Decision Making

Sermon Transcript

One part of my job I enjoy here is the times once per month when Mark and I meet as elders to pray for about 20 members of this church each by name; we just did it this past Thursday. Typically to prepare for that I’ll email those 20 members a week or so in advance and ask them if they have any specific prayer requests. The requests themselves are often encouraging as we get to hear of ways God is working in your lives and people with whom you are seeking to share the good news of Jesus. In addition to these things, one of the most common requests we get is for wisdom about some decision you are facing: Whether to change jobs, navigating a relationship, where to live, sometimes even whether to change churches.

 

These are wonderful things about which to request prayer, but we should recognize that not all humans everywhere throughout history have felt the weight of such decisions in the same way. There are many humans in the world today and especially throughout history who simply did not have many choices in these areas. They were slaves who were forced into a certain job, or perhaps they were simply the son of the local blacksmith who had no realistic prospect of a different career. So they never had to ask for prayer about which job to take. They grew up in a small village with only about 5 men in the same age range as them and everyone expected them to wed; so whether to marry and who to marry was not as difficult, and you get the picture. Furthermore, people were generally less mobile, so once you did commit to a trade or a spouse or a church or a place you typically wouldn’t entertain the thought of changing it much, if at all.

 

Suffice it to say that in 2025 Philadelphia, things feel different for many of you. And there are ways in which that is a gift: I’m glad to be married to my wife, though we didn’t grow up in the same small village, and I’m glad I could choose to be a pastor rather than work on computers like my dad did. But the proliferation of choices also brings with it challenges, not least of which is that we simply have to make them more often. Some of you could live just about anywhere if you wanted to, many careers may be open to you, now it feels like you can meet just about anyone for potential romance through an app, and even once you choose a certain job or place to live or church you could always change it! We face a lot of decisions, and so it is understandable that we often feel the need for wisdom to make such decisions. Well, good news: There is a whole book of the Bible devoted to wisdom, the book of Proverbs, and it does have some specific wisdom for us on decision making. That’s what we’re looking at today, and the basic approach Proverbs gives us is this: Trust in the Lord with all your decisions. And the proverbs we’re looking at today show us how to do so: Don’t trust yourself, trust wise counselors, and, ultimately, trust the Lord himself.

 

Don’t trust yourself

 

Proverbs 14:12 says that “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” That’s such an important piece of wisdom that it’s one of the few proverbs that is repeated again verbatim in Proverbs 16:25. In using the language of a “way”, Proverbs returns to a familiar theme from the first 9 chapters: Life is thought of like a way or path, and we are all on one. You can imagine the proverbial fork in the road: two paths, which do you choose? One looks wide, smooth, and you see a lot of footprints on it. The other looks narrow, treacherous, and relatively untraveled. Which way might seem right to the average man? Probably the broad, smooth, well-traveled one. Well this Proverb is letting you in on what you cannot see from the fork in the road: That path takes you right off a cliff. Remember that wisdom is the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it, and here’s the reality with which God wants to acquaint us through this Proverb: There are ways, paths, that seem right to you, but that actually end in death. Here’s how Jesus put it: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14).

 

Now, of course, there’s a sense in which we could say that all paths in this life lead to death; the death rate is still 100%, after all. But when Proverbs talks about death, it’s not typically referring to the mere cessation of bodily life. It has in mind something more like Jesus’ term: destruction. There are decisions you can make that seem right to you that have the potential to destroy your life and the lives of those around you, even while you live. There’s a purchase that just seems so right to you, you’ve prayed about it and you just think God really wants to give it to you, you can see how your friends and family would really love it, you have inner peace about it, you picture your life with it and everything just seems better. But there’s a problem: You can’t afford it. Nonetheless, it feels right to you, so you go on with it, and what happens? You end up in debt out of which you can’t climb, your paychecks start getting garnished, your kids are looking to you for a support you can no longer provide—destruction, though you’re still alive. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. There are decisions you can make that seem right to you that lead to an untimely death—somewhat notoriously in Proverbs, you may have lived until you were 80, but you slept with another man’s wife because it felt so right to you, and so either he killed you or you got the death penalty under Jewish law, and you died at 30. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. And, finally, there is destruction in the ultimate sense, what the Bible calls the “second death”, eternal condemnation in conscious torment apart from the favorable presence of God, or what we most commonly refer to as hell. A certain religion seems right to a man—the people are nice and moral, the leaders seem to really care, I feel better as I perform the rituals, and yet you appear before the judgment seat of God at the end of your life, and all that religion failed to furnish you with the righteousness God requires to receive eternal life, and instead you are eternally condemned. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.

