Keys to Answered Prayer #4


KEY TO CHANGING HOW YOU MAKE DECISIONS

Your first step to making a good decision is to pray and ask God to help you. The second step is to expect Him to answer your request. The third step is to read the Bible. Where should you read? God can speak through any verse to give you wisdom. Be aware that if you only try to find verses (particularly out of context) that apply to your specific situation, your soul can influence you to focus on verses that will justify what it wants. The fourth step is to be aware of small, divine nudges and tweaks that God sends to adjust your thought processes.

God will allow U-turns when you make a decision that you become uneasy with as you begin to walk in it. However, don't make so many U-turns that you get dizzy. Ask God if you have made a wrong decision and then wait for Him to answer. Don't immediately jump into the U-turn Polka. You may have to jump right back.

God wants to help us choose His plans and purposes for our lives. To do this, He will adjust and correct our decision-making processes (often gently, sometimes more strongly) and tweak our paths to turn us towards His best. However, He still allows us to make the final decisions. God is always willing to work with your wrong choices, but it will usually entail another trip around Mt. Sinai.

God is very interested in who or what you are listening to when you make your choices. If you are listening to the world through your newspapers, television, radio, magazines, or friends, you can make decisions based upon wrong input. Colossians 3:2 (NKJV) tells you to set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. Be sure you are looking for God's input instead of the world's input when decisions need to be made.

Every choice you make will cause a consequence. Right choices bring right consequences into your life, consequences that are loaded with favor. Wrong choices bring difficult, hard consequences into your life. Still, there is some good news even in the difficult consequences. God will work you through them (if you will let Him) to help you learn valuable lessons you have not been willing to learn any other way. All Christians should embrace their consequences, good or bad, and be ready to learn from them rather than fighting with or running from them.

Determine that you will be willing to make changes in your thinking and in your behaviors if God's will for your life requires you to do so. Begin by asking yourself what are you willing to change? Perhaps you need to seriously consider making a list of your willingness so that you can know what:

1. you believe you are willing to change,
2. you hope God won't make you change, and
3. you refuse to change.

This would be a list worth praying over! Fear of change can paralyze your ability to make choices. You might be afraid of change because you have been criticized for choices you made. Perhaps you have never been affirmed for any decisions you have made. Perhaps you stuck to a bad decision because you didn't want to admit you were wrong. Perhaps previous decisions have made you feel shame and guilt.

The next thing you need to do is recognize how to prepare to make right decisions. Here are some questions to settle in your mind:

1. What could the consequences of this decision turn out to be? Do I believe I could learn, with God's help, from whatever consequences might come my way?
2. Do I really know what God's Word says about this?
3. Have I really invested time and complete attention to God to hear what He wants me to choose here? That usually means more than reading one chapter in the Bible and praying five minutes.

Then ask yourself these questions about your soul's involvement in your decision:

1. Why is my soul so afraid of what people might think?
2. What is my soul's real agenda in this decision?
3. What do I want to get out of this decision?
4. What could I lose?
5. Will someone else be hurt?
6. What could this decision cost me (money, time, relationships, reputation, etc.)?

Then ask yourself why you struggle so much with making certain decisions:

1. Have you realized that you need to recognize and reduce your options? Example: If you see a bowl of fruit and you know that bananas make you sick and grapes give you hives, then your only smart option is to choose the apple. Period, end of choices.
2. What won't you allow to be a factor in your decision making? Are you afraid that your decision could result in you having to apologize, make restitution, or give up being in control? Bind yourself to God's will and made a decision right now that you will do whatever He ask you to do to bring blessing and favor to you and to others. Period, end of choices.
3. Don't overload your decision-making process with so many what-if's that the what is important gets lost. What if someone else gets there first? What if they say no? What if everything falls apart? What if I fail and lose all my credibility? Loose all negative what ifs from your soul. Bind yourself to God's will and choose to begin looking for the positive what ifs He wants to open up to you.
4. THEN, go back to this foundational truth: If you do your best to make a decision in accordance with God's will, that is your part. His part that He loves to fulfill is that He will take care of the details.

Realize that there are certain things you can take out of your decision-making processes by a process of elimination.

