Decision Making (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.

�But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. We�re here to take your calls as well.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome on this Thursday, September 17th to No Compromise Radio, nocompromiseradio .com. And my name is Mike Abendroth. This is show, I think, 14. If you�ve missed a show and you�d like to back up a little bit and listen to some of our older shows, you can go to nocompromiseradio .com, go to podcast, and you should be in good shape there.

How Christians Are Led and Why Decision-Making Matters

Thursdays, we look at current issues in evangelicalism. If you�d like to call today and talk about my topic, I�d love to have your phone call, 508 -831 -9863. And the topic today is how Christians are led.

People want to have guidance. People want to have leading. They have all kinds of phrases that they use. I won�t talk about any of those quite yet, but how does God lead Christians today? Does God speak to Christians directly?

Some kind of burning in the bosom, some kind of special word, a word of wisdom? How does God speak? How do we make decisions? We have a thousand decisions we have to make almost every day, and how do we go about making those decisions?

And we�ll talk about that today here at WVNE, 760 AM on No Compromise Radio. The show�s theme is basically this. To stand up for something, you have to stand against something. And while controversy for controversy�s sake is not very admirable or godly, standing up for truth is.

And so when Jesus preached the truth, John the Baptist preached the truth, Paul preached the truth, Stephen preached the truth, there was a reaction. And so basically when we preach the word, there�s going to be reaction.

Well, I�m just looking at the computer and my face just popped up, so I was shocked. It was scary. It was a Halloween picture. What we�re going to do today is talk about how Christians are led. I mean, some frankly say God is speaking to them today.

To remember with Oral Roberts many years ago with the vision of the 900-foot Jesus and that Jesus told him to build a 60-story hospital in South Tulsa. Never mind there were already three hospitals there and none on the north side.

They didn�t care because Oral heard supposedly from God. They tried to finish it in the early 80s, but it was a complete failure. Only two stories were occupied, tons of debt. Jesus came back though and spoke to Oral and got $8 million within two months.

Good thing because if he didn�t do that, God was going to kill him according to Oral. And the money was supplied by a dog track owner in Florida. Is that how God works today? Does he speak like that today?

What happens when we don�t hear God�s word? What kind of reaction would we get? I remember when I read about James Ryle, not J .C. Ryle, but James Ryle, he said that the Lord said this to him once. The four lads from Liverpool, he�s talking about the Beatles, went AWOL and did not serve in my army.

According to Ryle, this is God speaking, they served their own purposes and gave the gift to the other side. I lifted the anointing and for 20 years I�ve held it in my hand and I�m about to release it again.

I, God, will release an anointing and music that will take the world by storm like the Beatles when they first came, new anointed music that will capture men�s hearts. And then the Lord said, the same kind of reaction that the Beatles extracted will come, only this time the girls will not scream Ringo, John, George or Paul, they will scream Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Did God really say that? I think maybe a Lord said that, but not THE Lord. That's like Pat Robinson when he said years and years ago regarding the election, God told me some things about the election, but I�m not going to say because some old man on 60 Minutes would make fun of me, so I�m not going to tell you who the winner is going to be.

I know who wins, God told me, but I�m not going to say. Friends, we have to be very, very careful on how we look at Scripture. Second Timothy chapter 2 verse 15, Paul says to Timothy, an elder, and by derivation all of us need to take this advice, be diligent to present yourselves approved to God.

A worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. How does God lead his people today? How does God lead his people outside of Scripture today? We would all agree that if we have to make a decision, that if we have to have some kind of deadline to decide a new job or who to marry or something, it would be good to consult Scripture.

What does Scripture say? If you have a decision to make, that's the first thing that I could tell you as a pastor that you should do. I should read Scripture. I should read Scripture on the issue, oh I shouldn't marry an unbeliever, I should marry another person of the opposite sex.

There's lots of things that you could learn from Scripture, and while you're reading Scripture you're thinking things from God's perspective instead of your own. So what does Scripture say? The second thing you want to do is you ask yourself, I need wisdom.

James 1 says in verse 5 that if you don't have wisdom, assuming that we don't, you could ask God for wisdom, and this generous, wonderful, good God, of course will give His children wisdom. As Solomon asked for many things, at the top of the list it was wisdom, and God granted him wisdom.

