Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Matthew 2

Why does it have to be so difficult to make a decision? Which college should I go to? Should I ask her to marry me? Should I say yes if he asks me to marry him? Or maybe I should break social convention and ask him to marry me? Should I look for a new job? Which of the three job choices I have should I take? Of the many things I need to buy, what should I choose with the limited funds that I have? Should I repair the car once again or buy a new one? Should I home school my children or send them to a French or Moroccan school? Should I go back now to my home country to see my father who is sick or wait a few months and hope that he will be better? Where should I go on my next post?

There are times when I am so tired of making decisions that when I go to a restaurant and see all the choices on the menu, I long for a restaurant I call Mom’s. You walk in and sit down. The waitress makes sure you have washed your hands and then brings out what you will eat for lunch and if you don’t finish your vegetables, you don’t get any desert. A good meal and no decisions to make.

Or how about Urim and Thummim as a way of making a decision? Do you remember this from the Bible?
Exodus 28
“Whenever Aaron enters the Holy Place, he will bear the names of the sons of Israel over his heart on the breastpiece of decision as a continuing memorial before the LORD.  30 Also put the Urim and the Thummim in the breastpiece, so they may be over Aaron’s heart whenever he enters the presence of the LORD. Thus Aaron will always bear the means of making decisions for the Israelites over his heart before the LORD.

This was an approved decision making process in the days of Moses about which we know little. Urim is the Hebrew word for lights so probably was a white stone. Perhaps Thummim was a black stone. But whatever they were, Aaron, the brother of Moses and the priest appointed by God for Israel, was to carry them in the breastpiece of his priestly garments. When a decision was to be made, he reached into his breastpiece and pulled out a stone.

I like that. Neat, clean, easy and very clear. I brought with me my own breastpiece and two stone eggs, one white and one black. The white egg will indicate no and the black egg will indicate yes.

Who here this morning has to make a decision? Debbie, should you go to Gordon College? Dave, should you marry Angie? Sam, should you set up a dental practice in Rabat? Herman and Jettie, should you take in more children? Should you go to Spain? Should I continue preaching this sermon?
(Pull out stone egg for decisions, yes or no to these or other questions asked questions.)

Unfortunately, decision making is not so easy and fortunately, decision making is not just a matter of chance.

The reason I am talking about making decisions this morning is because chapter two of Matthew has a lot of decisions being made and different ways of arriving at the decision. The Urim and Thummim of Exodus was not one of them.

We start in verse 2 with the Magi. They made a decision to travel thousands of kilometers to see Jesus on a journey that took many weeks. On what basis did they make this decision? The Magi were astrologers. They studied the stars to learn what was going to happen on earth. The Bible does not say how many there were. Some have said twelve; western tradition settled on three. But however many of them there were, they saw something unusual in the heavens.

Perhaps it was a comet they saw, or the conjunction of three planets. Whatever it was, they saw something in the sky and it led them to come to see Jesus. We may not like the way they made their decision, but can you argue that it was a bad decision? Whatever you think of their way of making a decision, it led them to Jesus.

The stars led them to Jerusalem and when they arrived, contrary to gender stereotype, they stopped and asked for directions. They sought the advice of others.

King Herod was interested in anyone who might be a threat to his throne and so he called together the scholars to see what they knew. They were the right ones to ask because they knew the Scriptures and pointed King Herod and the magi to Bethlehem based on a prophecy of Micah.

The magi came to where Jesus was living. This happened a year or two after Jesus was born and Mary and Joseph were now living in a house. They worshiped Jesus and presented him with gifts and then were about to set off for Jerusalem to do what King Herod had asked them to do, to share with him what they had discovered, when God spoke to them in a dream..

They were warned in this dream not to go back to Herod and they returned to their country by another route.

Joseph and Mary did not know this, but now the life of Jesus was in danger and when the magi had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
“Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

When Herod realized the magi had not come back to him he was furious and so he gave orders to his soldiers to go and kill all the baby boys, two years old and younger in the area of Bethlehem.

After Herod died an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph and told him the coast was clear and he could now go back to Israel.

When Joseph arrived back in Israel and  heard that Herod’s most unstable son was ruling over Judea, he was afraid and he was warned in a dream that he should go to the region of Galilee. And this brought Jesus to a town called Nazareth.

Lots of decisions and a variety of ways of seeking the right decision. Looking to the stars to reveal what is happening, asking others for their wisdom, consulting the scholars to see what they have learned from the Scriptures, dreams, an angel of the Lord speaking in a dream.

I know you are facing decisions that have to be made. Some of you are facing major decisions that will affect the rest of your life. What is the best way to make your decision?

