Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why We Make Terrible Decisions and How to Improve Them

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Want to change your life? It starts with one good decision. Learn how decisions impact our lives from this discussion with https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller). Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-break-and-make-life-changing-habits/ (How to Make and Break Life-Changing Habits) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-handle-uncertainty-about-the-future/ (How to Handle Uncertainty About the Future). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. If this podcast has been helping you in your walk with God, would you take five seconds to help us? Hop onto Twitter and follow our new Twitter accounts at TMBT Podcast. If you go there, you can see our latest episodes. You can also follow Keith and I and send us messages. We'd love to follow you back and see what's happening in your life.

So we're going to talk on this episode about decisions. How do you make decisions? How do you make better decisions? And I am motivated to talk about this because I've made some pretty bad decisions in my life. And almost all the good decisions I've made, I look back and think, gosh, God was gracious to me. I just don't think I thought through my good decisions very well. And I just... So you lucked out on the good ones. I'm pretty sure that I did. Well, I've learned a lot of at a good point. Let me bail myself out here. I've learned a lot over the years. But when I think of bad decisions, a lot of the ones that come to my mind immediately are financial decisions. Well, please do share. Well, I remember when I graduated from college immediately. Now, Christine and I were going to go on staff with the Campus Crusade and just so you know I was given plasma just to like pay bills. Do you remember how much money you could get for your plasma? Yes. It was kind of a little bit, well, I don't want to call it a scam because I'm sure I just didn't read it carefully. But the first

month, if you went twice a week, you could make a lot of money. But then after that, not so much. And so it was- So they got you hooked. It sucked you into being part of it. And then- I told you that I gave plasma in college. You did? Yeah, I sold my body as well. We have way too much in common. This is that weird. I loved the feeling. This is weird. When they had to pump the saline back into it, they'd take the plasma out. I remember. And the saline was kind of cold. And so they'd put it back inside. And you'd feel that coldness inside your, I loved that. I loved that. People would have like blankets on them to try to keep themselves warm. Oh, no. I was like, bring it on. I want the cold.

You're the only person who was there by choice. So anyway, yeah. By choice. I was trying to get money too because I was, I won't even get into it. Well, anyway, Christina and I are going on staff at the campus. We said, we just get married. And I went and bought a brand new car. No, no, no. Hold on. Like off the lot new?

Off the lot new. The first car I liked went in naive, rookie. And the guy, I'm sure, just took me for all. I was worth. I played into all, like you walk out and then they come get you, and I just went for a hook line and sinker. 60 months of payments for a white 1990 Volkswagen Jetta. That I hated. 60 months? Five years. That's the most thing to let you borrow. And of course, I had to borrow it over a long period of time because I didn't have any down payment money. So it was a horrible, horrible, horrible decision. I'll tell you this, I've never bought a new car since then, and I never will. I could win the lottery tomorrow, and I I don't think I'd buy a new car. It's the biggest possible waste of money. How about you, bad financial decisions? Yeah, so I was trying to think through decisions.

No terrible large-scale financial decisions come to mind, but I can say what I think my problem is with decision-making. Some people are indecisive. Whatever the opposite of that is, I think the term is impulsive. That is me. I have no problem being a decisive person. So while I haven't gone out and bought a new car, I have made a lot of impulsive purchases where I'll buy something for maybe $20 or $30 or $40.

Like clothes or watches or... Clothes or a book or some little device that I think is going to make my life better. And I'll use it for maybe a week or maybe two days and then it just collects dust. And so I'm sure when you pile up all of those purchases, I'm positive. I spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on stuff that I threw out two years later. Sure. I remember Christine and I were on staff with Camp of Crusade in Michigan, and we didn't have any friends, and we didn't have much to do at night. And so we would go and buy ice cream and then put it on the credit card because that's smart. That was the most expensive ice cream Sunday, but they were good. I got so fat. It was amazing. Anyway, everybody should get a little bit fat in their first year of marriage. Yeah, I did that and some. It's like a permanent sleepover. That's actually how I viewed it. We watch TV. We drank Yellowtail wine. Emily and I were talking the other day about our wine taste and how I honestly wish I could just enjoy terrible wine again because it is so much cheaper. That would be a good decision. Don't ever get into expensive wine. While you like the cheap stuff, enjoy the cheap stuff.

