Decisions: Sources of Wisdom

A message from Proverbs 3 by Don Heatley from Vision Community Church 1/25/09

A few months ago I was having coffee with a friend who was facing a difficult decision in his life.  The decision involved a complex web of factors, his marriage, his career and his finances. There were a few paths from which he could choose and the best path was not clear at all.  We talked for a while and he reviewed the pros and cons each possibility.  Finally, he seemed to have chosen a strategy for moving forward.

“At times like these,” my friend said solemnly, “I always come to back to one simple question.  I ask myself, ‘what would my father do?’”

“That’s great,” I said.  “It’s wonderful that your father was that kind of example in your life.  It must be reassuring to have someone to admire.”

My friend looked puzzled.  “You don’t understand,” he said. “My father was an idiot who screwed up everything in his life.  So when I face a hard decision I just ask myself what would he do and then do the exact opposite.”

I imagine each of us has person like that in our life.  When in doubt we can always count on them to be a good barometer of what not to do in life.  However, like a Magic 8 Ball or Ouija board, such methods are not the best method on which to base our decisions.

Last week, we explored the importance for us, as followers of Jesus, to make decisions that align ourselves with God’s will and God’s purposes in the world.  God’s will is for us to become more like Christ.  God wants what is best for us and the world.  The purposes of God always work for the best outcome.  We also learned that in order to seek God’s will and be more Christ-like,  we must have the same mind as Christ.  How in the world do we do that?

Ten years ago, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter.  Basically, this space probe was designed to be a Martian weather satellite.  The information it was intended to gather would have told us much about not only the atmosphere of Mars, but in turn about the Earth’s as well.   The Mars Climate Orbiter never fulfilled that mission.  Upon arriving in Martian orbit, and receiving instructions from Earth, all contact was lost with the spacecraft.  For weeks, engineers puzzled over what had happened.  There appeared to be no mechanical malfunction.  Everything in the space probe seemed to have functioned as designed.  A couple of months later, the problem was diagnosed.  When the probe was built, engineers programmed it to respond to navigational commands given in English units; pounds and feet. Unfortunately, the ground controllers at NASA sent it navigation commands using the metric system.  The mismatch set the $125 million spacecraft too close to the planet, causing it to burn up in the atmosphere.  In the early days of computer programming such incidents were referred to as GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out.

When we face hard decisions, face the same challenge. Having the mind of Christ is so difficult because we have so much garbage going into our minds.  Often the reason we crash and burn is because we navigate our lives according to faulty instructions.    

Think of all the choices and noises that cloud our decisions.  Our culture programs us to believe in personal happiness  above all else.  Sacrifice and service are virtues only in as far as it helps us feel good about ourselves.  So should we base our decisions on what makes us happy?  And if we are feeling a little ethical we might add, “as long as it hurts no one else.”  When we face a decision, friends and family can offer often unasked for advice that causes us to question our own confidence.  We second guess ourselves and wonder if we are doing the right thing, or the just the easy thing.  Does the path forward seem so sure because it is the divine path?  Or is it merely the path we wanted to take in the first place and self-deceptive rationalization has given it veneer of holiness?

If we want to be programmed with the mind of Christ, we are in need of some serious rebooting. This is usually the point in a sermon where a preacher gets all excited and claims that God has given us a sure-fire unmistakable formula for discerning the right thing to do in life.  All you have to do is open up your Bible because it has the simple plain answer for every decision you face in life.  Well, I hate to disappoint you but that is not where I am going.  As followers of Jesus, Scripture plays the primary role in the process of discernment.  However, it does not always provide easily discerned answers.  There is no magic formula.

Of course, most of you probably knew that.  You have faced an important decision in your life.  You want to know what college to pick or if should sell your house and move. You have opened your Bible for guidance.  Instead of clear advice, you find instructions for how to get mildew out of your tent.  Do not be discouraged.  That just means the Bible is difficult and challenging. It does not mean it is irrelevant.  For Jesus followers, Scripture is our primary source for wisdom.  But how we apply it to our decision making process is more complex and inter-relational than merely looking up a verse as one looks up a definition in a dictionary. 

As someone with a love of electronic gadgets, I love instruction manuals.  I find them very entertaining.  Usually they are poorly translated and begin with awkward sentences such as, “Many congratulations for you to be enjoying pride in the happiness of your finest DX21 musical instrumental synthesizer.” Often in the back of the manual there will be a troubleshooting guide that features a decision tree for solving problems.  It will begin with simple choices, “Is the power turned on?  Yes or No? If Yes then check the function menu.”

That is a very good way to troubleshoot an electronic musical instrument but it would be a lousy way to compose a piece of music.  No book on music composition would feature a decision tree asking, “Is the song you are writing happy or sad?  If sad proceed to the minor scale.”  Composing great music is an art not an exact science but involves harmonizing sometimes dissonant tones and blending counter rhythms in syncopation.