In my thirty-five years of Christian life, I have seen people paralyzed because they were unable to decide what to do. I have seen people having to make a choice and unable to do so because they were waiting and waiting and waiting for God to speak to them. You may be struggling to come to a decision. How can you be guided by God in the decisions you make?

In the Alpha Course, Nicky Gumbel speaks about five ways we can be led by God in our decision making. He illiterates them with the letters CS. I want to run through these quickly. If you would like to know more about what Nicky Gumbel has to say about these five CSs, sign up for an Alpha Course. It will be well worth your time.

We are led by Commanding Scripture. Scripture leads us in many cases into what we should do. If I am so angry I want to kill someone, the Bible clearly tells me I am not to murder someone and in fact I need to learn why it is I am so angry and forgive the one who has offended me. There is a lot about my Christian life that I learn from what the Bible has to say.

We are led by a Compelling Spirit. There are many things in life about which the Bible does not speak. Choosing a college or job is not something the Bible speaks about. To take a train or drive to Marrakech is not a choice the Bible will help you with. But the Holy Spirit speaks into our lives and guides us. The tragedy is that most of the time we are not listening. But even so, the Holy Spirit continues to speak to us, encouraging us to follow a path that will lead to God.

We are expected to use our Common Sense. God gave us a mind and we are expected to use it to make good decisions. We can make a list of pros and cons for the choices we face and come to good conclusions. God gave us a mind and expects us to use it.

We are expected to seek the Counsel of the Saints, which means asking for advice from other Christians. There is a wealth of experience and knowledge in the body of Christ. Your brothers and sisters in Christ have learned a path of obedience and can help you as you make your way.

And Nicky Gumbel says, we are to pay attention to Circumstantial Signs. God uses circumstances to lead us and direct us. If you think you should marry a certain woman but she says no, that is a pretty clear sign. In less direct ways, circumstances also guide us. Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe said we need to pay attention to the little details of life because that is how God often leads us.

Commanding Scripture, Compelling Spirit, Common Sense, Counsel of the Saints and Circumstantial Signs: these are ways in which God guides us and helps us make good decisions.

With that as background, let me make a few observations about decision making.

I suspect that God prefers some decision making processes to others.

If I were to ask you to rank the decision making processes of the people in this chapter of Matthew, how would you rank them. My guess is that many would do it this way. The worst decision making process was the magi who consulted the stars. A big step up from that was to ask others for help and to consult the scholars. Better than that was to be spoken to by God in a dream and the best was to have an angel of the Lord speak in a dream. For many Christians, the more spectacular the revelation of God’s direction and will, the more true and powerful it is.

Many Christians long to have a direct, supernatural revelation from God and dreams and angels are just the ticket. But if every time you needed to make a decision, God spoke to you in a dream or an angel of the Lord appeared to you in a dream and told you what to do, would this be helpful for you as a Christian?

On the positive side, you would always know what to do. You might not want to obey sometimes what you were told to do, but you would always know the right choice to make. As positive as that might sound to you, the negative side far outweighs this advantage. The negative side is that this kind of revelation would not build your faith.

I hope you understand the importance of this. When we talk about being rich in heaven, it is our faith that will make us rich. In some way, the more faith we develop on earth, the more benefit we will have in heaven. The development of our faith is God’s primary concern for us.

Relying on spectacular dreams and angels is like reaching into the bag and pulling out a white or black stone. No thought is required. There is no struggle. There is no stepping out in faith believing that you are doing what God wants you to do.

Faith only develops when you are not sure if you are doing the right thing. Certainty is the opposite of faith and having a clear-cut method of making a decision, either pulling a stone out of a bag or waiting for the angel to appear, is on the side of certainty and will not develop faith.

I believe that dreams and angels are God’s last resort method for getting us to do what he wants us to do.

So what do I suspect is God’s preferred method for decision making?

Let me introduce you to one of my guiding principles in Christian living. I came to this realization early in my Christian life and this is it: God is not a magician and prefers to work through what he has already created to accomplish his purposes.

Many of the miracles in the Bible have natural explanations. When Joshua led Israel across the Jordan River, the river stopped flowing. There have been other recorded instances of this happening in recent history because of a mudslide farther upstream. The water of the Jordan dams behind the mudslide leaving the point where Joshua and Israel crossed without flowing water for one or two days.

Does this natural explanation make what happened less a miracle? How helpful would it have been if the mudslide occurred a week or a month before Joshua came to the Jordan? The miracle is in God’s orchestration bringing Israel to the bank of the Jordan at the time that the mudslide occurred, cutting off the flow of the water.

I could go on and on. There are miracles that defy natural explanation, but these are in the minority. Most often, God uses what he has already created to accomplish his purposes.

