God, Which Direction Should I Go?

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The question is not how God guides. The question you should be asking is whom God guides. Guidance is not something God gives to you as much as it is something he does for you. The question is are you the kind of person that God guides?

I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. It's getting close to the end of 2021, so we're thankful that you're choosing to spend this last week here with us on the program. You know, no matter how strong our faith is, we all have those moments when we come to the end of ourselves, to the end of our abilities, our resources, and wisdom. And the problem is, if we're honest, that we aren't sure if God can meet us in that place. But Pastor J.D. Greer explains today that if we offer our desperation to God in prayer, we will find him each day. What a timely message as we look ahead to the new year.

And Pastor J.D. titled this message, God, which direction should I go? This is the first time in our lives, whether you are a very spiritually mature person or whether you're a brand new Christian or even if you don't think you're that religious at all.

If you believe in God at all, I would say that these prayers have come out of your mouth at some point in your life. Well, this weekend, I want us to consider the prayer, God, which way is the right way for me to go? Which way is the right way for me to go? Again, I think all of us at some point have looked up toward God and said, God, I'm not sure.

I'm confused. Which one's the right decision? What school should I go to? Should I go to grad school or not? Which job should I take? Should I go out with him?

Should I break up with her? Where's the right place for us to live? Maybe it's been a more sobering question for you, like God, is it right for me to separate from my husband during this time? Or God, how do I handle this relational difficulty? All of us have been in a time where we didn't know what to do, and so we learned to God and said, God, give me a sign. God, show me which way I'm supposed to go. Right? In fact, let's just kind of calibrate this morning. At all of our campuses, if you were in a season right now where you are praying that prayer, God, I just need wisdom to know what to choose, just put your hand up at all of our campuses. See there? We're dealing with two-thirds of the people that are right now in that kind of situation.

This is probably one of the main causes of stress in our lives, is trying to figure this out. I brought, by the way, a number of props today, because remember my eight-year-old son told me that I get boring when I don't preach with props, so I brought a few props. Anybody remember these books right here? Choose your own adventure novels. Anybody read these when they were a kid?

I loved these things when I was a kid. Basically, if you're not familiar, you're reading and you come to a point where you've got to make a choice. It'll say something like, you're being chased by a flock of rabid wolverines and a little old lady invites you into her house for safety. Do you go in or do you stay out? If you choose to go in, turn to page 210. If you stay out, turn to page 130. And I'll be like, well, I mean, I don't have any other alternatives. I guess I'll go in. And then you turn to page 210 and it's like, oh, too bad.

A little old lady turned out to be a witch and she puts you in her pot and boils you in her stew and eats you for dinner. The end. And so you have all these choices to make.

And that's how people perceive the will of God. Is they're like, you're like, well, I got two choices here and one of them is going to lead me to prosperity and awesomeness and the other is going to lead me to doom and destruction. How do you figure out which way to go?

I remember when I think I was eight or nine years old, I started to figure out that the last page of the book was always like the best ending. And so I'd start there and see if I could reverse engineer my way back to the beginning and figure out what the right set of choices were. And so you're like, well, how do you do that in life?

How do you get to a point where you figure out where that peace and prosperity is and then reverse engineer your life? And how do you know when God's actually speaking to you? What does that feel like? Is it like some warm kind of tingly feeling you get when you think about the right choice? Or is it like some weird set of circumstances that you just know has to be God? A pastor friend of mine was telling me about a guy in his church who made a major life decision, major life decision, and he said what this guy said was his criteria for choosing was when he drove home he was thinking about one of the choices and when he pulled in his driveway, seven doves took off from his yard. And he was like doves are Jesus's favorite animal because that's what anointed him with the Holy Spirit and seven is the number of completion.