 

Ironically enough, this proverb doesn’t seem right to modern ears, does it? The “proverbs” of our world sound more like, “Follow your heart” and “Be true to yourself”, advice which is essentially telling you to do what seems right to you. Even professing Christians, when conformed to the pattern of the world in this way, can have a very hard time with the idea that sincere people who are doing what seems right to them may nonetheless be on a path to destruction; I even feel that impulse in myself. They’re not intentionally going against what they know to be right; why would God condemn them? And yet this verse tells us that even if a path seems right to a man, he could be on the way to death. J.C. Ryle was an Anglican pastor in England writing in 1874, so almost exactly 150 years ago, and even then, he said there were thousands in his day saying, “We have nothing to do with the opinions of others. They may perhaps be mistaken, though it is possible they are right and we wrong: but, if they are sincere and earnest, we hope they will be saved even as we.” In response, Ryle says, “Has the Lord God spoken to us in the Bible, or has he not? Has he shown us the way of salvation plainly and distinctly in the Bible, or has he not? Has he declared to us the dangerous state of all out of that way, or has he not? Let us gird up the loins of our minds, and look these questions fairly in the face, and give them an honest answer.” A path seeming right to a man tells us nothing about whether that path leads to death or life. Imagine the fork in the road example again: One path does lead to death, however it seems to the man, and this proverb is telling us that reality is like that: It does not bend to what seems right to us, and however sincere we may be in doing what seems right to us, if we persist in the path that leads to death, we will be destroyed. You may be sincere, and still be on a path to destruction.

 

Another way professing Christians can be conformed to the pattern of the world in this is by doing what seems right to them, but clothing it in spiritual language. So they know not to say, “I’m following my heart” or “I’m being true to myself” and instead they say, “The Spirit is leading me to _______” or “God told me to _______” or “I have peace about it.” And I’m not saying that can’t be true; the Spirit does lead his people! But it is also possible for someone who genuinely has the Spirit of God living in them to still make decisions based on what seems right to them, because though the Spirit gloriously lives in every Christian, sin lamentably does too, and our sinful flesh wars against the Spirit. Furthermore, as another 19^th century Anglican pastor put it, “It is the fearful property of sin to hide its own character and identity.” Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14).

 

Now, obviously indwelling sin inclines you to commit acts that in themselves are violations of God’s law, and the way to detect whether it is sin leading you or the Spirit leading you when considering those decisions is fairly straightforward: If you’re considering doing something scripture forbids, that’s sin, not the Spirit, and you should not do it. However, when we begin to consider how to make wise decisions rather than foolish ones rather than just righteous decisions rather than sinful ones, we have to recognize that indwelling sin also enters into the picture, because indwelling sin inclines us toward foolish decisions. Let’s say for example that you, like probably every other person in this room, struggle with envy, because you’re a sinner, and envy is one of the works of the flesh (Gal 5:21). And let’s say you’re single, but you especially envy people who are married. How might that adversely impact your decision making? It may incline you to want to marry just about anyone, and even though it may not be sinful for you to marry someone, it may be foolish, but you’ll lack the ability to sense that because you’re so driven by envy that you feel like you need to be married. Or, on the other hand, you may be less driven by envy of married people, and more by idolatry of an ideal spouse, so you refuse to marry anyone because no matter how great they are, they always fall short of your god-shaped ideal. Again, not inherently sinful to not marry someone, but it may be foolish, and you miss it, because your decisions are being driven by sinful desires. Because even Christians still have indwelling sin, the way that seems right to us is still not an infallible guide to wisdom.

