How do you decide what to do?

Psychology Today:
When making a decision, we form opinions and choose actions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions, and memories. The simple act of deciding supports the notion that we have free will. We weigh the benefits and costs of our choice, and then we cope with the consequences. Factors that limit the ability to make good decisions include missing or incomplete information, urgent deadlines, and limited physical or emotional resources.

Biases, reason, emotions, and memories.
This is how psychology says we make decisions. What is your initial reaction to that?

My initial reaction was not good. I mean, look at the character in this story:
Bias - prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.
Reason - the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.
A second definition of bias: a systematic distortion of a statistical result due to a factor not allowed for in its derivation.
Translation: take reason and throw it out the window due to other factors (like bias, etc.).
Emotions - a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.
Memories - that which has been learned and retained through a person’s previous interactions.

How many of you want to make important decision in your life based off of logic that processes through your biases, emotions, and memories?

Well, psychologists think that is precisely how we decide.

What about you? How do you decide?

Bible Characters who had to decide.
We’ll skip right over Adam and Eve and go to Moses.

Moses was a Hebrew who was born in secret, hidden, and sent down the Nile in a tar-pitched basket only to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter. He was raised in the Egyptian court, only finding out about his true heritage later in life. He saw the Hebrews being mistreated, murdered the guard, and fled to the wilderness. He was 40 years old at that time. 40 years of being an Egyptian.

He was about 80 when he met God at the burning bush. After this, he made a decision to go to Pharaoh and demand he let God’s people go.

Exodus 3:9-10
“9 Look! The cry of the people of Israel has reached me, and I have seen how harshly the Egyptians abuse them. 10 Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh. You must lead my people Israel out of Egypt.”

But that decision didn’t come without a fight. Moses’ Protests:
Exodus 3:11
11 But Moses protested to God, “Who am I to appear before Pharaoh? Who am I to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt?”

Exodus 3:13
13 But Moses protested, “If I go to the people of Israel and tell them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they will ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what should I tell them?”

Exodus 4:1
1 But Moses protested again, “What if they won’t believe me or listen to me? What if they say, ‘The Lord never appeared to you’?”

Exodus 4:10
10 But Moses pleaded with the Lord, “O Lord, I’m not very good with words. I never have been, and I’m not now, even though you have spoken to me. I get tongue-tied, and my words get tangled.”

Exodus 4:13
13 But Moses again pleaded, “Lord, please! Send anyone else.”

Bias, reason, emotions, memories

“God who am I? I am not biased towards them. They are biased towards me! I’m a Hebrew and they hate Hebrews!”

”Ok God think about this, let’s reason this out…they are going to want to know who sent me, right? What am I going to say?”

”God, I am not trying to get emotional here with you, but they think I am an Egyptian! I have no credibility with them. They’re going to go nuts! They’ll call me a liar and demean me.”

”Ok but seriously, I am terrible at words. Haven’t you been watching me all these years? I am HISTORICALLY bad at that you’re saying. Plus they are going to remember what I did when I killed that guard.”

”God please send someone else.”

Moses’ inability to decide to follow God’s plan led to the moment in history when God divided two roles that were meant to be held together: King and Priest.

1 Peter 2:9
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Just like son and daughter was our birthright, king and priest was our calling. Moses’ refusal to obey God split the two. They were reunited for a time with David and for eternity with Jesus.

What has your indecision cost you in terms of your calling?

Moses tried to reason his way out of his purpose through his bias, emotions, and memories.

Abraham - What about Father Abraham?
He didn’t do everything perfectly, but look at how he decided.

Was he biased? No, he believed God. Now, he tried to fix it on his own and got us an Ishmael, but after that mess up, we have a record of faithfulness.

Where do biases come from?
They come through stereotypes about people based on the group to which they belong and/or based on unchanging characteristics. Abraham knew who God was: faithful.

Was he emotional?
Would you be if you had to turn your Ishmael away? What about putting your Isaac on the altar? Yes he was emotional, at times, like when he lied. He was afraid the king would want his wife because she was beautiful. Abe said, “Tell him I am your brother so he won’t kill me.” The lie almost got him killed! But he got to a place where emotions weren’t driving.

