Tools for Monday: How to Discern What is the Good or Right Thing to Do
Making wise decisions can be a tough call these days. We often face choices that are not so clear-cut. Take, for instance, a decision about removing a loved one from a ventilator. I’ve grieved alongside families who agonized over such a difficult decision. And what about a choice some parents face about cutting relational ties with a wayward son or daughter? We could easily come up with literally tens of thousands of examples (if not more!) that point to the tensions we face when it comes to doing the right thing.
Fortunately for us, God has not left us in the dark to blindly grasp our way through the mazes of daily life. In fact, both the Old and New Testaments illustrate that God’s will is the primary foundation for making good and right decisions. We know this to be true because Jesus embodied and taught about the will of God. For instance, Jesus commanded us, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things (i.e. all the periphery things that we fret over like money and power) shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33). Consider also how Jesus faced the pending cross experience in famous prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will, but yours be done.” That which is good and right is what God wills, commands, and does. We see this truth perfectly embodied in Christ.
But how do we know the will of God, especially when faced with difficult decisions? Over the next few weeks, we’ll give some biblical and therefore practical and relevant advice for answering questions about God’s will in these blog articles. The intent of the articles is to give you a wide array of tools from which to choose in discerning the will of God, especially in complex situations.
For today’s article, it is quite sufficient for us to affirm our trust that God wills for the most loving decisions and outcomes in our most complex dilemmas. Put another way, since God’s nature is wholly love, this means that God is not going to act outside of his nature. If you ask for a piece of bread, then why would God give you a stone (Matthew 7:9-11)?
Since we affirm that God has a loving will, we can consequently reject any notion that the good or right thing to do in a situation is just left up to chance. The Bible knows nothing of an arbitrary kind of good out there that we have to discover by ourselves. God doesn’t dangle carrots in front of us like that. This means that one doesn’t have to get the right “vibe” or have good karma in order to make good decisions.
If the good could be reduced to something independent of God (which it can’t), then we wouldn’t need God. Instead, we’d be forced into a rather hopeless and hapless pursuit of locating a brand of intrinsic good in the universe somewhere and then forcing it on others through coercion once we’ve found it. A cursory glimpse at human history points to the fact that trying to find and enforce an ethical law that is superior to God is narcissistic at best and violent at worst. Good decisions cannot come down to a mathematical formula or doing something because it “just feels right.”
God therefore must be the source of life and therefore of the good and right. Doing God’s will leads one to his or her greatest sense of serenity (Philippians 2:13). We’ll explore what this looks like in applicable depth over the coming weeks.