portland?
Finding Freedom in Decision-Making
So here's what I want you to see when it's time to make decisions. You want to make good decisions and godly decisions. There's a process that includes what we've been talking about His word. Here's what I want you to see in the midst of all of this. So God gives you an option.
You're a high school senior. You have scholarships from Cal and Stanford and let's say, and Pepperdine. Rather than just rejoice that God's given you three options, you've given away all that joy to try to fight. He doesn't care. He's calling like that, but overall he doesn't. Sometimes it's as clear as that, but he doesn't care. He doesn't make a wise decision, the best decision because all of a sudden this traditional thinking of I've got to find God's way. There's no joy there.
I'll tell you this for sure. When hardship comes, you're going to rethink it. So you're going to go, okay, I'm going to go to Cal and the minute now there's hardship, you're going to go, I blew it. I should have been Stanford. You're going to go to Stanford and go, I blew it. It should have been Pepperdine. No. Hardship's part of life. How do I make good decisions, godly decisions? It's that process I went through.
But the freedom that there isn't this one single, now give me the other side. I'm trying to figure out whether to take a job. Should I go to work at Honeywell Intel or bring drugs up from Mexico? Now to me, God says, all right, let's eliminate Intel. No, I'm kidding. Let's eliminate the drugs. You see that?
Living Confidently
Now I live life, not with a swagger and an arrogance, but I can live confidently. It's the result of all that. We'll tackle it next week.
Father, thank you for the amazing truth. It seems so obvious. And even then it's not just know what to do. We ask you to give us the power to do it. And that's what your spirit does. God work in our life. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen.