Re-post: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do

Solving perplexing situations in family, workplace, church, and society prompts fundamental questions: Should I remain silent? If I speak up, what should I say?

When involved with a complicated circumstance, I’ve learned the wisdom of weighing my response in light of the day on which we will come before the Judgment Seat of Christ.

Of course, our performance is not what saves us at the Final Judgment. The Scriptures teach that we are saved by grace alone, through faith in Christ. But the Scriptures also say, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

That is, it is at the same time true that, in the words of Romans 8:1, “… there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” and that the believer’s performance will also come into account, which will include the quality of the life we have lived for him (2 Corinthians 5:9,10).

If I consider a problem in the light of the Final Judgment I often, though of course not always, gain clarity about what I should do. Such an exercise helps me keep distracting emotions, selfishness, and short-sightedness at bay.  

I recall a time when I was leading a committee in dealing with a complex and contentious church matter. I was thinking my way toward what I saw as a resolution. But not everyone agreed with my plan.

After one meeting with the committee, I went with two of its members for coffee before we started for home. At the table the situation again bubbled to the surface. As the one who was ultimately responsible for the decision, I gestured upward and said “We will have to answer to God for how this matter is resolved.”

The initial response was a surprised silence, as if I had introduced a new idea to my companions. The discussion to this point had seemed to have moved on a purely human level: Which of the groups involved will we favor? How can we close up this matter quickly? Which way would require the least damage control? A sense of accountability to God for a wise judgment hadn’t factored into our deliberations.

Thinking about a thorny problem in the light of the Final Judgment takes the problem out of the moment and into the context of eternity. It keeps the focus on God and his wisdom.

Christians, by remembering the Final Judgment, can practice the mental and spiritual discipline of making all of life’s decisions in the awareness that God is present at every moment and in every circumstance. This obedience enriches faith.

Photo credit: barnimages.com (via flickr.com)

Repost: Reviewing Life’s Difficult Decisions from a Distance

Kay and I were 35 and serving a growing church in Western Canada back in the 1950s. After five years of rich ministry there we received an unsolicited phone call from a conference superintendent inviting us to come and serve a congregation in the mid-western United States. The church was a broad and challenging field of service and included large numbers of college students. He said that he and his committee were sure we were a match.

The invitation created conflict. We loved the people where we were and they loved us. The growth of the church was strong and exciting. We also loved the city and our children were settled in a good school. Why, then, might we accept? Because the challenge of this invitation also had its strong pull. I had even told a favorite professor while in seminary that I was interested in being a college pastor someday. Here, it seemed, was the opportunity.

Day after day I wrestled with the invitation. Kathleen did the same. We talked over the pros and cons. We committed the issue repeatedly to prayer. In the end, Kathleen entrusted the decision largely to me with one stipulation: our profoundly disabled son, John David, would not have to be moved. He was happily situated and well cared for in a nearby institution.

The dilemma we struggled with was not about furthering my career. I was ordained for a lifetime of ministry and we were trying to live out a calling — a vocation — not merely a career. The decision had to be in harmony with a divinely-approved plan. In our denomination a conference Ministerial Appointments Committee assigns ordained personnel to their place of service, while moving from one conference to another is more of a personal decision.

One morning I went from my study into the sanctuary of the church and knelt by a green pulpit chair. I had to decide. In that moment of anguish, with resolute finality, I believed I knew the answer. We would go. I told Kathleen. I phoned to inform the conference superintendent.

We weren’t prepared for what followed. When we told our congregation and leaders of our conference we became acutely aware of the strength of the bond between us. There was grieving to the point of tears on both sides. We felt forlorn and bereft, as did our congregation. I now question from a position of greater maturity: Could we have broken the news better? More gradually?

In my distress, I phoned the superintendent who had invited us. I told him I had given his committee my word and would not break it but asked if he would release me from my commitment. He would not, he said, because his Appointments Committee was counting on my coming. That closed the door with a thud.

My turmoil was so overwhelming that I walked the streets of our city seeking relief from a kind of deep suffering. Kay and I both lived with this anguish for several weeks.