In much the same way, Scripture, as our primary source of wisdom, plays off of other sources of wisdom in our life.  God has given us other sources of wisdom to guide us in our decisions.  Fortunately, we are not the first Christians to wrestle with decisions in life.  God has given us the wisdom of two thousand years of Christians who came before us; Christians who had to decide things about their relationships, their families, their careers, their money, their sex lives, their education, their politics, their health, or their priorities.  Through being a part of a church, through reading, the web or documentaries, we all have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of these saints.  Some of them may even be people we know who are further along the journey than we are. 

Certainly their experiences are not infallible.  Some of our Christian ancestors held sinful beliefs in things like slavery, crusades and the repression of women, to name just a few.  Even some Christians we know, may be off the mark in some areas. Yet even their flawed experiences, when held to the light of Scripture and other sources of wisdom, can illuminate our decisions.

When Pam and I began this church, we looked to many sources for guidance.  We read books written by mega-church pastors form the South and Midwest.  While they had some wisdom to offer, much of what they advised would not work here in the Northeast.  It turned out much of the guidance we received came from a man with a powdered wig, and lived in England two centuries ago.  John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, brought the church outside the walls of the church of his day.  He preached in public squares, poor neighborhoods, taverns and prisons.  He took much criticism and was attacked for his ministry methods, as were we, ironically mostly from those who claimed to be in his tradition.  Yet his experience as a disciple of Jesus was a source of wisdom for us, two hundred years later.

Wesley was also a source of wisdom for us because he once said, “any irrational religion is a false religion.”  Sometimes a decision is so clear, the path ahead so obvious, that we say “it’s a no-brainer.”  There may be times when that is the case, but we must be cautious  not to leave reason our of our decision making.  Earlier we heard the reading from Proverbs 3, “Trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding.”  I have heard that verse misused so many times in my life.  That verse is not an invitation to ignore reason, or science, or logic. 

At times I have found myself in conversation with sincere well meaning Christians who question scientific ideas like evolution or the fact that the earth is billions of years old.  When I present them with a coherent argument for an alternative Christian viewpoint they respond with their tried and true weapon, “Trust the Lord and lean not on your understanding.”  I do not believe the words of Proverbs are calling us to be stupid.  In fact, just a few verses later, the author entreats us to use our Common Sense. Guard it with our lives, we are told.

When we face difficult life choices, God does not want us to leave our brains out of the process.  God invites us to bring our intellect to bear on Scripture, and on the wisdom of the Christians who journeyed before us and truly wrestle with our life choices.  Despite the fact that we live in a postmodern world and that modernism’s Reason has not delivered the Utopia it once promised, its is still wise to approach our decisions rationally. 

This is all the more important in our day since I think following our hearts is often overrated. It was good advice in the repressed cultures like Victorian England or 1950’s suburbia, but none of us live there anymore.  In a culture and moral climate as free as ours, sometimes cold hard Reason is the only antidote for self-indulgence and self deception. 

According to the wisdom of financial experts, when you face money problems in your household, the first step is to get an accurate picture of your finances.  Before you make a budget, you need to know how much money is coming in and how much is going you.  If you are diagnosed with a disease, you need to gather information in order to make wise decisions about your treatment.  When we face a dilemma or tough decision, we need to do a reality check.  We need to assess the situation as it actually is and face the cold hard facts.  That dose of reality can be a gift from God that empowers us to see a clearer path ahead.

Once we have an accurate picture of reality, how do we know whose advice to take as we take action?  Ancient Israel consistently struggled with making decisions about its future.  There was an abundance of people willing to give advice.  They were called prophets.  The trick was how to tell a true prophet from a false one.  Actually it was not that tricky since there was a simple way to tell them apart.  Jeremiah 28 outlines a simple criteria for identifying a true prophet.  A true prophet is one whose visions come to pass.  In other words, true prophets turn out to be right.  Seems obvious but it is a lesson we are slow to learn.

We have marriage problems and seek advice from and commiserate with those who have miserable marriages.  We need to make a career decision and kvetch with people who have never been successful in their field.  We struggle about God or the church and waste our time talking with people who bounce from church to church or never get their spiritual journey started.  

In fact we should be seeking the guidance of those with thriving marriages, successful careers, or maturing faith.  Certainly, is people have been through a similar struggle to that of our own are best prepared to guide us in our own decisions.  But if they have come through their struggle on the side of bitterness, cynicism, or negativity, Scripture, our first source of wisdom is very clear - have nothing to do with them.

Once again, we come full circle.  We see that God has given us multiple sources of wisdom that all resonate with each other.  Our task as followers of God is to discern where these sources resonate with dissonance and where they do, avoid that path.  At the same time we need to discern where these sources resonate with harmony and then act and move forward.  As we face hard decisions, we all would love to have those skills.  We want our children to have those skills. These are not skills that comes naturally to any of us.  In order to develop them, we need to be a part of a community that teaches us the stories of Scripture and saints, challenges our intellect, preaches a prophetic voice that turns out to be right and holds us accountable to our choices. 

The church is many things, but one of its most practical attributes is that it is a depository for wisdom.  Only here can we find not only all these sources of wisdom, but a community that will love, support, and pray for us as we face the difficult decisions of life and discern our path forward.