 

So don’t trust yourself. Your first instinct, your strong impression, even your strong impression that God himself wants you to make a certain decision, can still lead you to death, whether that be pain in this life, an early end to this life, or unending torment in the life to come. As we saw earlier in Proverbs, trusting in the LORD with all your heart means leaning not on your own understanding (Prov 3:5). Slow down. Many of the Proverbs on decision making are telling us just that: Slow down. We looked at one of them last week: “A wicked man puts on a bold face, but the upright gives thought to his ways” (Prov 21:29). The upright recognize that there is a reality outside them, that many paths lead only to death, and therefore they stop and give thought to their ways, rather than putting on a bold face and charging ahead with whatever seems right to them. Here’s another: “Desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way” (Prov 19:2).

 

There we even get this idea that you may have a desire that in itself is good, like the desire for marriage we were just talking about, but that desire without knowledge is not good. Another effect of sin is that it darkens our understanding (Eph 4:18) and though Christians are being renewed in knowledge (Col 3:10), we are still in process, and sometimes lack sufficient knowledge to pursue our desires in a wise way. But if you trust yourself, if you trust that what seems right to you is right, that your desires are basically good, and that you have sufficient knowledge already to pursue them in a wise way, what will you tend to do? You’ll tend to make hasty decisions. On the other hand, a healthy distrust of yourself should slow you down. It should cause you to stop and ask questions like, “Ok; this really feels right to me, but is it right? What else might be going on in me?” and even if the desire is good, a healthy distrust of yourself should cause you to stop and ask, “Do I really know what I need to know to pursue this desire in a wise way?”

 

Now let me be clear before I move on: Not every decision requires that level of caution. If you’re standing in traffic and a car is speeding at you, don’t stop and think, “Well now I know what seems right to me is to move out of the way of the car, but maybe that’s a sinful desire. And maybe I’ve got the mechanics of cars striking humans all wrong!” Just get out of the way. When you wake up in the morning and you go to get dressed, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth, you should not stop before each decision and consider whether you might be going astray. It takes wisdom to use the proverbs wisely, and that kind of hyper-analysis of every decision you make is a foolish use of these proverbs. Generally the more significant the decision, the slower you should go. For example, what god you will worship, who you will trust for your salvation, what church you will join, whether to marry a particular person, how you’ll raise your kids if you do end up getting married and God gives you kids, where you’ll live, what you’ll do for work, maybe some big financial choices or ethical dilemmas. For these especially, desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. Slow down. Don’t trust yourself. Instead, trust wise counselors.

 

Trust wise counselors

 

So as you slow down, don’t just sit there inactive, and don’t just try to process it all by yourself. Instead, seek out wise counselors. Proverbs 15:22 says that “without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed”. And don’t seek that counsel from just anyone. Proverbs 12:26 says, “One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.” Wicked counselors will lead you astray, but one who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor. Righteous advisers, wise counselors, and many of them: That’s what you want to be looking for as you slow down in proportion to the significance of the decision before you.

 

And how do you know whether someone is righteous? You have to know what scripture calls righteous, and you have to get to know the person. I’m a big fan of reading books, and while I have something of a love/hate relationship with podcasts, I appreciate them too in their proper place. You can learn a lot from sources like those, but those aren’t really sufficient to make wise decisions. For one thing, they don’t usually talk back to you. Go ask a book which job you should take and see what kind of answer you get back. But more to the point of Proverbs 12:26, except in rare cases when you know the author personally or someone you trust does, you have no idea whether they are righteous, or even whether their life demonstrates wisdom. Their job could be miserable but you’re looking to them for career advice, their parenting may be awful but you’re looking to them for parenting advice, their church may be really unhealthy but you’re looking to them for advice on which church to join, and so on.

