Sermon Tone Analysis

Guidance Core Seminar

Week 1

Introduction: Anxious or Restful?

1. INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Guidance core seminar!

My name is Rob Satrom.

Steven Wall and I will be your co-teachers over the next seven weeks.

Our goal will be to look at what the Bible says about decision-making.

Out in the wider Christian world, there are some really unbiblical ideas about how God guides our decisions.

And yet the Bible gives us some amazing truth about how God does guide us.

Our hope is that this class will provide some practical, Biblical help.

Example of Anxious Decision-Making

When I was a sophomore in high school, I loved playing the guitar.

I had just bought a new electric guitar and I was in the market for an amplifier that would make me sound like a pro.

I visited all the guitar shops and researched all the best amps to figure out which one I should buy.

I finally settled on a small but powerful one – the Line 6 Flextone amp.

I thought it was awesome.

But after I purchased it, I almost immediately had the feeling that I had made a bad decision.

I had never spent that much money on anything in my life and I couldn’t help but wonder if I had chosen the wrong amp.

Well, the amp turned out to be fine.

It served me well until I sold it to a friend of mine just a few years ago.

This was a relatively trivial decision in the grand scheme of my life, but I wonder how many of you can relate to this experience.

We agonize over a decision, do lots of research, finally get up the courage to pull the trigger, and then still agonize about the decision.

Read

“And he said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on.”

I’m not sure Jesus had the purchase of guitar amps on his mind when he gave this instruction to his disciples, but his message is clear.

Don’t be anxious.

This is a class on decision-making.

But we’re after more than just good decisions, as the title of this class suggests.

We want you to be decision-makers who please God by resting in his goodness.

Not anxious decision-makers who are constantly terrified about choosing the wrong path for life.

Question for the class: why would God be displeased with anxious decision-making?

Answer: When we’re anxious in our decision-making, we’re telling God that He is not big enough to guide us according to His perfect will.

We’re saying God is not fully trustworthy to lead us where we need to go and provide for us what we need.

OK.

So how do we get there?

Today, we’ll start by considering how God guides us—looking at unbiblical notions of how he guides us, and then what the Bible says.

Then we’ll say out a process we can use to make big decisions.

And the rest of this class will simply double-click on different steps in that process.

So…how does God guide us?

2. How Does God Guide Us?

I think that Christians generally follow one of three different theories of how God guides us[1].

1) Theory #1: Guidance = Discern God’s Plan.

In other words, God has a secret, detailed plan for each of us and our job is to figure it out.

We do that by “looking carefully into a combination of circumstances, spiritual promptings, inner voices, personal peace of mind, and the counsel of others (30).”

This can sound right at first blush, but this theory has some problems.

It sounds kind of cruel of God, doesn’t it—to subject us to this endless guessing game about such important decisions?

Is that the God of the Bible?

How do we ever know when what we’ve found is his plan?

What happens if we don’t chose his plan?

Does that mean we’ve somehow fallen out of his sovereign will?

Why doesn’t he just come out and tell us what he wants?

2) Which leads to Theory #2: Guidance = Listening to God.

The idea here is that God communicates directly with us and we need to listen to him.

He may speak through a small, still voice in our heads or through dreams, or sometimes even audibly.

Problem is, for how many of us is this our daily experience?

We certainly see this happening in the Bible, but not very often.

Should we expect this to be normal for Christians?

While God can speak audibly to us or lead us through an impression or through a dream, this is not the way God usually operates.

Most importantly, we’re never instructed to seek God’s guidance this way in scripture.

3) Theory #3: Guidance = Wisdom.

In other words, the normal way God guides us is by making us wise.

He gives us insight—through his Word, through prayer, through the counsel of others—that equips us to make wise choices.

Which of these most aligns with your practice when you have a big decision to make?

What kind of prayers do you pray?

As you might imagine, the Bible’s teaching aligns to that third theory of guidance.

Restful decision-making is the decision-making of wisdom.

It’s not the decision-making that depends on something God doesn’t normally do (theory #2).

And it’s not the anxious decision-making of hunting down an elusive God (theory #1).

What we want you to see through the course of this core seminar is that God usually guides us through His word.

He does that by equipping us with wisdom and knowledge of how we should live our daily lives.

Some key passages to underscore this are , , and .

Hebrews talks about how God speaks to us today – through His son and through His word.

Proverbs teaches us that we’re to seek after wisdom.

We’ll get more into this in the weeks ahead.

But for now I want to emphasize that when we seek God’s guidance, we shouldn’t expect His audible voice, writing in the sky, or a talking donkey.

He has guided his people in that way, and he can guide that people in that way.

But he has not promised to guide his people that way.

In fact, we’re never taught in scripture to ask God to reveal the future to us.

Instead, we’re told to seek after God in His word and to seek wisdom.

That’s how decision-making should normally work for the Christian.

Any questions so far?

OK.

I’ve given you the problems with the first two theories of guidance.

But there’s a problem with the third as well.

3. Our Enemy: Indwelling Sin

Theories #1 and #2 aren’t particularly affected by sin, are they?

Because guidance is something that basically happens to us.

But if Biblical guidance essentially comes down to wisdom, then indwelling sin is a huge problem.

Because it colors all that we do and all that we think.

The Bible is riddled with examples of how sin blinds us and keeps us from making wise decisions.

Think about David’s sin when he lusted after Bathsheeba.

Giving in to those temptations led him to commit adultery and later murder.

[IF TIME PERMITS: SHARE EXAMPLE OF DATING A NON-CHRISTIAN IN COLLEGE AND HOW THAT SIN KEPT ME FROM BREAKING UP WITH HER AND FROM DEVELOPING TRANSPARENT AND HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER CHRISTIANS DURING MY FRESHMAN YEAR]

Think of three basic categories of decisions[2], and how sin challenges our ability to make them well.

1) Decisions of Righteousness: By “righteousness” I mean doing what God has told us to do and not doing what he has prohibited.

No debating here.

But, of course, we all know from experience that even here—where God’s guidance is most clear—we disobey.

In our sinfulness, we turn what is black and white into gray.

Or we just rebel because we believe sin instead of God.