That meant the decision was done and I was totally at peace. And my friend was like well first, in North Carolina they're probably pigeons not doves. Second of all, I'm just not sure I would make a major life decision based on what could just be a coincidence. Now don't sit there and shake your head at me like oh we're so spiritual we never think. You do that kind of thing, don't you? You've got some sort of like what is that really God speaking to me? We kind of want, prop number two, we kind of want God to be, remember this?

You remember this thing? We want God to be our magic eight ball. We're like God how do I ask you a question and you just tell me like, you know, which way to go? God will I preach longer than an hour today? Up to you, up to you. So, Lord our cat's evil, all right? No doubt about it, no doubt about it.

Is Nicolas Cage the greatest actor of our generation? You know some things you don't even need an eight ball to determine, they're just self-evident. But that's what we want, we want God. You want to know like what's the criteria for God is my magic eight ball? How do I know exactly what he wants me to do in a certain situation? Well this weekend I want to acquaint you with a new favorite Psalm of mine.

It's become a favorite I think because of where I'm at in my life. But it is a promise of guidance and it shows you the way that God guides his people. Now let me give you one word of historical perspective before we totally dive in here, okay? Historical perspective. Up until about 50 years ago there was almost no talk in the church at all about discerning or knowing the will of God. At least in terms of personal decision making.

If you go back to the sermons of the early church or the sermons that were preached during the Reformation, you're not going to find a single one on ascertaining the will of God. Today by contrast we are obsessed by it. It's always the most popular seminar at any conference you go to.

It is the number one question I get asked whenever there is an open Q&A especially if there are college students in the audience. And I think the relative absence of it and the sudden obsession of it in our day can by itself teach us something important. You see previous generations did not worry as much about discerning the will of God but in our culture we are all about individualism and we're all about self-actualization and we're all about security and so the will of God becomes a way for us to guarantee that we get all those things. That's why many of us have turned the will of God into an idol and that we seek to know the will of God more than we seek to know God himself.

We think finding the will of God is going to remove all uncertainty from our life and help us achieve all of our dreams and live our best life now. Now the Bible does talk about God's guidance in our lives, I'm going to show you that here in a minute, but it puts the emphasis in different places. You're going to see the Bible put more emphasis on knowing and trusting God and becoming the kind of person God wants you to be, a whole lot more emphasis there than it does in learning to detect some mystical guidance in a particular decision.

In fact here's your big idea for the day from this psalm if you want to just write it down from the beginning. The big idea in this psalm is the question, the question is not how God guides, the question you should be asking is whom God guides. Not how God guides but whom God guides. Guidance is not something God gives to you as much as it is something he does for you. The question is are you the kind of person that God guides? Psalm 25, this is the psalm of David in which he is both asking God for guidance and rejoicing that he has it. Let's start in verses 12 and 13 right in the middle of the psalm. Who is this person David says?

Who is this person who fears the Lord? He, God, will show him the way that he should choose. He will live a good life and his descendants will inherit the land. What you should notice there is that the guidance that David is trusting God for in this psalm touches a lot of different things. In this psalm he's going to make allusions to relationships and healthy relationships and career choices, even parenting decisions.

See where it says my descendants in the land, he's talking about being a wise parent. In verse 15 David trusts God to keep him from disaster, keep my foot from the net. Verse 17 he trusts God to guide him through the things that are causing him stress in his life. So if your thought, by the way, this morning is that God really only cares about the spiritual stuff in your life, and all the other stuff is just, you know, whatever, you need to put that thought away. You can see from this psalm that David is trusting God's guidance over every square inch in his life, from his relationships to his career to his parenting and everything in between. David sums up his hope at the beginning and the end of this psalm.

At the beginning, verse 2, my God, I trust in you. Don't let me be disgraced. In any decision I make, don't let me be disgraced. Verse 20, guard me and rescue me. Do not let me be put to shame.

Again, in any area of my life, don't let me be put to shame because I'm taking refuge in you. Now before we get into describing the kind of person that God guides, let me point out a couple of really precious promises in this psalm that David seems to cling to. First, in verse 2, David declares, others cannot mess up God's will for me.