1. Would it be all right to cheat on your income tax if you could give part of what you save to the Church? Ask yourself this: Are you willing to get up in your church on Sunday night and give a testimony about how you cheated on your taxes but you are going to give part of it to the church?
2. If you want to date a married person because you feel that God has told you that this is the person you are supposed to be married to, ask yourself this: Are you willing to get up in Women's Ministry, Youth Ministry, or Men's Ministry and give God the glory for telling you who your spouse is really supposed to be and then name that person and his or her wrong spouse?
3. If you find a way to get the answers to a Bible School final test, can you rationalize that it will be all right because it will help you graduate with honors? Are you willing to stand up at graduation and explain how clever you were to find a way to help yourself graduate with honors?

Your unsurrendered soul will try to rationalize and justify making the decisions that it wants made. It is easy to listen to its rationalization and justification if there are no other opinions and voices involved in your decision-making process. It is a different story if you need to stand up and try to rationalize or justify to your church, school, or office what you have done or what you want to do.

In the above decisions, you can narrow down the scope of your options until there is no doubt about what you should do. God would not tell you to cheat on your taxes. God would not tell you that dating a married person is all right because this person is not married to the right person. God would not tell you to steal test answers to help you have a better Bible school resume for future ministry opportunities. Period! Discussion over.

If God would not bring up those options, then who would? Either your unsurrendered soul or the devil, that's who! Focus on the big picture in your difficult decisions (God's will and His truth in the matter), and then realize that everything else is a detail of your soul or the enemy.

We often make decisions based upon what we hope will hurt us the least at the present time. Striving to always make risk-free decisions while leaving God out of the equation will always mean we risk making a wrong decision or we refuse to make decisions at all. Feeling shame or guilt for decisions we have previously made will definitely impair our ability to make right decisions now. There is no risk involved in choosing to cooperate with God in all of our decisions.

Your soul may be telling you that never making a wrong choice again is the only way to protect yourself from ever being judged, criticized, or humiliated again. The big picture is that even if you make a wrong decision after trying to hear God's voice, hold on to the truth that your heavenly Father is a God of love, grace, and mercy towards His children. Hold on to the truth that He will help you learn from your wrong decision and turn it into gold if you sincerely want to do what He wants. Hold on to the truth that your Teacher is ready to recognize and bless your learning curve.

Sometimes it helps to talk to people who are more spiritually experienced about the subject of your decision than you are. Ask what options they would consider when making a similar decision. They can present you with new options, and their insights could completely change the way you think about the decision. Too often Christians make their decisions while being hopelessly entangled in the unmet needs, unresolved issues, and unhealed areas of their unsurrendered souls instead of making them with God's guidance and help.

While other people cannot tell you what to do, they can sometimes give you a different perspective of how your soul could be clouding your judgment. Consider how you might be making wrong decisions based upon wrong beliefs hiding in your soul:

1. You do not want to let go of a wrong relationship in your life even though God is asking you to do so. Your soul's neediness manifests itself in the belief that any relationship is better than no relationship at all.
2. You are not willing to accept an unavoidable end of a job and be open to new opportunities as being part of God's better plans for your life. You try to cling to a personally detrimental, difficult, dead-end employment situation because you are fearful of having no money.
3. You do not want to step out into a new opportunity or adventure with God because you are afraid of failing. You have not allowed the Holy Spirit to teach you how to grow stronger through your past mistakes. You have not been thanking God for the learning process.

When your unsurrendered soul is firmly locked down on wrong beliefs out of your past, it forms what some call life scripts. Your soul determines which role it feels best about presenting to the world based upon the experiences of your life. It may go for sweet, strong, self-sufficient, controlling, dominant, needy, victim, brave, or shy. Your soul then begins to make decisions, put forth attitudes, affect behaviors, and revise your memories to agree with that life script as if it were cast in stone.

If your soul casts you in a sweet role, then you will try to act as sweet as you can (regardless of what you are really feeling). If your soul casts you in a strong role, then you will try to act as strong as you can (regardless of your fears). The problem is, being cast as sweet or strong does NOT make you sweet or strong. The constant acting out of your soul's scripted role will wear you out.

