Every time you close another door—be it the door of immediate satisfaction, the door of distracting entertainment, the door of busyness, the door of guilt and worry, or the door of self-rejection—you commit yourself to go deeper into your heart and thus deeper into the heart of God.
God has provided you with many avenues for obtaining wisdom and averting failure. Resist your inclination to accept advice with easy solutions and to reject help that requires a more difficult path.
A chasm is opening between the men who believe their Bibles and the men who are prepared for an advance upon Scripture. Inspiration and speculation cannot long abide in peace. Compromise there can be none. We cannot hold the inspiration of the Word, and yet reject it; we cannot believe in the atonement and deny it; we cannot hold the doctrine of the fall and yet talk of the evolution of spiritual life from human nature; we cannot recognize the punishment of the impenitent and yet indulge the “larger hope.” One way or the other we must go. Decision is the virtue of the hour.
There may be no trumpet sound or loud applause when we make a right decision, just a calm sense of resolution and peace.
Place spiritual noise-cancelling headphones on, drown out all voices but His. The fear of the ‘what-ifs’ of tomorrow should never have a say in the decisions you make today. Off-the-cuff decisions based on fearful speculation are never wise.
Every single day, we make hundreds of choices without being aware of it. Most of those choices, we make automatically, based on the choices we made yesterday and the day before that. We are creatures of habit, so what habits are you forming today and what impact will they have a year from now?
Based on a chapter in my book, Not Always All Together
The spiritual leader will not procrastinate when faced with a decision, nor vacillate after making it. A sincere but faulty decision is better than weak-willed “trial balloons” or indecisive overtures. To postpone decisions is really to decide for the status quo. In most decisions the key element is not so much knowing what to do but in living with the results.
Many of our trouble occur because we base our choices on unreliable authorities; culture (“everyone is doing it”), tradition (“we’ve always done it”), reason (“it seems logical”), or emotion (“it just felt right”).
Every spending decision is a spiritual decision.
Stop! Right now! Take a deep breath in and exhale. Remind yourself that you are loved, you are cherished, you have value. Remind yourself that nothing that anyone does or thinks or says to you will diminish that value. Remind yourself that every person you meet today is loved by God just as much as you are and is worthy of respect and is worthy of being seen as a person of value. Now continue to make decisions today based on those truths.