Decisions: Destinations

"Destination – Fruit" a message from Galatians 5 by Don Heatley from Vision Community Church 2/1/09

Over the past few weeks, we have explored how we, as followers of Jesus, are to make our decisions.  First and foremost, we learned how critical it was that our decisions be rooted in the will of God.  Although we saw the importance of aligning our lives with God’s purposes in the world, we discovered that there may be many right answers within that will.  Remember, we are called to have our minds transformed to be more Christ-like.  Last week we examined the sources of wisdom that God has given us to develop that mind of Christ.  Our Scriptures, illuminated by the wisdom of those who journeyed before us and the gift of Reason is the place we look and listen for wisdom.  We listen to hear resonances and dissonances that guide us in our discernment process.   As we saw, that is why our church is so vital to our lives, because this community of faith is a repository for all those sources of our wisdom.  Even all these wonderful elements are not enough to help us make good decisions.

Making a big decision in life is a journey.  It is like a trip on which we seek directions.   Getting directions is a lot easier than it used to be.  Just a few short years ago, we relied upon roadmaps.  I remember going on family vacations, driving, getting lost and breaking out the roadmap.  Problem was,it seemed we always seemed to be stored in the car that we were not.  When we were in Pam’s car, it was in mine.  When we were in my car, it was in Pam’s.  If we were lucky, and the map was in the same car as us, we then faced the challenge of figuring out where we were on the map.  That usually took about five minutes, all the while we were usually heading even further in the wrong direction.   Even if we could figure out where we were and where we wanted to be and determine a route to get there, we were then faced with the ultimate challenge of folding the map back up.  That was even harder than reading the map in the first place.

Of course, now we have access to Mapquest, Googlemaps, and GPS in our cars, even in our phones.  We should have no excuse for getting lost.  Yet we still do.  Last month I was in Dallas shooting a documentary.  When I rented my car, the guy behind the desk kept trying to upsell me more services than the economy car I had reserved.  “Do you want an SUV?  More insurance? A different gas plan?  A GPS? Directions to your hotel?”  

I proudly said, “No thanks.  I have GPS in my phone.”  So I proceeded to get into my cramped little Hyundai, entered the address of my hotel and set off on the President George Bush Turnpike.  That gave me some degree of comfort, since after all, something named after Bush 41 could not lead me in anything other than a “prudent” direction.  I followed each instruction the voice in my phone spoke to me.  Soon I found myself circling the same exit and entrance ramps multiple times, until I finally was told by a confident voice, “You have arrived at your destination.”

I looked around.  There was no hotel. So I pulled over.  There I was, late at night, sitting in the parking lot of a small strip mall in front of a discount orthodontist and a Subway.  No hotel in sight.  Now I took out my phone for its original use, calling the hotel.  I explained where I was and the woman at the front desk promptly informed me I was about ten miles away from my intended destination.  “How could that be?” I asked. “I entered your address into my GPS.”

“What address did you enter, sir?”  She seemed to almost know the answer.

“Your address.  1572 Dallas Parkway.”

“Did you specify North Dallas Parkway?”

“You know what?  I think I know what I did wrong.  I’ll see you in about ten minutes.”  I hung up.

I had done almost everything right with my GPS system.  Geosynchronous satellites ensured my starting location was accurate.  The software gave me accurate guidance along the way.  My mistake was that I was heading for the wrong destination. 

Making a decision is a lot like that. Last week we talked about the need to enter good information into our brains when discerning the path ahead.  Those were the sources of wisdom we talked about.  They are like the starting location one enters into Mapquest, or the GPS direction one receives along the way.  However, we must also take into consideration our ending location as well.  In the midst of gathering advice, seeking God’s wisdom and purposes, we must never forget our destination and consider the results and consequences of our choices.  This presents us with quite a challenge since we have the freedom of so many choices.

The early Christians faced much the same dilemma.  During the early decades of the Jesus Movement, the big controversy was over circumcision.  Circumcision was a Jewish practice and, since many of first Christians were Jewish, they argued that one needed to be a good Jew first, before one was a good Christian.  So in order to be a part of the church, one needed to trim a little off the top, so to speak.  Paul countered that, in Christ, we have a new freedom and that rites like circumcision and dietary laws were no longer required. 

That may seem silly to us, but when one thinks of all the current church arguments about homosexuality, we cannot help but note this fixation we Christians have always had with things below the waistline.  In reality though, our time is not that different from Paul’s.   Freedom is a scary proposition.  In Paul’s day, as in ours, people rightfully worry that if you remove one longstanding requirement of a religion, it will quickly lead to a watering-down of faith and morality.  Reacting to this fear of the domino effect, Paul’s opponents viewed him as dangerous and heretical.  Conversely, other more libertarian individuals figured that as long as they were doing away with circumcision, why not just do anything one liked?

So Paul was faced with a challenge in the churches he planted in cities like Galatia.  If God was indeed doing something new in Jesus Christ and the old hard and fast rules no longer applied, if doing the right thing was no longer a simple matter of just looking it up in a scroll (which by the way it never was), how was a Jesus follower to make choices in their lives?  What criteria was a Christian supposed to use to make decisions?

Rather than talk about where that decision process begins, Paul takes a different approach here.  The guidance he gives the Galatians is to take into account their destination.  In other words, what outcomes will their decisions produce?  He offers two criteria for determining that.

The first is that of love. In Paul’s day the churches argued over the Jewish laws about purity, circumcision and food.  Yet all those laws could be summed up in one command, he says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Sure we are free in Christ, he says.  But we are not to use that freedom exclusively for our own agenda. Christ freed us from all sorts of religious rules and regulations, not so that we could be self-actualized or self-indulgent.  Christ freed us so that our focus might shift from our own self-righteousness, to the well being others. 

