God Can Help Us Make Big Decisions

            What does God want for our lives? How do we know His will? Christians believe that we can know truth because God tells us truth in the Bible. Now the Bible is clear about many things:  God does not want us to murder, lie, steal, or commit adultery. God does want us to love, forgive, pray, and worship Him.

            But how do we know whether or not God wants us to take a certain job, date a certain person, move to this town or that one? t one? How does God speak to us about personal decisions for which the Bible does not offer clear guidance? “What do you mean, Charlie? Are you saying the Bible doesn’t hold every answer we need?” I’m saying the Bible gives us the general principles we need to live by, but sometimes we are faced with specific individual circumstances to which the Bible does not directly respond.

            If, for example, I’m faced with a choice of cheating on my wife or remaining faithful to her, the Bible clearly tells me to remain faithful. In 1995, however, I was faced with a choice to go and teach at a Christian college in Kentucky or stay in Dallas and remain a public school teacher. As a college professor I could train young Christians—future leaders, teachers, workers—in ways that I could not in public schools. But as a high school teacher I was “in the trenches,” shining a light in the darkness and making my Christian witness known. In a choice between good and evil the Bible is clear. The Bible teaches me what good and evil are! But the choice between two goods? I need a little more help.

“Word” and “word”

            The New Testament, written originally in Greek, contains two words that refer to God’s word.  That’s right, the New Testament has two words for the word, “word!”  Spelled in English these words are logos and rhema.  Logos refers to Christ (as in John 1:1) the gospel (as in Acts 8:25 or 2 Thessalonians 3:1), or the Bible (as in Mark 7:13 and John 10:35).  Another word referring to the Bible, by the way, is graphé or “scripture” (as in 2 Timothy 3:16).

            Rhema, also refers to a word from God.  But its uses include a supernatural word given to us by the Holy Spirit, speaking to specific instances in life.  You can see this connection between word and the work of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 6:17 where the “sword of the Spirit” is “the word of God.”  We normally think of this passage as referring to the whole Bible, but the use of rhema (not logos), the context of spiritual warfare (see Ephesians 6:10-12), and the connection to the Holy Spirit suggest a word revealed by the Holy Spirit (see also Romans 10:8, 2 Corinthians 12:4, Ephesians 5:26, and Hebrews 6:4-5).

            Now I am not arguing that clouds will part and a voice we can hear (which sounds strangely like Charlton Heston’s) will tell us what to do.  I’m simply saying that, at critical times in our lives, God will guide us in a variety of ways, and some of those ways may be miraculous.

            There are two extremes to avoid here: believing that God does not speak to us today in any supernatural way on the one hand, and believing that every impulse that pops into our heads is a message from God on the other (i.e., “Well Lord, Lord, Fruity Pebbles or Honeycombs for breakfast this morning?  Speak to my heart…amen”).

Hearing God in Major Decisions

            Consider the following guidelines in making major life decisions.

1.      Your decision must agree with God’s written word.  You can feel with all your heart that God wants you to marry the non-Christian man or woman you’ve been dating.  You can believe that God wants you to marry him or her in order to save his or her soul.  But it doesn’t matter how strongly you believe it.  YOU ARE WRONG!  The Bible says, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers” by marrying one (2 Corinthians 6:14).  If you think God is contradicting His own word, you are not hearing a rhema word from Him at all.  However God guides you in making decisions in life, it will be in accordance with His written logos, the Bible.

2.      Ask advice and prayer of wise fellow Christians.  One of the reasons I eventually said yes to traveling to Kentucky was because a mentor whom I greatly trusted both recommended it and gave me reasons for going which I had not thought of before.  The warning here is that you be careful to avoid only asking friends who will tell you what you want to hear.

3.      Look for confirmations from people, regular Bible reading, and sermons and lessons that come across as unusual coincidences.  In your Bible reading, for example, you may come across a passage that fits your particular circumstances amazingly well. Now be careful here.  Flipping the pages of the Bible with your eyes closed and stabbing it with your finger to find a miraculous message from God is not the kind of Bible reading I’m talking about!  Try this example: last summer I was teaching a Sunday school class on Ephesians.  I don’t even remember the topic of discussion anymore; I only remember that, after the class, a friend approached me and said that what we had talked about in class was exactly what he needed to hear at that moment in his life.

4.      Pray throughout the entire decision making process.  Detail what it is that you would like God to tell you.  Surrender the choice to Him and let Him know that you are willing to do what He wants, even if the resulting choice is not what you wanted.  Be humble, and don’t think the issue too petty to pray about.  Most of all, in relation to prayer, be willing to wait and never stop praying while you wait.  You may not know when the decision is going to be made.  From the time that I was first approached about the teaching job in Kentucky to the time that I knew my family was going was eight months!  You may have to wait on the Lord for the decision.  If so, never stop praying.

5.      Finally, I think the model of Gideon’s fleece is an appropriate one if applied with humility and the right combination of faith and restraint.

            In Judges chapter six, several enemy nations from the East cross the Jordan river to conquer Israel’s land.  The Holy Spirit comes upon Gideon, motivating him to raise an army to defend God’s people.  He does so and gathers the army close to the field of battle.  There Gideon asks to know God’s will:

Gideon said to God, “If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised—look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said.” And that is what happened. (Judges 6:36-38a)

            Gideon repeats the test once but by reversing the sign—he asks God to make the fleece dry and the ground wet, and God does it (Judges 6:39-49).  Afterward Gideon knows he is there to win a war.

            Gideon’s example can be followed today, and here’s my recommendation as to how: choose two or three signs that you would like to see God accomplish in order to make His will clear.  Choose more than one sign and less than four.  Important: choose events or circumstances that are neither too outlandish (don’t ask God to part a nearby lake or river) nor too obvious (don’t ask Him to make the sun come up tomorrow morning either).  Make the signs unusual enough to be recognizable if they come through, but not so unlikely to happen that you’re basically daring God to tell you to do something you really don’t want to do.

            Here is where I did not take my own advice.  Instead of three fleeces, my wife and I picked over eight!  We had issues about the nature of the work, the salary, finding a house, selling our old house, selling a car, having so much money to work with in the move, and more.  We went overboard.  And on selling our house in Dallas we probably went too far: we said we’d have to sell the house in six weeks and be able to make at least $2000.00 on it (and we’d refinanced the loan less than a year before).  Every one of our tests came through!  But I don’t recommend pushing God that hard.

            God speaks to us today.  He’s prepared to help us make critical decisions about our lives.  We only need to listen and be willing to follow where He leads.