Then, with the furniture we had put up for sale beginning to disappear, the reality of our move became tangible. Finally, on the day of our departure, two members of our congregation took us and our three children, Carolyn, 12, Donald, 9, and Robert, 7, to the train for our trip across Canada. We would stop a few days with family in Ontario and then enter the United States at Detroit to buy a used car there and start the 400-mile trek to our new field of service 250 miles south of Chicago.

We grieved painfully for at least a year: first for the loss of our beloved and lively congregation, then for the loss of an urban environment we had come to love and the beautiful landscape of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia ringed by mountains.

And it took us that same year to become comfortable with a less active college church congregation in a very different community. But we see all of this now as the inevitable stress of making a major change. And, painful though it was, we also see it as God’s will for us at that time.

That move began a thirteen-year ministry at a college center with many heart-to-heart interactions, many lifelong friendships, countless treasured memories, and numerous ministry connections and responsibilities locally, across the continent, and beyond. We still hear from people speaking of the help they received in their Christian journey during those years, or at this or that crucial time of decision. Some were students back then and now are grandparents living in retirement.

Knowing God’s will is a mysterious undertaking. As we pore prayerfully over the issues and dilemmas of life, we do not always arrive immediately at a sense of certainty that introduces calm and security. Sometimes, in fact, we only see clearly, weeks, months, or even years later, that we have made the right decision.

And it is some comfort to know that even when we must proceed without a clear answer to our prayers for guidance, or when in our humanity we choose less than the best path, our Lord can confirm our decision or redeem our blunders or missteps. His Spirit is available for every need, and his Providence is a great consolation to those who sincerely attempt to live in obedience to him by faith.

Photo credit: deargdoom57 (via flickr.com)

Re-Post: Making Good Decisions and Sticking to Them

Our grandson Zachary is about to complete his residency in anesthesiology. After four years of medical school, this five-year program, as you would expect, has been highly focused on what an anesthesiologist must know.

But along the way, nuggets of truth tangential to his training have also proven to be valuable. He gave me an example.

Some time back, he listened to a talk a medical doctor had given to a chapter of the Christian Medical Fellowship. It was about how to make good decisions.

The doctor, he explained, set forth two reference points that should be reckoned with when one is making decisions: righteousness and wisdom.

The doctor’s first point was that the standards of righteousness are fixed. They are set down in the Scriptures, and these standards, God’s Ten Commandments, are solid and unchanging reference points.

They may not break down for us the thousands of questions our minds can raise but our decisions are more to be trusted if we act in accordance with them.

For example, we are to worship no other gods, and to revere God’s name; we are not to steal or bear false witness, etc. Issues like these are not negotiable (Exodus 20).

At the same time, the standards of righteousness, though changeless, do not need to be consulted for every decision. For example, whether to wash the car on a Saturday afternoon may not require moral pondering. But whether to return an extra five dollar bill given out unintentionally by a cashier requires a clear and instant moral response.

What to wear to a picnic may not take a lot of moral thought, while whether to enter a business partnership with someone whom you sense may not always be honest does trigger a process that should lead to a clear moral decision.

Wisdom, Zach heard, is the application of common sense undergirded by our understanding of righteousness. Both of these aspects of our reality must be factored in for good decision making.

For example, wisdom helps us to choose our friends wisely. It aids us in making good vocational moves. Working together with the demand that we must aim to be righteous, wisdom applied can save us from entanglement with false friends and such entrapments as substance abuse, pornography, and other soul-destroying enticements.

Wisdom encourages us to maintain our commitment to righteousness and at the same time wrestle with the unknowns and perplexities of life. That is, our commitment to righteousness gives us a solid footing for decision-making while wisdom helps us probe the options, imagine consequences, and evaluate godly advice.

The point the doctor made that seemed most helpful to Zach — and would have been most helpful to me at the same age — was that when we must make a decision for which there is not an obvious “wisdom-directed” answer, after we have satisfied the righteousness criteria we can move forward without paralyzing fear.

That’s because when our first impulse is to honor God and always make righteousness our primary aim, and when we use the best wisdom at our disposal, we can believe that God will take our decisions and bless their outcomes, or even teach us from them. And we can believe as well that he will deliver us from the paralysis of second-guessing our decisions.

