I could boil my life down to a few big decisions. The decision to get married, the decision to follow Christ, the decision to have children, the decision to enter the ministry and the decision to quit my job and move my family to seminary.
Big decisions vary from person to person, but because there’s so much riding on these big decisions, they can fill us with angst and uncertainty.
Genesis chapter 24 is a story about a big decision. In this chapter, Abraham sends his servant to find just the right wife for Isaac. Isaac was the miraculous son that God gave Abraham; the son through which a great nation was to be formed. So this was a big decision for Abraham’s servant!
In this story, you’ll find 3 important principles on which every big decision should rest.
The Providence of God. It’s so easy to forget that God can and does engineer and/or oversee every circumstance to fulfill His good and perfect will for us. (Romans 8:28.)
The Purpose of Prayer. Abraham’s servant prayed…not to manipulate God’s will, but to reveal it. Too often we see prayer as a means to get God to do the things we want Him to do, rather than a means of revealing what God wants to do and aligning with that.
The Place of Worship. When it was clear that Rebekah was God’s pick for Isaac, Abraham’s servant immediately stopped and worshiped. Worship is a response to God for what He’s done for us…the spontaneous proclaiming of God’s obvious intervention in our lives.
The stress and anxiety of our life could be greatly reduced if we would face every decision (big and small) anchored in the providence of God, the purpose of prayer and the place of worship.
Bret Legg is the Teaching and Counseling Pastor at Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, GA.