And so if you have a decision to make, moving, job change, where to go to school, you say, Lord, would you give me wisdom? I don't know, I can't think of every detail, I want to do your will, please give me wisdom.

You could also ask for wisdom from others. Ask an elder, ask a friend, ask a Titus 2 lady, what do you think about the situation? And lastly, you have to go by your desires, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in Psalm 37.

But there are some things that you don't want to do when you're making a decision, but everywhere you go, people talk this way, 508 -831 -9863. I want to make sure you think through decision-making from a biblical perspective, and the common thread for each of these that I bring up today will be that they're dangerous, and they're going to put experience above Scripture.

They will, in fact, deny Sola Scriptura. And if I ask you, do you want to deny Scripture, and do you want to deny Sola Scriptura? You wouldn't want to do that. You wouldn't want to put things on par with Scripture, or maybe even over Scripture, or close to Scripture.

But these each do that, and you want to be very, very careful. Sadly, we have all kinds of slogans in Christianity, and we're especially having these kind of slogans when we make decisions. Instead of going back to Scripture and wisdom and desire, we run to something else, and we are afraid, really, to make decisions, trusting in the providence of God and His good care.

After all, if He's given us Jesus Christ, won't He give us every other smaller gift, like wisdom, like direction? He will even, if we make a bad decision—of course, not presuming on the grace of God, but when we make a bad decision, and we will, we are finite and fallen—God can even turn those out for good things, and so we want to make sure we don't fall back on some bad ways to make decisions in evangelicalism—508, 831, 9863.

Why Christians Should Not Be Led by Impressions

The first area that you ought not to use to make a decision, to somehow call it godliness or maturity or anything else, is going by impressions. Going by impressions. By the way, I'm having an impression right now.

You should never go by impressions. How about that impression? Henry Blackaby, in his book Experiencing God in the Early Eighties, took evangelicalism by storm, and he said in that book, God speaks to us by means of impressions.

He went so far to say in Experiencing God that if you don't regularly feel these impressions, you are not experiencing God. Friends, that's not true. That's not biblical. That's rubbish, is what that is.

We have to be careful. What kind of impression? Remember, our hearts are wicked. Our hearts are deceitful. We cannot know our hearts. Jeremiah 17, 9 and 10, you should read those two verses together. It is the Lord alone who knows our hearts, and our hearts will trick us and deceive us.

We cannot know our hearts, and so if you're trying to work on impressions, saying, God gave me an impression, you've got two problems. One, God hasn't given you an impression. And two, you're mistaking your own finite fallen feelings for God?

No. Bill Gothard can say all the time that you're going to get some kind of inner prompting when you need to make a decision. He calls them checks in your spirit, and how God warns and directs you directly.

That is not true. Gary Friesen is right in his book Decision Making in the Will of God. Impressions are impressions. Inner impressions are not a form of revelation, so the Bible does not invest inner impressions with authority to function as indicators of divine guidance.

Impressions are real. Believers experience them. But impressions are not authoritative. Gary Friesen is right. We may feel things, we may have impressions, but we cannot take our subjective feelings that we know are fallen and not always right, and easily prone to wander away from Scripture, and then say, that's God helping me to decide.

You remember the great evangelist, the Calvinistic Methodist evangelist, George Whitefield. He used to have all kinds of subjective impressions. And he prophesied that he would have a son, and that son would be a preacher named John.

He did get a wife, the wife became pregnant, they had a boy, he named him John, and sadly instead of becoming a great preacher, he died at four months old. That was Whitefield's only child. And Whitefield later said, as Jonathan Edwards helped him, Whitefield said, quote, I misapplied several passages of Scripture.

And so he said, many good souls mistook fancy for faith and imagination for revelation. Let me repeat that. Many good souls, I believe today, mistook fancy for faith and imagination for revelation. We want to be led by God, but God today leads through His Scriptures, He leads through wisdom through other people, and through granting it directly to us as we pray.

And then we just need to make some decisions. We trust in the Lord with all our hearts. We don't lean on our own understanding. We acknowledge the Lord in all our ways, and He will make our path straight.

Get out there and move and make a decision, and God has purposely not told us exactly what to do in all these things. We have a book that's transcultural, transchronological, and He doesn't give us some of those things, and so we have to just make sure we walk in faith.