Photo credit: Richard Elzey (via flickr.com)

Good Decisions Don’t Just Happen

Who doesn’t want to make good decisions? After all, our lives are shaped largely by the sum of the decisions we make.

Many of our decisions are routine and without moral significance: What shall I wear to work in the garden today? Then there are the big ones. If a proposal of marriage should come on Valentine’s Day, should I accept? Consequences either way would be long term.

Our grandson, Zach, once told me of a talk he heard on wise decision-making given by a doctor at a meeting of the Christian Medical Fellowship. What impressed him about the talk was the common sense of the doctor’s outline.

He identified two reference points for making life-shaping decisions — “righteousness” and “wisdom.”

Righteousness, the doctor said, equips us with an unshakable standard. The Ten Commandments in the Bible are a base for facing life’s most critical issues, and that standard, we find, is already written into our consciences.

For example, we are to have no other gods but the true God — the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are to reverence God’s name; to show honor to our parents; and we are not to steal, or bear false witness. Issues like these are not negotiable.

According to the doctor, a second element is needed in decision making and that is wisdom. This is the application of common sense in accordance with our grasp of the above deeply rooted standard of righteousness.

We apply the two together to the specific decisions we must make. For example, God’s righteousness tells us we are not to walk in the counsel of the ungodly (Psalm 1). In the light of that instruction, wisdom helps us to choose our friends wisely.

Wisdom allows us to maintain our commitments to righteousness while we wrestle with the endless variables of life. In doing so our solid footing does not give way while we tread through the process of deciding.

The doctor’s point that appealed most to Zach was this: when we take righteousness seriously as a fixed point but must make a decision unguided by chapter-and-verse, we can go forward confidently and carefully apply the best wisdom we have.

And when we go ahead, Zach continued, with the best wisdom at our disposal, we are saved from the paralysis of second-guessing ourselves. We remain staunch while we decide.

All of this reflects the wisdom of master decision number one: to follow Christ wholeheartedly. When we stay close to him we stay close to his righteousness and his wisdom.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, It is because of [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — He is the righteousness of God to us and he is (at the same time) the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:30).

Photo credit: Richard Elzey (via flickr.com)

What to Do When We’re Not Sure What to Do

Perplexing situations in family, workplace, church, and society sometimes prompt the fundamental question:  Should I speak up or remain silent?

I’ve discovered that when that question arises in my mind and presses me I’m greatly helped if I consider the situation in the light of the upcoming Judgment Seat of Christ.

The Scriptures teach that we are in Christ through faith. We are saved by grace, alone.  But Scriptures also say to us in Christ, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Paul teaches that even though we are fully covered by the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ and “there is now no condemnation,”  we will nevertheless be judged for the quality of the life we have lived for him.

If I make myself think of a problem in the light of that Final Judgment I often, though of course not always, gain amazing clarity about what I should do. Such an approach helps to keep selfishness at bay, and enables careful thought to triumph over  initial reactions or distracting emotions.

I recall a time when as an administrator I was dealing with a church matter that was conflicted. Differences of opinion were sharp. In my thinking I was working toward what I saw as a resolution. But not everyone agreed with that approach

After one meeting with a committee, I went with two of the men for coffee before we all started for home. At the table the situation again bubbled to the surface. As the person ultimately responsible for the decision, at one point I gestured upward and said “I will have to answer to God for how this matter is resolved.”

There was a brief moment of silence as both men looked at me with surprise. It was as though a whole new idea had been introduced. The discussion up to this moment had seemed to move on a purely human level: Which of the groups involved, will we favor? How can we close up this matter quickly? Is there greater need for damage control? Any sense of accountability to God for a wise judgment had seemed temporarily out of sight.

Thinking about a thorny problem in the light of the Final Judgment takes it out of the moment and gives it an eternal context. It keeps God and his wisdom at the center of the picture.

Making decisions in the presence of God is a deeply Christian response for both little day-to-day issues as well as towering decisions that may change one’s life’s direction. Family life and church life can submit to the fundamental reality that God is present at every moment and in every circumstance, too!

It’s not a new insight. Look at the early church bathing in prayer the decision to send Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey (Acts 13:2,3).