You may feel compelled to choose to do things that agree with your unsurrendered soul's life script that you would never normally do. You may feel compelled to make decisions that fit with your soul's life script that you know you shouldn't make. You will then develop stronghold thinking to prevent outside influences from intruding upon your wrong thinking. Stronghold thinking uses human logic, rationalization, and justification to defend what your soul has chosen to believe. It doesn't matter to your soul if others can see the limitations you are allowing it to impose upon you, it just builds its stronghold walls higher.

Loose stronghold thinking any time you feel pressure from others regarding your soul's chosen life script. Stronghold thinking never works for your benefit, and loosing it can help whether or not others are right. Loosing stronghold thinking can help you overcome your soul's control as well.

Do not get focused on why you haven't stuck with or walked out past decisions you have made. While you can learn from the past, you must not let your past drive your future. Focus on learning how to make right decisions and then begin to walk in them from this point forward. Paul says in Colossians 3:1-2 (The Message):

So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ-that's where the action is. See things from his perspective.

Never forget that whatever decisions you make, you are saved, forgiven, loved, and living by grace. Grace is favor without merit; grace is God's blessings and loving kindness. When you respond positively to a good word from the Lord or to a good message of preaching, you will generally make a decision to believe it and receive it. Then you must choose to begin to walk out what you have received. Hearing a good word and saying you believe it is fine, but actually walking it out is an entirely different scenario. This is what I call faith's follow through.

Are you following through on what you have agreed is good and true? Second Corinthians 13:5 says this:

Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don't drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it (The Message).

Let's pray: Lord, I bind my will to your will. I bind my mind to your mind, Jesus. I bind my raggedy emotions to your healing balance and comfort, Holy Spirit. I loose, smash, crush, and destroy wrong patterns of thinking, wrong attitudes, wrong beliefs, excuses, denials, and deception that my soul is clinging to. I loose the effects and influences of wrong decisions and wrong agreements that I have made in the past. I choose to learn from them and then give them to you.

I want to make good decisions. I have made wrong ones in the past by not fully seeking your guidance or direction, by not seeking your voice, and by not reading the Word with a right heart. Forgive me for that. I choose to believe that you want to help me and that it will all be good. I welcome your nudges and your tweaks!

Holy Spirit, I ask that you help me to recognize if I start to feed upon wrong input from the sources of the world, and I will choose to stop. Help me to recognize that consequences, whether filled with favor or difficult days, can be used as valuable learning tools. I will embrace my consequences and allow you to teach me from them.

I loose all fear I have about having to change the decisions I need to make. I don't want there to be a list of things I have decided I am willing to change, hope you won't make me change, Lord, or flat out refuse to change. I want to be flexible and pliable in your hands. I loose all desire my mind has to be right every time, and I loose all shame and guilt from my emotions.

I want to be excited about making right decisions. I loose all fear of what people might think of my choices. Help me to always be motivated by love in the decisions I make. Help me to always consider how my decisions will impact or affect other people. Help me to remember that making decisions without thinking about their impact on others can cause me to hurt other people. My soul is not yet in a position to be advising me on this, so I am choosing to reject its application to be my guidance counselor! You are my Leader and My Lord, Jesus. I want to hear from you.

I will choose to think on things above and not below. I will choose to always look at the big picture which means that even if I blow it, if I am truly trying to do what you want, your love, grace, and mercy will cover my failure.

I bind my mind, will, and emotions to your plans and purposes for my life. I loose all scripts that my soul wants me to follow. I want to be the full person you created me to be. Lord, you made the choice of who my parents would be, who I would look like, what I would sound like, and how my natural personality traits should flow out of me. If you want me sweet, gold, mercy-driven, prophetic, building bridges, preaching the Word, writing books, overflowing with great love to third world countries, or to be the gentlest of the gentle, then that is who I want to be. That is who I will excel at being as I am willing to let you teach me how to let go of the things that hold me back and open my hands and my heart to receive the things that will impel me forward.

I bind my soul to you, Lord, and I loose all stronghold thinking that has tried to keep me from smashing and crushing its hindrances to and deceptions about my future. Thank you for your favor and your grace. Help me to walk in these blessings, passing them on to everyone I meet. I have decided to be a blesser! My future looks so bright and open and ready, I cannot wait to get started. Thank you, Jesus! In Your Name, Amen.

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