Other people can't mess up God's will for me. You'll notice all throughout this psalm, David keeps referring to his enemies. Verse 2, don't let my enemies gloat over me. Verse 19, consider my enemies.

They are numerous. There's a lot of them and they hate me violently. I've got enemies who, they hate me and they have a terrible plan for my life. Some of you look back at your life and you see how there have been people in your life who tried to mess you up.

Maybe they didn't mean to or maybe they did it intentionally, but you had a father who messed you up or a mother or a brother or an ex-spouse or a business partner or a boss, former boss, current boss. Well, David evidently had a lot of those people also. And what David declares in this psalm, he says, God, I trust that your promises and your guidance is greater and more powerful than any of my enemies' evil intentions against me. It's hard here for me not to think about Joseph in the Old Testament, the book of Genesis. Joseph, you're not familiar with the Bible, just about everybody's heard some version of this story, but here's Joseph, a guy who's sold into slavery by his brothers. He's wronged at their hands.

After he's sold into slavery, he experiences a litany of racial discrimination and unjust accusation and accusations of sexual assault and things that just keep him in a lot of suffering for a long time. But when Joseph gets to the end of his life, he's in a position where he's able to bring a great act of goodness and salvation to Israel, and he looks into the face of those brothers who had betrayed him all those years before and he makes that famous statement. He's like, you meant it for evil. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And that was the basis, by the way, that he was able to forgive his brothers because he knew that even though they had wronged him, that God had overwritten their wrong for good in his life. Let me just tell you that if you are struggling with an area of bitterness towards somebody, if there's somebody in your past that you just can't forgive, I guarantee you that if you trace it down to its root, you will find that at its root, you don't actually believe, or at least you haven't reconciled, that even though they meant it for evil, God could still use it for good in your life. That doesn't mean that they didn't do you wrong, and it doesn't mean that you didn't hurt, and it doesn't mean that they were just getting off scot-free. But what it means is that God's grace is so amazing that he can take even the wrongs of others and turn it for good, and that's his promise. In fact, that's my homework assignment for you this week.

I'm serious about this. You go home and you take a 3x5 card, and you write on that 3x5 card that name of that person that hurts you and that you think messed you up. And then underneath their name, you write the phrase, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And for seven days, you look at that and you pray that back to God, and you tell me if seven days from now you don't come in here and have a different attitude toward that person and toward that chapter of your life.

They meant it for evil, God meant it for good, and David says, not even my enemies can mess up your plan for me. Promise number two, maybe even better, my own past mistakes can't permanently disqualify me from God's will either. At least twice in this psalm, David asks God for forgiveness for past mistakes. One of them is here in verse 11, Lord, for the sake of your name, forgive my iniquity, because it is immense. In other words, not little iniquity, not JV iniquity, like big league iniquity, varsity iniquity, and yet even in the midst of immense iniquity in his part, he still prays for God's guidance, and he still trusts God for his perfect plan for his life.

Now here's what you need to take away from that. David believes God's promises are greater even than his own mistakes. Now some of you are like, wait a minute, I get that it seems fair that God would protect me from the harm that others want for me, but my own mistakes, it seems like God may be like, you know what, you made that bed, you're going to have to sleep in it, you messed your life up, that's just something, that's on you.

And it is true that sins and mistakes can bring consequences into your life, and those consequences can be painful, and sometimes they're irreversible in this life. Yet what David is saying is even those don't disqualify you from God's ultimate plan for your life. All right, go back to Genesis again. Jacob, by the way, everything you really need to know about God is in the book of Genesis. Everything after that is just kind of a footnote and commentary on the book of Genesis. So learn the book of Genesis and you'll be fine. In the book of Genesis, Jacob is another guy who sins a lot.

I mean, varsity level immense sinner. And some of those sins bring really painful consequences, like he betrays his brother and lies to his brother, and so he is estranged from his family and has to flee and live in a foreign land. Yet, while he's in that foreign land, he meets the love of his life, and from the relationships in that foreign land, right, from that marriage ultimately comes the line of the Messiah.