Did he consider his memories?
Like how even though God said got to a place I’ll show you, and God took care of him, Or how he lied twice and God covered him, Or how his wife was old and barren and she still conceived, Or how nephew who was like a son to him was doomed and God spared him.

So how did he decide, and how does it compare to how Moses processed?

Now, Moses did finally decide to do the right thing, but he had to overcome his bias, emotion, and memory so he could reason properly.
Abraham, too.
You and me, too.

I want to make godly decisions, not good decisions. I want what I do to positively impact the Kingdom. I want to build people, not tear them down. I want to help people get closer to Jesus, not further away. I want my family to grow and develop and be provided for and safe.

I am sure you want the same thing, but the truth is that we are going to have to adjust how we make decisions to see that happen.

Remember last week, potentially everything is eternal.

How can what you decide on a regular basis create godliness and growth in every area of your life?

That’s today’s little thing. Let’s adjust how we think.

If we are going to do this, two sides of the decision coin need to adjust. We need to do some things to help us make better decisions, but we also need to stop doing some things that are hurting our decision making process.

Remember, godly decisions, not just good ones.

Let’s start with things we need to stop doing.

Don’t let emotions decide for you.
Let’s start with the hardest thing first.

Proverbs 25:28
28 A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.

Jeremiah 17:9
The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?

Listen to your heart. TERRIBLE advice. Your heart is driven by your emotions and your emotions change with your environment.

This is why emotions and happiness are so tied together. You can be happy as a lark with a friend, but let someone you are cross with walk in and everything changes. Why? Because your emotions are attached to memories with that person and those thoughts based on those emotions release chemicals that alter your satisfaction with what is going on around you.

This is why environment is so important to a culture that teaches do whatever makes you happy. It is why college campuses have safe zones. It is why you can’t talk about some things at work. It is why you get cancelled if you speak against wokeism.

When your emotions drive, a wreck is inevitable.
Emotions do not produce godliness.

Galatians 5:22-23
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

These are the results of a spiritually driven person.

Galatians 5:19-20
When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

All of these are byproducts of emotional response to negative stimuli.

You have to decide what results you want from your decisions.

Emotionally driven decisions produce natural results.
Spiritually driven decisions produce supernatural results.

How do I know if my decisions are driven by emotion or not?
Ask yourself: Would the Holy Spirit be pleased with my result?

Don’t let the natural decide for you.
We’ve talked briefly about being spirit led, but sometimes it isn’t that we aren’t trying to let the Spirit lead, but rather, we are too focused on the natural, on what we can see.

2 Kings 6:14-17
So one night the king of Aram sent a great army with many chariots and horses to surround the city. When the servant of the man of God got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere. “Oh, sir, what will we do now?” the young man cried to Elisha. “Don’t be afraid!” Elisha told him. “For there are more on our side than on theirs!” Then Elisha prayed, “O Lord, open his eyes and let him see!” The Lord opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.

Sometimes we get so caught up with what is in front of us that we miss the miracle God is performing around us. Natural eyes see natural things, but there is a dimension of life that exists outside of what you can see in the natural. I’d argue that the realm beyond the natural is exponentially more real and important than the physical life we are living.

Now that is hard to accept because we have these natural things to deal with: Bills, people, money, politics, etc

But if we are spirits with bodies not bodies with spirits we have to do two things: One, realize the spiritual outweighs the natural, but two, realize that doesn’t mean the natural doesn’t matter.

If you want decisions about your natural life to be godly, then you can’t decide based on what is best for your natural life. You decide based on what is best for your spiritual life. I need to unpack that a little.

Money issues?
Are you making spirit-led money decisions, or are they emotionally, fleshly driven decisions? Genuine need or instant gratification?

Relational issues?
Are you more concerned with unity or justice? Getting closer or getting even? Genuine love or conditional love? When you decide with your flesh you can’t be surprised when you don’t get supernatural results.

Remember Matthew 6:33
Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added.

Thinking like this will make us:
- Reevaluate our motives
- Make sure we are not being disobedient or rebellious
- Tap into a higher level of living (spiritual)
- And keep what is going on in the natural in check.

You have survived 100% of the issues you’ve faced until now.

What is going on in the natural is not the end of the world, but making decisions based on what you see in the natural is not the answer.

Romans 8:6
…Letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace.
This works for your decisions, too.

Spirit-led decisions start with the Word of God.

Don’t let history decide for you.
When we let yesterday decide today, we suffer tomorrow. The past can be powerful, and a lot of times that is because the trauma we experienced and based on the emotions that are tied to those experiences. Because of this, we can easily allow what happened yesterday to make your decisions for today. The result is that we potentially miss out on God-moments because we’ve allowed the past to stay a part of our present.

I know this is harsh, but your past does not define you. Neither what was done to you, nor what you did. Jesus doesn’t look at your past and disqualify you. Jesus sees your past, but chooses to focus on your potential. Want proof?

Romans 5:8
But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

You can’t get better proof than that.

If your past does not define you, it also doesn’t get deciding privileges in your life either. Does that mean blindly throw yourself back into toxic situations? Of course not. Don’t cast your pearls before swine…Wise as serpents gentle as doves…But it does mean be willing to forgive the past so you can make godly decisions in the future.

Bible example
In Luke 5, Jesus told Peter, “Follow me.”
Peter did, but at Jesus’ arrest and initial beating, Peter denied Jesus three times. Peter was broken over it.

Fast forward to John 21.
Jesus is arisen and Peter, still reeling, decides to go back to what he knew: fishing. Jesus found him on the shoreline, just lie he did before, but this time was a little different.

Jesus had a decision to make. Stick with Peter or not?

Jesus had good reason to abandon Peter. Bias, emotion, and memory would lead to a reasonable outcome of letting him go.

But in John 21:19, Jesus told him once more, “Follow me.”

Peter did, and in his first message, thousands were saved. Peter was the leader of the Church after Jesus ascended and left arguably the largest impact on Christianity other than Jesus and perhaps Paul.

Peter made emotional decisions. But Jesus made godly ones. Had he not, we would have missed out on Simon the reed becoming Peter the rock.

What have you missed out on by allowing your past to decide for you?

Done with the don’ts. Let’s talk about some do’s.

Do lean into your relationships.
I loved that two things turned Moses’ decision around. First was Jesus. (Yes it was Jesus in the burning bush. “Before Moses was, I AM.”)

Moses encountered the power and majesty of God Almighty. This wasn’t just head knowledge. He’d known gods in Egypt. He’d know of the God of the Hebrews. All data and information. But at that bush, he had a heart encounter.

So the first thing you need to know is that the further you are from Jesus, the worse your decisions get. “I can’t hear him and I don’t know what he wants me to do.”

Life Hack:
Stop asking for answers and start leaning into the relationship. No one wants to be a genie. God doesn’t want us coming to him only when we need something any more than we want that.

If you need to make a decision, don’t go to God only for an answer. Go to him for a relationship.

Second reason his decision turned around was Aaron.
Moses was terrified, but he stopped letting emotions drive him, and that allowed him to lean into others around him to help. Just knowing that Aaron would be with him gave him the confidence to make a godly decision.

Why do we think we can do everything on our own?
The first best gift God gave you was Jesus. The second was the Holy Spirit. But the third, PEOPLE.

There has never been a self made man and in the same way that if you want to be great it takes a team, if you want to decide well, it takes a team, also.

Proverbs 11:14
Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.

The only time we don’t want counsel is when we know that counsel is going to tell us what we don’t want to hear, and if that is the case, then you are being led by your emotions anyway and have little chance of making a godly decision to begin with.

Just like a budget doesn’t tell you what you can’t do, it tells you what you can do, wisdom from counselors isn’t telling you what you can’t do, but what you can do.

Even Jesus didn’t isolate himself from relationships.
He knew he needed people in his life to succeed.
He had to put his life into others’ hands (and some of those failed him!)

But even Jesus would rather have relationships and risk betrayal than be a man alone.

Proverbs 18:1
Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment

Bad decisions begin in our own desires.

Do isolate for prayer.
Don’t isolate from the counsel of godly people (remember, they love you, love God, know you, know God, and have your best interest in mind), but there are times when you do need to isolate.

Luke 6:12-13
12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. 13 And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve…

This is interesting. Why would Jesus, God in the flesh, need to consult the Father before making a decision? Perhaps it is to give us a model for doing the same thing? Perhaps

More likely, Jesus was so connected with the Father that the whole night in prayer was less about the decision and more about the relationship.

That’s how Jesus sees prayer. It isn’t a duty. It is the opportunity for relationship. It is the opportunity to lean into God.

I can assure you that Jesus knew who the 12 would be, but Jesus was adamant that he didn’t do anything unless the father said it.

John 14:31
but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.

One of the main reasons Jesus was so vocal and visible about interacting with his father was because he wanted you to understand the appropriate relationship between the father and his son or daughter. Jesus wanted you to see that the father loves you so much that he is completely and totally invested in and concerned with every decision you make, no matter how big, no matter how minute.

Luke 5:15-16
15 But despite Jesus’ instructions, the report of his power spread even faster, and vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases. 16 But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.

By worldly standards, Jesus was killing it! His biggest decision should have been which stadium to play next, but rather than that, he just wanted to get away with his Father.

I am convinced that if we knew the Father like Jesus did, it would be our relationship with him that would inform our decisions, not the excuse of deity.

When is the last time you prayed not to get an answer, but just to spend time with God?

Do have faith
Now, while we need to have our relationship, not our requests, as our focus with God, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want us to ask him for what we need. Even in Jesus’ model prayer, we ask him for our daily bread, for protection, etc. but only after we worship him, praise him, and seek his will.

But faith is so essential in this process that we can get so locked into what we need that we miss the currency those needs come through. That’s faith. Too often we are concerned by a lack of clarity but not enough concerned about our lack of faith.

James 1:5-7
5 If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. 6 But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. 7 Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.

How do you do this?
Faith and prayer and relationships, tame your emotions, refuse to let history and what you naturally see influence you, HOW?!?!?!

With faith, it is the same way you trust him for salvation.
You make the commitment to give the decision to him. You dive into prayer to spend time with him. You dig into the word to know more about him. And when you feel the urge to decide before he’s spoken, you confess he is Lord even of your decisions.

With prayer and reading the word, you do it to know him more.
We don’t treat God as a genie and get mad when he doesn’t answer immediately. Sometimes there are little things you learn in the waiting that make a bigger difference than the answer.

With relationships, we cling to God even when we don’t know what to do.
We honor him by obeying him. And when it comes to others, we refuse to make any decision alone. Household decisions with your spouse. Go ahead and include your trusted friends. Get their input (but AFTER you talk to your spouse) Listen to their counsel.

And friends, remember, you aren’t Jesus. You can’t demand they obey you, but you need to be as committed to giving godly counsel as they are to considering it.

With your emotions, you can have them, but they can’t have you.
If you can’t handle your emotions and they lead you to bad decisions, get help. You obviously can’t fix it on your own. If you feel rejected or offended, angry or depressed, overlooked or on the verge of a meltdown, reach out.
Your emotions are just going to continue leading you to decisions that feed their ravenous hunger.

With what you see naturally, choose to be led by the Spirit.
It doesn’t mean ignoring what’s going on in physical life, but it means making Jesus Lord of all of it, not just the parts you want him to have.
Seek his Kingdom first and you’ll get his. Seek your castle first and you’ll get nothing.

With history, you are not the sum total of what you have done or what others have done to you.
You are who HE says you are. Yes we all have a past, but Jesus never promised to fix your past. He promised you joy for today and peace for tomorrow.

Don’t look now, but you have a decision to make.
Are you going to trust him to lead, guide, and direct you or not?
If you are, then let’s take a moment and submit everything to him.

What is the Holy Spirit saying to you through this message?

How does he want you to respond?