 

A similar limitation also typically applies to professional counseling. Again, I’m a fan of professional counseling in its proper place: I’ve seen three different professional counselors regularly for even a year or two at a time at different periods in my life. Our church financially partners with a network of professional counselors in Philadelphia, I’m happy to refer people with whom I interact to professional counselors when it seems wise to do so, and our church even has a benevolence fund that we are willing to use to financially subsidize professional counseling when it seems wise to do so. But like any good thing, there are ways people can use counseling foolishly, and in our current cultural climate one way that typically happens is by viewing the counselor in an almost god-like way, as a kind of all-knowing, perfectly righteous guide, whose counsel therefore rises to an almost unquestionable status in your mind. Facing a hard decision; how do you make it? Ask your professional counselor, and do whatever he or she tells you to do, or whatever he or she leads you to conclude.

 

But there are multiple problems with this approach. To start with the one related to Proverbs 12:26, in most cases, you don’t know your counselor. You’re paying them for an hour or two of their time every week or so, and what you see of them in that time is only what they let you see, which is often very little and reasonably so due to the nature of the relationship and the focus on helping you. So in most cases you don’t know if they are righteous or wicked, wise or foolish, and therefore whether they will guide you in the path of righteousness or lead you astray. Furthermore, many counselors today, even some with “Christian” in their title, are trained to be non-directive in their approach, which means even when you seek their counsel on something, the main thing they’ll be doing is trying to help you identify what seems right to you, and encouraging you in that direction, which is the very thing Proverbs 14:12 warns us not to do! And, finally, each professional counselor is only one person, while Proverbs 15:22 tells us that with many advisers plans succeed. One mark of a wise professional counselor even is that they will encourage you to seek the advice of other wise counselors besides themselves.

 

A professional counselor, especially one who is operating from a biblical worldview and is a member in good standing of a healthy church, may be one helpful voice in a decision you’re considering, especially if you have an existing relationship with them, but one of the beauties of Proverbs is that it does not present the wisdom we need to make wise decisions as the sole province of paid and credentialed professionals. As professional counselor Julie Lowe has written, “Often the secular world takes many things that you and I know to be relationally wise and helpful, and turns them into a therapeutic model that only experts can access.” If you’re trying to decide where to live, what job to take, who to marry, etc. you’re making decisions that humans have made for thousands of years without paid professionals, and you’ll probably be most helped by talking to 5 or 6 wise Christian friends who really know you, and especially with some of those bigger decisions or ethical dilemmas, at least one of your pastors. People who know you, whose lives demonstrate a pattern of righteousness and wisdom, who would actually be willing to tell you if they thought you were going in a foolish direction—let many of them in on your decision, again in proportion to its significance, and really listen to their counsel.

 

This is another reason it is wise to join a church—in a church with meaningful membership practices, the pastors of that church have gotten to know the members and at least the pastors or in a congregational church like ours the whole membership has affirmed them as a brother or sister in Christ, and so it gives you a context in which you can get to know some other Christians and let them get to know you, so that when you face decisions, you already have a multitude of wise advisers, and at least a pastor or two who have been affirmed by that congregation, who you can go to for advice. But whatever you do, don’t isolate yourself to make decisions. Proverbs 18:1 says, “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” It’s generally a bad sign when someone comes to the people closest to them and simply announces a big decision they’ve made. They say, “I want you to know I’ve prayed about this and I feel at peace about it,” and the people closest to them are thinking, “Really? What advisers did you talk to about it?” and you sometimes find the answer is none or just a few they knew would affirm them in what seemed right to them; why would someone make decisions like that? They isolated themselves to seek their own desire, and as a result, they cut themselves off from sound judgment.