Now here's your dilemma. He got into those relationships because of sinful choices he had made. Was the Messiah plan B? Was the Messiah an, oops, I guess we'll give the world Jesus? Of course not. What does that mean that Jacob didn't actually sin?

Well, no, he obviously did, and he suffered because of the consequences of it, but it just shows you in the unbelievable mysteries of God's grace that he takes even our sinful decisions and he can write, he can stamp his plan on them, and he can say even your sin is not enough to disqualify you from my ultimate plan for your life if you repent. I always think here, and I got my wife's permission to tell this story, of how eventually the road that led to her and I meeting. She was a high school senior, and she lived in Virginia, and so she'd been accepted at William & Mary and the University of Virginia. And so she was trying to figure out which way to go, and she was waffling. Well, she said that her relationship with her parents during this chapter of her life was not awesome, and she said that her and her dad had gotten in an argument, and she said, so my dad was a graduate of Virginia Tech, and she said, I don't know how much you all know being North Carolinians about those things up there, but we have relationships like that down here that if you like Virginia Tech, you can't like UVA, and if you like UVA, you can't like Virginia Tech.

If you love one, you've got to hate the other. That's somewhere in the Bible. So she was like, they were just like, not UVA, and dad was like, not UVA. And so she said, but to spite him because of our argument, I turned in the letter for UVA, right, which is not a godly motivation for why you should go to school there, right? It's clearly a sinful motivation, almost an act of rebellion against her parents. Well, you know, from her relationships at UVA, ultimately she meets the man of her dreams, Jesus, and also me while I was there, and now, you know, she's here and we have four kids. Does that mean that's all plan B?

Am I plan B for her life? Don't answer that. But am I like God's second best?

No. It's that God takes even our sinful choices, and somehow in the beauty of His grace, He can still work His plan for our life. That's why David exalts in verse 10, all the Lord's ways show faithful love and truth. All the, how many of the Lord's ways? The ones that are done in response to the good things that I've done? No, all of them.

There is not a single thing that God does with me that is not done in faithful love and truth, and even when I give up on Him, He hasn't given up on me, and goodness and mercy keep following me. Now let me apply this one other way before we move on. I've met people who were born out of sinful circumstances. They were born because of an affair. Or maybe your parents had you out of wedlock and you've wondered, like, am I a mistake? In fact, maybe you've been told that throughout your life. Maybe your parents told you, you are a mistake. No, friend, you are not. Maybe the circumstances by which you came into the world were sinful and that's on your parents, but you were not a mistake. You want to know how I know that? Jesus Himself came into the world through a series of sinful choices by others, and He definitely ain't a mistake.

And if He ain't a mistake, then you're not either, all right? So as you can see, there are some incredible promises David is clinging to here. So the question then becomes, how do I experience the guidance of God? What do I got to do to experience the guidance? Remember, the question is not how God guides as much as it is whom God guides.

So that's our question. Here's number one, I'm going to give you four characteristics of the person that receives the guidance of God. Number one, those trained in the ways of God. Those trained in the ways of God. Verse four, make your ways known to me, David says.

Lord, teach me your paths. When David says, teach me your paths, he is talking about an inward familiarity with the ways of God that trains him almost instinctively in how to act in various situations. Think of it the way that an athlete is trained. A coach cannot train an athlete to respond in every situation because the defense is always changing, it's always unique to that moment. But what a coach can do is train the athlete in the instincts, the skills to know how to read a situation and then to equip them with the skills so they can respond in the right situation when that situation is abundant. It reminds me of one of my favorite Michael Jordan interviews after he had done some crazy split the defense, tongue out move, acrobatic dunk or whatever. And the interviewer after the game says, Michael, when you drive into the lane do you know what you're going to do before you start driving? And Jordan's famous response was, no, I just jump and decide in the air. So he's not just jumping and deciding, instinct, right? I just jump and my instincts take over and out comes this beautiful work of art basketball move.

