Decisions

1. Jesus Christ controls history.
If Jesus Christ controls history, then there are crises in life, but there are no tragedies and no innocent victims (Rom 8:28; Eph 1:11; Col 1:17; Rev 22:12-13).

2. Every person has an allotment of time and trouble.
God has allotted to each of us a certain amount of time and in that time He has allotted a certain amount of suffering, adversity, and crisis. But He has also provided for deliverance in each and every one of our problems (Exo 4; Job 5:7; Psa 34:19, Psa 34:37).

3. Crisis always involves controlled testing.
Satan may get through the barriers or the hedges God puts around us. but he never gets beyond the divine limitation (Gen 22:1-19; Job 1-2; 1Co 10:13).

4. Every crisis forces us to make decisions.
One of the reasons God allows pressure and crisis in our lives is to show us what we are inside. Crisis forces us to make decisions and in every decision we face the option of choosing good or evil.

5. Every future decision involves elements of past decisions.
Decisions made by David (1Sa 23, 2Sa 2, 4, 11-18) and Paul (2Co 1:1-12; 2Co 4:8-15; 2Co 6,11) illustrate this point. Every good choice we make opens the door in the future for greater choices; every wrong choice hinders and limits future options. Today we make our decisions; tomorrow our decisions make us. If we consistently make bad decisions, we will begin to callous our souls and destroy spiritual sensitivity.

6. There are two wills that affect every crisis.
The sovereign will of God and the changeable will of man are at work in every crisis (Deu 8:1-20, Deu 8:11:26-28; Jer 18:5-12; Eze 18:20-29). Before history began. God saw every option we would ever have and knew every choice we would ever make. Based on His omniscience, He made all His decisions before He created us; none of the decisions He has made are ever going to change. His decisions and His will are expressed to the extent that He has revealed them to us in His Word. Throughout the course of human history, in the exercise of human volition man has often chosen—and continues to choose—contrary to the will and Word of God. Every one of these choices has an effect on the course of history; every one brings suffering. Bad decisions always bring about human suffering because they are contrary to the plan and purpose of God.

7. We are the product of our decisions.
We are not the product of our environment and we are not the product of other people—unless we have chosen to be. Decisions are what make people. We all have a will from which we make decisions. Those decisions form a pattern, and from that pattern there develops a trend in our life. From the trend come habits and from the habits, character. It is the trend of our lives with which God is most concerned. Consider, for example, David. If we looked only at individual actions in David’s life, we could say that he was a scoundrel, a liar, a thief, a pitiful father, an adulterer, a murderer, unfaithful He was. David was all these things. But these were not the habitual activities of David’s life. A chart of David’s life would actually look something like a graph of the stock market in a good year. He would make gains and then he would falter and then he would make gains and then he would falter. But always the gains were getting higher and the trend was always upward. David continued to climb higher and higher in the spiritual realm.

This material was originally a highlighted topic in "The Basics.".

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