 

Don’t do that. Slow down and seek many wise counselors in proportion to the significance of the decision, and really listen to them. Don’t come to them with a decision practically already made and look for a rubber stamp. Recognize that there could be a way that seems right to you, but its end is the way to death. But here’s the beauty of what many advisers provide: Though they’re all sinners too, and you need to keep that in mind, odds are they won’t all struggle with sin the exact same way you do. So to return to an earlier example, while your envy might incline you to marry someone it’d be foolish to marry, you may have three friends who struggle more with idolizing the ideal spouse, and who are therefore more prone to see the flaws in the one you are considering. Even their sin, then, simply by virtue of being different from yours, may help you see significant flaws you were prone to overlook because in your heart, you just have to get married. Furthermore, if you choose wise counselors, they typically also have righteous perspective to bring. Because one of sin’s effects is to disguise itself, we often need other people to point it out to us. So Hebrews 3:13 tells us to “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” And, of course, because we are limited in knowledge and perspective, a multitude of counselors broadens our perspective and knowledge. When facing an ethical dilemma, there may simply be passages of scripture with which you weren’t familiar, and another adviser can bring those to bear on the decision. When deciding whether to take a certain job, you may just be thinking about the increase in pay, but a wise counselor might encourage you to consider the danger of the love of money, or another might ask how you would plan to give more with that increased salary, while another would ask you about the evangelistic opportunities at your current job, and so on.

 

Don’t trust yourself. Instead, slow down, seek wise counsel, and trust wise counselors. But ultimately, trust the Lord.

 

Trust the Lord

 

Proverbs 16:9 says, “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” That means our decisions are real and have significance—the heart of man does in fact plan his way. You know that you make real decisions and that it is you who is making them, and we have seen already in other proverbs we looked at that our decisions have real consequences, and yet, our decisions are not ultimate. It is the LORD who establishes our steps. We make plans, but our plans will only come to fruition if they align with God’s plan, because it is his purpose that always prevails. That’s just part of what it means for him to be God and for us to be man. Psalm 127:1 – “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”

 

So what do you do with that? Sit back and let the Lord build the house? Sit back and make no decisions, assuming that God will do it for you? No; the builder does labor, the watchman does stay awake, and the heart of man does plan his way! Instead, you do what Proverbs 16:3 says – “Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” That word for “commit” there means something more like “roll”, as in “roll your work to the Lord,” put it on his plate. It’s still your work, you must do it, but you can choose to do it in dependence on yourself, or in dependence on him. So when you face a big decision, don’t just seek people as your wise counselors; seek the Lord. Ask him for wisdom in prayer. Examine the scriptures yourself. In Psalm 119:24, the Psalmist says to the LORD: “Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors.” Seek God’s counsel through scripture and wise counselors, and trust him to provide it. Then, guess what you’ve got to do? Make a decision. Even many advisers can’t do that for you. Like it or not, it will always be you deciding what god you will worship, who you will depend on for salvation, what church you will join, whether you will get married, where you will live, how you’ll raise your kids, and so on. And once you make your decision, you roll it onto the Lord in prayer, trusting him that although your heart planned your way, it is he who must establish your steps.

 

And you can trust him with that, because although your plans do sometimes fail to come to fruition, his never do. “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Prov 19:21). Do you see what that means? It means we do not live in a chaotic world that may just as well end one way as another. There is a Lord ruling over this world and ruling over even the very steps we take, whose purpose will always stand. I mentioned earlier the folly of making hasty decisions, but there is also a folly in slowing down so much as to avoid making decisions at all, for fear that we might get it wrong! Some call it “analysis paralysis”. Where does that sort of debilitating fear come from? Take it from me as one who regularly struggles with such fear: It comes from unbelief. In Psalm 23:1 the Psalmist says, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but when this kind of fear grips you, it comes from a heart that says, “I have no shepherd,” and therefore I better make the right decision every time or my life will just spiral out to destruction. Do you see though that when you are functioning in that way, you are living out of accordance with reality? It’s foolish. The reality is that there is a Lord who establishes your steps, whose purpose always stands.

