Making Godly Decisions

Cru friends,

Welcome back, or for the first time, to the Pittsburgh Metro Cru staff blog!  We will update this weekly with timely devotionals, resources, or information about Cru events.  In order to make this work, please bookmark the page, comment on the posts, re-post links to it, read it every day, make it your homepage, make t-shirts for it, etc.  Just kidding, except for the first 1 or 2.

We now continue with the recap of our talks about The Finishers (in case you missed them, here is one on sharing our faith and here is one on spiritual multiplication).  This week, we remember Katie's talk on making Godly decisions.


Making Godly Decisions

After giving us a hilarious example of decision-making with her now-fiance Ben's crucial choice at the beginning of their relationship ("So do you still want to date me?"), Katie warned us about some of our tendencies to make decisions poorly and then shared some principles for making Godly decisions:

1. Making bad decisions

A. Trying to please ourselves or others instead of God
In the words of Katie, "you better check yourself."

B. We don't know how to discern God's will
Specifically, when it comes to big decisions, we tend to "stack the deck" against God by only praying about the "spiritual" option.  If we're choosing between a mission trip and making bank at some job, we'll only pray about the trip, not the job.  Then, when God doesn't give us some sort of supernatural shove toward the trip, we conclude we're not called there and we take the job by default.  This is not an effective discernment of God's will.

2. Making Godly decisions

A. Lordship
“Present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern God’s will, His holy, pleasing, and perfect will.”  Romans 12:1b-2
Two ways we can surrender to the Lordship of Jesus are through prayer and Scripture.

B. Stewardship
Three questions to ask yourself:
What are my strengths and weaknesses?
What am I good at?
How has God used me in the past?

C. The needs of the world
Ultimately, faced with the choice of doing something vs. not doing something, DO SOMETHING!


Next steps

So, as you make the decisions about what you're going to do this summer, after you graduate, or 10 years from now, we encourage you to do so through the lens of Jesus' Lordship, stewardship of who He has created you to be, and the needs of the world and the church.  Also, if you ever want to talk through this stuff as it applies to one of your big decisions, we're available to do that with you!

--Pittsburgh Metro Cru Staff Team