I think this is true with his guidance of us. He created us with minds. He has put in us the desire to learn and explore. We have learned a lot and God expects us to make good decisions based on what we know. He has given us the Scriptures and as we read we discover how it is he wants us to live. As Christians, we are filled with the Holy Spirit and as I said earlier, the Holy Spirit is speaking to us, guiding us. As we read Scripture, the Holy Spirit puts thoughts into our mind. When we learn to pay attention and learn to listen for the voice of God, we are directed in what we should do.

This is not certainty. What we hear is still just a thought in our minds and we have to step out in faith as we decide to act in one way or another.

Let’s say God wants me to go to Morocco. I might read my Bible and come to this verse from Romans 10:
How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?  15 And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

As I think about this verse I might remember having just read an article about Morocco. Perhaps I might know some friends who had been to Morocco. A lot of movies mention Morocco and perhaps I would see a film and that would make me think again about going to Morocco. Maybe I would do a Google search and see what options there were for working in Morocco. In this way I could discover that the international church in Rabat was looking for a pastor.

I think God would want me to think through the options and consider going to work in Morocco, talk to friends to see what they thought, make some contacts, pray and then make a decision to contact RPF and ask them to consider my application.

No need for God to speak in a dream, no need for an angel. God gave me a mind and expects me to use it and step out in faith believing that Morocco is where I am supposed to be.

It is when I set out in a direction that is not God’s plan for me that God intervenes at a more supernatural level. So we read in Acts that Saul set out for Damascus to persecute the church and Jesus appeared to him to turn him around in the proper direction and he became the great Apostle and theologian Paul. In a much less dramatic way, I was preparing to go to medical school when God spoke to me more clearly than any other time in my life and set me in the direction of seminary and the ministry.

If we are reading our Bibles, praying, trying to listen to the instructions of the Holy Spirit, then we will rarely, and maybe never, have the more dramatic experience of God speaking to us in dreams or visitations. I believe that dreams and angelic visitations are a last resort for God when we have not been responsive to his leading in other ways.

This being said, there are times when God needs to direct us in ways that our common sense and the advice of our friends will not help.

In the case of Matthew 2, how were the magi to know not to go back and report to Herod? How was Joseph to know that the life of his son was in danger? In God’s work, there are times when he needs to direct us in special ways but these are not the norm and they are not superior ways of being directed to reading the Bible or using the brain God gave us.

In Morocco we hear often of people having dreams as a way of being led to knowledge of the living God but again, I believe this is because God is at work in the lives of people all over the world. When the culture prevents other means of revelation, God will not be stopped and dreams are used to communicate his love and desire for us.

Ultimately it does not matter how you decide but that you decide and obey.

When Joseph received word from the angel of the Lord in a dream, he did not lie in bed wondering what he had eaten that caused him to have this dream. He did not roll over in bed and wake up in the morning wondering what it was that he had dreamt the night before. God made clear what Joseph must do. Joseph got up, woke up Mary, got dressed, gathered their belongings, packed them on their donkey, put Jesus safely on the donkey and then they set out, in the middle of the night in obedience to what the angel of the Lord had told them to do. He did not delay, he acted at once on what had been revealed to him.

When you come to a decision and believe that God has led you to do something, do it. Don’t put it off and think about it for a week or a month. Don’t be paralyzed, afraid to act because you are not sure what it is God is telling you to do. When God speaks, step out in obedience.

“But,” you say, “what if I made a wrong decision?”

The reason you can step out in faith so confidently is that Christians make decisions with a safety net to catch them if they fall.

You may been to a circus where someone walks on a tightrope from pole to pole under the circus tent. Or you may have seen trapeze artists swinging from bar to bar, flipping in the air and then being caught and taken to the other side of the tent. It is a scary business but whenever I have been at a circus, people have done this with a safety net below them so if they fall, they bounce in the net and then can climb back up to try the stunt again.

It is because God is so creative that we can make mistakes and head off in the wrong direction and not be afraid. We can make the wrong choice and God will wrap our bad decision in his creative plan and make something wonderful come out of it.

What this means is that it is better to decide and make the wrong decision than to sit and not make a decision because you are afraid of making a wrong decision. God’s creativity is the safety net with which we make decisions.

I want you to have confidence as you make the decisions you have to make. Draw close to Jesus. Spend time in prayer, taking time to journal and reflect and trying to listen to God’s voice in your thoughts and observations. Be obedient to what you know to be true and then when you have to make a decision you will be in the place to make a good decision.

Write down your choices. Evaluate the pros and cons for each choice. Pray and ask God to help you think of the factors and values that apply to this decision. Talk to friends and get their advice. Work this through and then come to a decision. Come to it confidently because you have given your heart to God and you know by faith that he will guide you.

Step out in obedience knowing that if you are moving in the wrong direction, God will make that clear to you in one way or another.

May God bless you as you make your way through life, making choices that will draw you closer to his will for your life.