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God-Centered Decisions: Doubt, Discern, Decide

Writer's picture: Rev. Dr. Abigail Rian EvansRev. Dr. Abigail Rian Evans
Colossians 1:9-14; Psalm 27:7-14​ 

Grace to you and peace from God our Creator, Christ our Savior, and the Holy Spirit our comforter. It is an honor to be here at Brick church and a challenge to preach here in my son Tom’s church- quite a pulpit to fill. As you know, Tom comes from a family of preachers. His grandfather Edwin H. Rian, my father, his father, Robert Maxwell Evans, his sister-in-law, Mary Tiebout and then there is me who when my sons were growing up accused me of talking to them in sermons. 


I also want to thank you for your wonderful support of Tom, as a pastor is only as good as his/her flock. Your church is blessed with a wonderful staff as well: your associate pastor Adam, parish associate Caroline, theologian in residence Charles, seminarians Rob and Henry and of course the amazing Director of Music, Ray, and is gifted choir who uplift us by their music. 


Your vision for the future of Brick Church as a spiritual home for all is inspiring indeed. All today is really inclusive since animals are invited for today’s Blessing of the Animals service, followed by a potluck and a wonderful evening Service of Peace and Light. It is also fitting today that you are having the installation and ordination of church officers. These women and men have responded to God’s call through the Brick Presbyterian Church to serve this church, community, and the wider world. Their decision is a yes to God.!  


My theme for our reflection this morning is God-Centered Decisions: Doubt! Discern! Decide! Every day of our life since we were very young, we have been making decisions, choices, and acting on the basis of them.  Right now, in our country we face important choices with the coming elections. 


Some of our decisions are easy, others are momentous decisions that have long term consequences.  The following are some of the questions people have asked me in my ministry as a pastor, missionary, professor, or chaplain as to what decision they should make. Where should I go to college? Should I cheat on an exam? What career should I pursue? Who should I marry? Should I have children? If so, how many children and when? Should I get divorced if my husband has affairs? Should I move my family to accept a promotion? Should I have chemotherapy or surgery if I have a terminal cancer diagnosis? Should I tell my wife I have AIDS? Now that I am dying, should I tell my husband and kids that as a teenager, I had a baby who I gave up for adoption who just found me several days ago and wants to meet my family? Should I join a cult that values me when no one else does? If I used black magic, can I still be a Christian? Should I give money to a just released prisoner from charges of murder one who came to the church for help? Should I quit my job because I am so stressed out? Change professions? Move to another country?  


We all have had moments of crisis in our lives when we are not sure what to do. Remember the word crisis in Chinese comes from two characters: one for fear and the other for opportunity. Crises can be an opportunity to grow or retrench-the choices involved can be life defeating or life enhancing. Some may be a matter of life and death. 


Decisions are multi-dimensional and sometimes they are simply a case of following the lesser of two evils. What we call tragic choices. Other times the right decision may be quite clear, but we do not wish to follow it. A decision may involve numerous complications and ramifications that we cannot clearly discern, unexpected events beyond our control. 


Making the right decisions does not simply involve developing a code. What virtues shall I seek and what sins should I avoid? The Talmud had 365 negative commandments, as many days of the year and 248 positive commandments, as many as the bones of the body according to Jewish tradition.  


However, the person who is a slave to a code, him or herself may become codified. This is the type of self-righteous person about which Thoreau once remarked, “If we see a person approaching with the intent to do us good, we should run for our life.” However, we do not want to go to the other extreme of avoiding all codes or laws, as comedian years ago Sam Levinson described in viewing, e.g., the 10 commandments. “Some people are looking for moral guides from the 10 commandments, some for laws, but most people are looking for loopholes.” 


In any case, decision making is not simply a matter of following the law, a set of rules and regulations. Hard decisions can also be complicated. How to act and what to do in the face of complex situations. I want to share with you a true story. A couple, the husband, a pastor and the wife an active Christian educator were serving a church, and all seemed to be going smoothly in their lives. He then shared that he was gay, divorced his wife and went to live with his partner. Several years later her husband contracted AIDS. Subsequently, she was killed in a car accident and at her funeral her former husband's partner  stood up at the time of testimonials to say that she had called him when learning that her former husband had AIDS, offered to care for her former husband in whatever ways were helpful but even more than this asked his partner, "What can I do to help you?" Tragic situations, complicated decisions, even those can be an avenue for showing God's love. 