What career path should you take?  Should you switch jobs? What school should you attend?  Whom should you marry?  What house will you buy?  How will you spend your money?  Do you ever allow love of others to become a consideration in those decisions?  When you choose to spend money or a big purchase, do you stop to think about how it will affect your spouse or children? 

Such questions are very counterintuitive to us.  After all, we spend vast amounts of time griping to others and ourselves how we never get things our way.  We complain that we never come first.  We are the victims.  We need time to pamper ourselves, take a little “me time” as they say on daytime television.  Trust me.  If you have enough time to watch daytime TV, you have plenty of me time.

When we face a decision, it is too easy to get caught up within ourselves and our own stories.  I know that, as for me, I can get so wrapped up in myself and the self-importance of my own decisions, it is almost as if an episode of “Biography” is taking place in my head.  “In 1995, Heatley faced a turning point in his life, ultimately culminating in his decision to buy the Subaru.”  You and I are not as important as we think we are.  This is why Christians always must factor the needs of others into our decisions, or as Lenny Kravitz once said, “Let Love Rule.”

We have to be careful here.  Letting love guide our decisions should never be an invitation to tolerate being abused.  God certainly wants what is best for us.  The problem is, so do we.  Unlike God, we are not so good at taking the good of everyone into account in our decisions.  M. Scott Peck once defined love as putting the spiritual well being of another before that of your own. So let us ask ourselves, are the decisions we make going to result in there being more love in the world, or less? 

When planning a vacation, there are some destinations no one chooses.  For instance, when one lands at Newark airport the flight attendant announces, “Enjoy your stay in Newark.” No one stays in Newark.  It is not a location one picks as an ultimate destination.  In fact, it is a bad destination.

Making choices that are not rooted in love also leads us to some bad destinations.  In fact, Paul lists some of those destinations in Galatians; “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;  trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits, the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community.”  This my friends, is the Newark of spiritual destinations.

If you have any of these qualities in your life, the first step is to admit it.  Call it what it is.  The second step is to realize that you have these things in your life because of a bad decision you made somewhere along the way. Paul warns that if we use our freedom in this way, the Kingdom of God will elude us.  Let us be clear here.  By that, Paul does not mean, “If you do these bad things you won’t go to heaven after you die.”  That would mean we could earn our own salvation, and Paul certainly did not believe that.  Like Jesus, Paul had a much broader view of God’s Kingdom.  It is God reigning in our lives right now.  It is God’s dream for your life, my life and all of Creation.   Paul is warning us, if you face a decision and the choice you are pondering will lead to this kind of diminished life, God’s Kingdom will not be in you.

No matter how many bad decisions you have made in life, you can still make another decision – a decision to follow Christ and turn your life around.

In contrast, there are other destinations that are located in the Kingdom. They are called the fruit of the Spirit and traditionally they are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.   I have heard about these fruits my whole life.  Mistakenly, I always associated them with qualities that good religious people, especially Christians, are supposed to have.  There were these pious ideals for holy-rollers.  Somehow they always eluded my grasp so I would get angry about not being more loving, impatient with my impatience, and unwilling to control my self-control.  I have since come to realize that they are much more than that.

These fruits of the Spirit are our guidelines to making decisions.  When we have a difficult decision to make, we must ask ourselves; will the choice I am considering promote reconciliation and love, or divisiveness?  Granted, there are times when doing the right thing will cause people to be angry with us.  Even Jesus caused controversy, but in general, will our decision create needless divisiveness or does it bring people together in what my friend Tony Jones calls “an envelope of reconciliation.”

Will our decision result in joy, in exuberance for life?  Will it enhance life, or diminish it?  Will our decision create peace for others and most tellingly, within ourselves?  Sometimes there is no better assurance of the rightness of our decisions than the peace we feel after we have made them.  I had a friend who hated the place where he worked.  His job was slowly killing him inside and adversely affecting his health and his marriage.  One night he had a dream that he was working in another organization.  Like a nightmare, it jarred him out of his sleep.  Rather than awaking with a feeling of terror, he awoke with a profound sense of peace.  The kind of peace he had not felt in years.  From that he knew what decision he needed to make about is job.

Paul’s fruits of the Spirit challenge all of our decisions.  Will our choice make us more patient, that is, is it coming as the result of our patience?  Or is it the result of wanting to make a quick easy and unexamined decision, an outcome of our lust fir instant gratification?   Will our decision be an act of kindness, not the random kind but a carefully considered strategically subversive act of kindness for God’s Kingdom? 

Will it produce a generous result?  Or is it rooted in our need to acquire power and things or control events and people?

Will our decision be faithful to all of our relationships?  Is what we are deciding honoring our commitments and showing loyalty to our family our friends, or our church?

Will our decision be gentle?  Or will it assert our wishes and power on someone else?

Finally, will our decision be rooted in and lead us to more self-control?  Often our decisions are based on controlling others rather than us.  However, developing discipline within us is a key to spiritual maturity.

  Think about the decisions you have made in the past.  Especially consider the results of those decisions.  Which of Paul’s two lists did the outcome most resemble?  Is it his list of what is traditionally called the “works of the flesh” that is, the selfishness that is at odds with the freedom God gave us?  Or did your decision result in these fruits of the Spirit?  In either case, take some time to examine how you came to that decision and how the outcome would have been different if you ran your choices through this grid of criteria.

Take a moment and think of the decisions you face now.  Ask yourself how and if each choice would result in more love, more joy, more peace, more patience, more kindness, more generosity, more faithfulness, more gentleness, and more self-control. In short, will your decision result in more of God’s Kingdom.

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