And if we delight ourselves in the Lord, Psalm 37 says, He will give us what? The delights and the desires of our hearts. And so as we are in the Word of God, He will give us what we desire, and then we will own those things, and we'll search after those.

Be careful that you're not led on an impression. If you say to me, I have an impression that helped me do X, Y, and Z, that again does not prove that it's true. You don't want to put impressions anywhere close to Scripture.

508 -831 -9863. Why don't you call me and we'll figure out other things that people do, and they use biblical terminology, but in a mystical, subjective way. Secondly, I was led by God. God led me to do something.

I was led, I hear it all the time. God leads me. Well, the other thing we have to remember is, God does lead us, of course, but sometimes people use this kind of language, they coin these terms, God led me to make a decision, because they want validation for their decision.

Life is hard. Decisions are many. It's hard to even pick from a menu. All the different decisions that are available cause panic, cause frustration, cause paralysis. And so if you say, well, yes, but God really led me, then it's a lot easier to make the decision.

But here, too, it's our own inner heart that we can be misled by. I would say Ananias and Sapphira were led, but they were misled by their heart. Acts 5, verse 1 -4, But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and kept back some of the price for himself.

With his wife's full knowledge, and bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to the light of the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land?

While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God.

People say I feel led, and I'm sure Ananias and Sapphira felt led, but they were led, misled by their own heart. A good way you can do it is this way. If you're in time now, which you are, and you look backwards, you look at how God has providentially gotten you to this point.

You can see the hand of God. You can see the hand of God as sovereign will as you look backwards in time and see how He has brought people into your life, taken people out of your life, and allowed you to make the decisions that you needed to make with either blessings or with consequences.

But when you look back, you can see providence, and you can see how God has led you. But in the future, friends, from here to tomorrow, you don't feel led. Maybe you ought to not feel led, I should say, but you don't know how God is going to sovereignly work everything out.

The only way you can move forward in life is to say, this is God's revealed will. This is Scripture. This is what He's already told me, and to the best of my ability, through the grace of the Spirit of God, I will move forward and make decisions.

Providence helps us to see how God has led us, but for the future, we ought not to say, well, God led me to make this decision. Basically, saying we don't want to trust ourselves, that's good. But when you say God led me, how do we know it's God, and how do we know it's not our own selves?

We want to be careful to use that terminology. If you say God led me here because look at how He's led me in the past, great, but to make a current decision to say, I feel led of God to do that. Why don't you just say, I just want to do that.

I've prayed about it. I've read Scripture, and now I need to make a decision, and so this is the decision I'll make. That's much better. 508 -831 -9863. Here's a big one. So I've been pretty kind on the show today.

I haven't really riled any feathers like yesterday with the shack book, but this one may rile some feathers. And I want to help you. That's all I want to do. I'm just telling you things honestly. Someone said to me this week, we're just glad to have some honesty on the radio and people that can tell it like it is.

By the way, if you want to give me a nasty gram or a nasty email or you want to go to the website and say something and critique me, you can do that as well. So far we haven't had any negative emails.

I'm sure they'll come. So far it's only been positive. Why do we want to be led by Scripture wisdom and desire? Answer, it's because it's biblical. Impressions are fallible. Leading is fallible unless you're looking back, seeing God's providence.

And also here's the big one. I had a peace about it. I'm going to make a big decision in my life because I really felt a peace. I know some people that won't make a decision until they get some kind of peace from God.

I could ask you a lot of different questions to approach this problem, but when you evangelize, do you have a peace about it? When you have to go confront someone and sin for church discipline, do you have a peace about it?

If you're a pastor, when you get up to preach, do you always have a peace about it? This is just some kind of code word for, well, I want to feel good about something, but it doesn't help you make a decision.

Here's a man who had peace in his heart, but it was the wrong, unbiblical, sinful decision. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea. There was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up. Then the sailors became afraid, and every man cried to his God. They threw the cargo, which was in the ship, into the sea to lighten it.

But Jonah had a peaceful, easy feeling. Jonah was listening to the eagles, I have a feeling. Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down and fallen asleep. He was sound asleep. He was humming himself to sleep to, I've got a peaceful, easy feeling.

If you tell me I have a real peace about X, Y, and Z decision, then I'll look at you in a nice way and I'll say, I don't have a peace about what you just said to me, I have a peace about it. We don't need to have some peace about evangelism, we're called to do it.