The question for us to consider is how do we make God-centered decisions? How can we know God’s will? What should we do?


Let me suggest 3 steps: doubt, discern, and decide. 


DOUBT: Doubt is good; we all have doubts. More dangerous is someone who believes they have all the answers or better yet listening to someone who is certain they know what the right decision is for you.  Even the apostle Paul struggled with making decisions. Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” 


…Marty Martin wrote in his book The Absence of a Cry about the reality of our doubt. He discusses what he calls summer and winter Christians. We cannot escape the winter of the heart which is at the core of the believer’s struggle. Summerstyle believers shun the doubter and offer a Christianity of cool comfort, living on the surface of some perfect world.  Winter Christians (hanging on by their fingernails), often find themselves alongside the atheists living on the edges of doubt but still struggling to include a “yes” to God. We need not eliminate a summer Christianity, but neither should it be allowed to have the only voice. So, as we face our doubts, we struggle to discern what we should do.


DISCERN: Discerning for us means seeking God’s will for our lives in a broader sense but also in specific situations informing what we should do. Susan Farnham, an episcopal lay leader, years ago wrote a book Listening Hearts about discernment. She convened a group of Christians to discuss how we can discern God’s will and make the right choices. This group read for almost a year various books on spiritual discernment and direction. They created a model which embraced Ignatian spirituality and Quaker clearness committee resources. 

The best decisions are God-centered because good decisions do not only consist of experience, technical information and weighing the immediate consequences but have broader implications which are long range and transcendent. 


Making God centered decisions involves understanding and then acting on God's will for us. 

To understand and act on God's will in a particular situation and concerning a specific decision requires a lifelong practice of seeking God's will and having a personal relationship with Christ. Each choice that we make influences the next one as well as providing a base of experience to draw on when we meet a major crisis.  


Paul promises that God has revealed the mystery of His will through Jesus Christ. In various parts of the NT, especially Romans and Ephesians and our lesson for today from Colossians Paul outlines the general will of God. This provides the context for the specific decisions we make. 


What is God's Will? 


1.  Believe in Our Personal Salvation Thru Jesus Christ. 

This perspective means that what we do each day is building for eternity. Decisions are not just temporal. For example, how is my job contributing to life in eternity? How does Christ shine through my marriage? Looking onto Jesus our eternal contemporary not only steadies our direction and pace, but it sustains us with an eternal present. We have no regret for the past or anxiety for the future. We live each day to the fullest. 


2. Lead lives that are holy and blameless. 

Lives that are good, pure, upright, truthful, charitable, kind, tender-hearted, reflecting the right attitude, i.e., with fortitude, patience, joy, and thanksgiving as the passage in Colossians describes it. What action will reflect a holy life? Telling my wife the truth or a lie about where I was last night? Betraying or encouraging a business partner? Going on a ski trip or making a contribution to a homeless shelter? 


3. Be God's children. 

This means having a personal, intimate relationship with God. who treats us as a member of the family. When I decide to listen to a friend's troubles instead of going to a movie I am acting as if we are all members of one family--God's family. When I am faced with a choice between reconciling with a competitor at work or getting even with him for past hurts which will contribute to uniting all things under God? So, we are then asking about the specific and temporal in light of the eternal. 


But we wonder, is it really possible to know God's will? To be truthful it is very hard sometimes to understand God’s will. We could describe three main difficulties: limitations of our own knowledge; paradox of God's will and human freedom; and the substitution of our will for God's will. 


Limitations of our knowledge 

As Paul wrote in 1 Cor. 13 “…we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." We have a lot of confusion in our minds about the will of God – we may have a PhD in our profession, but our knowledge of Christian faith and God’s will may be at the sub-kindergarten level. 

It is often because we cannot see the whole of life that we do not understand God's will; it is complex and complicated. 


Second, it is difficult for us to know God's will because of the paradox of human freedom and God's will. 