That's because he has been trained in the ways, he's become familiar with them, so he executes in the moment even without his coach telling him, this is what you should be doing. That's what David is talking about. I want to be trained in that way. The New Testament way of talking about that is this, Hebrews 5. Anybody who lives on milk, talking about a Christian who doesn't know much about God's word, who lives on milk being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.

In other words, you've got to have somebody holding your hand telling you what to do in every situation. Because you're still a baby and you don't understand much. However, go to verse 14, solid food is for the mature who by, watch, constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. When he says good from evil there, he's talking about things outside of what scripture tells us.

Why? How do I know that? Because if scripture tells you, you don't need to be trained to distinguish good from evil.

It's written right on the page. He's meaning in the moment you have this instinct to determine good from evil because you've been trained in the ways of God through constant use and familiarity with the scriptures. Let me go back to my illustration of an athlete for a minute. When I drive the lane, okay, when I drive the lane, I don't see. I don't see those things that Jordan sees. And the few that I do see, now that I'm 45 years old, when I drive in there I will sometimes tell my body what to do as I'm driving the lane and my body's like, I ain't doing that. I ain't doing that. And I go in and in my mind it looks like some beautiful spin layup and it turns out looking more like a wounded duck coming in for a crash landing.

Why? Because my body is no longer trained in constant use through, and I'm old which is beyond the scope of this illustration. But I'm no longer trained in constant use so that I'm able to respond with instinct in that moment because I have not been in constant use with those skills in basketball. What David is saying is you have got to be so familiar, you've got to be so dexterous with the scriptures that in the moment you just instinctively know what to do. And if you're looking for an action step on this one, it is that you get so saturated with scripture that when life cuts you, you bleed God's word.

And it just becomes a second nature to you and it becomes an instinct to you. That's your action step because listen, you will never live out the will of God any more than you know the word of God. You cannot live out the will of God any more than you know the word of God and if you're telling me I want to know the will of God but you're not devoting yourself to the word of God then you're kidding yourself.

Because it is more of an instinct than it is an instruction. And God says you become the kind of person who understands my ways and you'll end up choosing what I want you to choose. When life cuts, do you bleed the word of God? I don't know about you but that resonated with me today. I want God to be visible to everyone I know, visible through reliance on Him. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of J.D.

Greer. If you enjoyed today's teaching and you'd like to hear it again or share it with others, you can do so online free of charge at jdgreer.com. As Pastor JD often says, the gospel changes everything.

In fact, we have this phrase that we say a lot. The gospel isn't the diving board into Christianity, it's the whole pool. So as we head into a new year, I'd encourage you to be intentional about serving God by loving and serving your neighbors, whether that's with your time or your money. And remember, the most important gift you can give someone is the message of the gospel.

Be intentional about having those conversations and see what God can do. One way you can help share the gospel in the new year and beyond is by supporting this ministry. This time of year is critical as we close the books on 2021 and plan for the future.

So if you've never given to support the ministry of Summit Life, we'd encourage you to take that step today. When you do, we'll say thanks by sending you the Summit Life 2022 Planner. This resource is so much more than just a day planner.

There's space for you to record all of your notes and to-do items, of course. But as you use it, you're also going to find Bible verses reminding you of the truth that God does indeed make all things new. We've also included a Bible reading plan that will take you through key passages from every book of the Bible in 2022. It's just one of the ways that we can help you manage the resources that God has given you, including that resource of time.

Plus, it's a great reminder to keep you in God's word while you tune into the broadcast. Ask for a copy of the Summit Life 2022 Planner when you make that important and generous year-end donation today. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or you can give and request the planner online at jdgrier.com. That's jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Thanks for joining us today.

And be sure to tune in Thursday as we continue the message titled God, Which Direction Should I Go? on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.