Making The Best Decisions

“Making the Best Decisions”

December 2, 2012

Genesis 1:28

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Joshua 24:14-15

“Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

As we enter into the Advent Season our thoughts turn to how God put on the form of human flesh and showed us what He was like. You hear the word ‘incarnate’ a lot around Christmas time. It simply means that God left the splendor of heaven, put on human form and was born as baby Jesus in that manger in Bethlehem. That was an awesome event. It is right and good that we should celebrate it. But another awesome event that we don’t celebrate is the reverse of the incarnation of God. It is when God created man to be like God. God created us to be in His image. Our natural state is to be like God. Unfortunately, when we fell; when we rebelled against God’s will; when mankind sinned – we lost that godlikeness estate and degenerated into the fallen creatures we are today- inclined to sin continually (Gen 6:5).

Jesus came to enable us to, once again, become like God. When we accept Him as our Savior and Lord, a process begins that will transform us into His image once again. The Scripture says,

“And we ...are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory...” 2 Corinthians 3:18

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son...”

Romans 8:29

The Holy Spirit’s job is to empower us for Christlikeness. When He is allowed, He will transform us and produce God-like fruit in our lives. Pastor Bob talked a little bit about that last week. But what I want to talk about this morning is the way we have been created in God’s image. Some people think God must look like us – because we were created in His image. But I don’t think we were created ‘physically’ in His image. I think we were created ‘spiritually’ and ‘creatively’ in His image. We were created from an eternal perspective and with eternity in mind, but we were also given choice making power that no other creature has. We can choose our own destiny. We can make our own choices of who we are and what we are. That is tremendous power. When God created man He gave him ‘dominion’ or power over the whole earth. As a sign of His gift, God brought the animals to Adam and allowed him to name them (Genesis 2:19-20). He put him in charge of the Garden and gave him permission to eat anything in it except for one thing. Choice! God gave man a choice.

Choices are so important aren’t they? Eve saw the fruit and it looked GOOD! Beside that it had the power to make her wise (Gen 3:6) so she made a choice. She enticed Adam and HE made a choice. We have been paying for those unwise choices ever since.

This morning I want to talk about making ‘good’ choices; ‘good’ decisions. In my study of the subject I have come up with four different decision making influences. There are four things the influence what our choices will be. Imagine there are four boxes and we go to each one when we make a decision about something.

The first box is what I call the ‘peer’ box. Everyone else is doing it – so I might as well, too. It is called peer pressure. It’s the “going along with the crowd” box. Aaron, Moses brother knew about that. Listen.

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”