We don't need to have a peace about things to make decisions. This reminds me of Quaker type of higher life where Hannah Whitehall Smith would write in her religious fanaticism book that some women would not get out of bed or put their clothes on without God's guidance.

Or, in the same book, one woman was quote unquote led to steal money from her landlord to teach an object lesson to him about worldly possessions. That is crazy. Feelings can never be the final authority.

Feelings are unstable. Feelings are unreliable. Feelings are governed by pride. C .J. Mahaney says, sometimes lies feel like the truth. He is right. Martin Lloyd Jones said, avoid the mistake of concentrating over much upon your feelings.

Above all, avoid the terrible error of making them central. Do not go on your feelings to make a decision. Feelings shouldn't be the engine of your life, they should be the caboose. I am pro-feelings, I am pro-feelings all the way, but not to make decisions.

I love Martin Luther when he said this little poem, it's an easy one to memorize as well. Feelings come and feelings go, and feelings are deceiving. My warrant, Luther said, is the word of God. Not else is worth believing.

If you have to make a decision, and it's a critical decision, you might not have a peace about it. But you should still do it, because it's biblical, because it's right. If you will say, well I want to ask this girl to marry me, but I don't have a peace about it because when I get down on one knee and say, will you marry me?

She might say, no. Well friends, go win the wife. That's the risk you have to take to be a man, to go do that. And so, if she says yes, you'll have a good feeling about it. See, the feelings come later.

I think probably the worst one, as I alluded to at the beginning of the show, is the most incorrigible of them all, Edwards would say, and that is when people want to make decisions, they say, not talking about the Bible, they say, well God told me, God said.

When people say God said to me, I asked for chapter and verse, oh could you please tell me what chapter and verse that would be? Sam Logan said, however you define guidance, you must resist anything that moves in the direction of new revelation from God.

If someone says God tells me something, A, I'd like to say chapter and verse, please. Secondly, B, I'd like to say, well if this is new revelation from God, could you just wait a moment so I can get my pen out and write this down?

Because when God speaks, we need to write it down. A classic example of this problem and this error is found when people pray. When God speaks to you, it is called scripture. When you speak to God, it is called prayer, and never the twain should meet.

You don't listen to God in prayer, you speak to Him. There's no biblical command to listen to God when we pray. Jack Ephord said, while alone and quiet, listen with your heart. Don't strain your ears for audible sound.

The Bible describes this order of the Lord's communication with us as a still, small voice. Further, expect His voice to come by more impressions, that is by thoughts or ideas which begin to form as you are quiet and worshipful in His presence.

Friends, that is Quakerism, that is inner light. And the problem with Quakerism and inner light is this, they forget about man's corruption, the total depravity of man, the inability of man to do anything because of the fall that would please God.

And so we have to be very, very careful that we remember that God says our minds are corrupt, our wills are corrupt, and we can't be guided by something that's corrupt. And so what we want to do is say to ourselves, if you have to make a decision, what does Scripture say, let me get wisdom, and then let's make a decision and move forward.

There's never a command in the Bible to listen to God outside of His Word, nothing even close. The Bible never commands us to tune into our inner voice, no, we're to meditate on Scripture. We are to cultivate wisdom and discernment, Proverbs 4, from the Scriptures.

Phil Johnson said, to whatever degree you seek private messages outside of His Word, you abandon sola Scriptura. So we do believe in the fall, and we do believe that if you base things on your own feelings and God led me and God said to me, you're going to be in big, big trouble.

And who could challenge that? What elder or pastor could challenge it? Well, God told me, oh, well, I guess I'm trumped. No, that is not it at all. We want to teach our people Scripture, wisdom, desire.

Now the one I didn't get to, but maybe I'll get to tomorrow or another day, is God opened the door, God closed the door. And so that is another way not to do things. God closes the door, and you should bust through that door.

God opens a door, and you should have enough wisdom to not go through that door. This is No Compromise Radio. My name is Mike Abendroth. Get the podcast on NoCompromiseRadio .com, or go to Bethlehem Bible Church at bbchurch .org and listen to the sermons there.

We have a Bible Institute, we have outreaches, and we'd like to help you in any way we can. Again, this is No Compromise Radio. How do you make decisions? Scripture, wisdom, desire. In that order. And be very, very careful that your desire is filled from Scripture and not based on God's leading, quote-unquote.

God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.