 

The reality is, as the late Pastor Tim Keller said, that guidance is not so much something God gives as something God does. When you’re facing one of these big decisions like where to live or what job to take you should definitely pray and ask God for wisdom, but you probably already realize that on those at least, there is no verse of the Bible that tells you the answer and he doesn’t usually guide you by simply telling you whether to take the job or not or giving you the address at which he wants you to live. So how can you move forward with such things, knowing that you shouldn’t trust what seems right to you? You move forward knowing that even though God hasn’t given you guidance, i.e., he hasn’t told you where to live, he is actually guiding you, guiding your very steps, so that you do live and you do marry or not marry and you do take the job that accomplishes his purpose in the end. Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.

 

You can trust the Lord to the degree you believe that his purpose will always stand, and you can trust the Lord to the degree you believe that his purpose is for your good. How would you know that? Proverbs 19:21 doesn’t tell you that: It juts says the purpose of the LORD will stand, but what if that purpose is set against your good, rather than for your good? How would you know? You would have to know that God is for you, and how can you know that? Not by the way that seems right to a man. The way to know that God is for you that seems right to most any man you ask is basically to do your best to live a good life. Yes, nobody’s perfect, but the important thing is that you do your best, and when you mess up, you admit it, and you try to do better next time, the thinking goes. Keep making progress. In more religious garb, keep going to church, keep receiving the sacrament, keep performing the ritual, keep trying to do better this week. The beliefs can vary widely, but do you know why basically every world religion and even atheism end up basically saying, “do your best”? Because it’s the way that seems right to a man! It is the wide gate of which Jesus spoke, and about which Jesus was equally clear: It leads to destruction.

 

So instead of pointing us to that way, Jesus came and pointed to himself as the way: He said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Though he was the one human who didn’t have sinful desires leading him astray, he chose to walk the path to the cross on behalf of sinners, to die the death we deserved, so that we could receive the eternal life he deserved, the life he entered on the third day when he rose from the dead. As I mentioned some of the biggest decisions earlier, I mentioned two big ones: What god will you worship, and on whom will you depend for salvation? Why not worship the one God whose purposes will always stand? And when you realize that you’ve sinned against that God, don’t trust yourself for salvation. Trust God himself, God the Son, who became man, died in your place, and rose from the dead, and you will be saved. Through faith alone in Christ alone, you can know that God is for you. He already paid for all your sins, and his righteousness has now been given to you, so that you now, even with your indwelling sin, stand justified, loved, and accepted in God’s sight.

 

That’s the big decision you must make first: Will you trust Christ alone for your salvation, or will you keep trusting in your best? Once you decide to trust him for your salvation, you can look to him as your ultimate counselor in all your other decisions. In one of the more famous prophecies of Christ’s coming in the part of the Bible written before he came, the prophet Isaiah pronounces a series of titles that would apply to Christ. Do you know what one of them is? Wonderful counselor. He’s given us his word, written down for us in scripture. He’s given us his Spirit, to open our minds to understand the scriptures. He’s given us his body, the church, a community of counselors, some of whom may even work as professional counselors, and he’s given us pastors to lead these communities of counselors. So don’t trust yourself. Trust the wise counselors he provides, and trust him ultimately, the wonderful counselor. It’s in him that we can see all the purposes of God working together for our good. He has taken personal responsibility to accomplish the purpose of God, and here’s what he himself said that purpose was: “That everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day” (John 6:40). God almost certainly won’t tell you what job to take, who to marry, where to live, and so on. You will typically have to make such decisions by not trusting in yourself, praying, seeking wise counselors, and not ultimately knowing exactly what the result of your decision will be. But God has clearly told us that everyone who looks on his son and believes in him will have eternal life, so that if you decide to do that, you can know this: Whatever you decide on the other things and whatever the results end up like, Jesus will order your steps in such a way as to raise you up on the last day, to be with him forever.