The crux of much of our lack of understanding in knowing God's will is the theodicy question, i.e., how can God be all powerful and loving and allow evil? The argument goes somewhat as follows: If God is God, and if God has power and if God is merciful and gracious, why are children hungry and violent wars continuing? Why does not God assert God’s self? Or as Woody Allen put it, “If God is Lord of the world when you look at what a mess it is in, God must be an underachiever.


Generally, in struggling to resolve the paradox of God's ordination and human freedom we go to one extreme or the other. However, it is precisely in the midst of this paradox that one of the most important teachings of the Reformed Tradition, i.e., predestination, appears. Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that God has foreordained us from the beginning of time, we are in God's hands and yet at the same time we are given freedom and responsibility. We need to hold these two truths in tension with one another. 


The third difficulty in knowing God's will is substituting our will for God's will. Often, we want something so much that we substitute our will for God's plan, or we feel God's will in our life would not be acceptable. It is interesting that often when people do not want to do something they hide behind the phrase, “If God wills.” 


I can remember, for example, in the small church in Chapeco, Brazil, where we worked as missionaries, we would ask people to teach Sunday School, or lead a Bible study group, or meet with the young people. Very often their response would be, "Se Deus quiser” (if God is willing). Well, hardly anybody showed up to teach Sunday school or lead a Bible study, so I guess God didn't want much to happen. True or false? 


As a chaplain at Columbia University when I was organizing a Christian student group on campus, I would have students come to me and say, "Well, I have a big exam tomorrow. Is it God's will for me to study for my exam or to go to the Bible study?" Well, usually those students had not studied all along. So, it already was a false dilemma. Second, I would ask them, "Do you think it is God's will for you to be a student?" And generally, they would say, "Yes." Well then aren't you supposed to be the best student that you can be? Prayer and Bible study should not be an escape from studying, but rather give us the power, and the perspective and the motivation to go and do our studying. Throwing our minds into neutral is not more spiritual; we should pray to excel at what we are doing rather than using prayer as an excuse for not using the talents and gifts that God has given us. 


DECIDE: Having gone thru doubt and seeking to discern God’s will then we must decide– no decision is a decision. 


As we come to the point of decision here are some steps we can take:  


1. Pray.

2. Study the scriptures.

3. Listen to your conscience.

4. Use your common sense.

5. Seek the advice of Christian friends. 

6. Know God's overall plan, purpose, direction and priorities for your life.

7. Test out your understanding – BE BRAVE. ACT. 


The writer of Chronicles expressed it this way, "We do not know what we should do, but our eyes are fixed upon thee." (2 Chron. 20:12) What we are ultimately talking about is not simply individual choices but how we choose to live out our daily lives. Let us remember that we will make mistakes, we may make many bad choices, but we always live under God’s mercy. James Stewart wrote:


"I beg you to be sure of this, that however hard and difficult and sacrificial the road of God’s will may seem, it is down that thorny and unlikely road that there is waiting the great discovery, the very thing which has been sought elsewhere in vain. The peace of being able to forget oneself, the happiness of a heart content, and the serenity of God which passes understanding. Our true life, our Christian effectiveness, our share in the joy, which is the Spirit's most characteristic fruit, will always depend on the degree in which we surrender, or fail to surrender, our inclinations to the final control of God. Spiritual power will always vary in direct proportion to spiritual dedication. In our burnt offerings of ourselves on the altar of God’s will is the song of the Lord with the trumpets." 


As George MacDonald, the Victorian poet, author and pastor expressed it: 


I said, Let me walk in the fields.

God said, Nay, walk in the town. 

I said, There are no flowers there.

He said, no flowers, but a crown. 

I said, But the sky is black, 

There is nothing but noise and din. 

But He wept as He sent me back, 

There is more, God said, there is sin. 

I said, But the air is thick, 

And fogs are veiling the sun. 

He answered, yet hearts are sick 

And souls in the dark undone. 

I said, I shall miss the light, 

And friends will want me, they say. 

He answered me Choose tonight. 

If I am to miss you or them. 

I cast one look at the fields, 

Then set my face to the town. 

He said, My child, do you yield? 

Will you leave the flowers for the crown? 

Then into His hand went mine, 

And into my heart came God, 

And I walk in a light divine. 

The path that I feared to see. 

AMEN, AMEN.


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