And someone offers you something good. You say, no, I'm not going to drink that. I like what I like. Makes sense. Okay, we're going to talk about decisions today, how we make them, how we can make better decisions. And there's some books. that I've read, and I think Patrick's maybe looked at some of these, I'm not sure. One is by Chip and Dan Heath. It's called Decisive. They are great. Read anything that they write. It's always interesting. That's exactly right. Switch is a great book. There's a lot of great books by them. Another one is Better Decisions and Few Regrets by Andy Stanley. It's a new book that he has out. And then James Clear, the guy who wrote Atomic Habits, he has a great website and he has all kinds of articles on decision making. And some are relevant to what we're talking about today. Some aren't.

but anytime you visit his website, you're going to learn something. If you think about the story of your life, it's made up of a bunch of decisions that we make. Some are big decisions, but a lot of them are small decisions. And the story that we're writing is going to be determined by whether we make good decisions or bad decisions. How will we respond to this diagnosis? Which people will I pursue a friendship with? Will I join a small group? Will I serve in my church?

Will I buy that house? If I just go home at night, I got to make decisions about how I'm going to spend that night. Am I going to read a book, surf the web, spend time with family or friend? Am I going to watch a show? What am I going to do? What am I going to do in the morning when I wake up? Am I going to look at my phone first or am I going to look at my Bible and read that? Am I going to sleep in or am I going to work out?

Will I change jobs or where I live? Am I going to save money? Should I have another drink tonight? All those are small little decisions that determine the story of our life. There's a famous historian named U. Arnold Toynbee, and he has this great little quote where he says that history is one dang thing after another. It doesn't say dang, but this is a Bible podcast, so I'm keeping myself clean. And that's his view of history. It's just one dang thing after another. And I think that's how we sometimes

tend to view our lives. Just one dang decision after another decision. But that's not really true, because all those decisions, they pile up over time and those tiny decisions that you're making that I'm making, they aren't one thing after another. They are the thing that actually becomes your life. They're the thing that actually shaped who you are, where you end up, who you're doing your life with. And so being able to make good decisions, not just good big decisions, but also good small decisions, is a enormous deal. It's not one decision after another. It's who you will become. So decisions are incredibly important, but we're not very good at making them. I saw a survey from the American Bar Association that said 44% of lawyers recommended young people

to not pursue a career in law. So here are people who've made their career in law and they go, oh, this was a bad decision. Do you think that's why they say it? Because they regret it or they just don't want any extra competition. Who knows? They're lawyers. You never press a lawyer.

Or there's a lot of job turnover. 40% of senior level hires in big firms are pushed out or quit within 18 months. I had a friend who for a while her job was removing tattoos from people. You had a friend who removed people's tattoos? That's what she did. She removed people's tattoos. And it turns out tens of thousands of people removed tattoos every single year. So think about good and bad decisions.

At some point in their life, they thought this is a great decision. This dragon on my arm is going to be cool for the rest of my life. How many of those people that are having that tattoo removed were drunk when they got the tattoo? It depends if it's in Chinese or not. I personally think that getting tattoos is fine. That's not our point. Some people get tattoos and they love them. They're going to enjoy them for the rest of their lives.

That was a good decision for them. But for others, they get a tattoo, maybe again in Chinese, and they regret it for the rest of their life because they're not even sure if that says what they think it says in Chinese. I guess better to have a tattoo removed than a vasectomy reversed. What was that like for you? Oh, stop. People make bad decisions. Do you know how many times I've caught people, by the way, with Hebrew tattoos that are misspelled? Oh, no, that's funny.

accidentally told someone. I go, what's your tattoos say? And I kind of look at it and I read it in English. I translated it on the spot. So it does this? I think that that's not what it says. It doesn't go, oh, no, no, that's not what it says. Get this look of shock on there. But again, think through your decisions. You put a Hebrew tattoo on your body and you didn't consult anybody who actually knew Hebrew before you put it on there permanently. Yeah, I think of all the bad decisions that people make, they wake up one day and realize they didn't save enough for retirement or they end up realizing that they've spent a long time in a relationship with somebody that's not good for them. Think of all the people who get divorced and blow up families.

And I wonder how many would go back and say, I made a bad decision somewhere along the route. So let's go ahead and talk about six different reasons that we make terrible decisions. And just so you don't get depressed, after that, we'll talk about six ways to make good decisions, practical ways to be making good decisions in your lives. But we always start with the negative. So let's start there. So the first one, and maybe the biggest one we can talk about, is confirmation bias. And here's what confirmation bias is. It's when we make a decision and then go out looking for support for that decision.

I think most of us like to think we are people who look at the evidence or who think through things carefully and then come to a decision. But everything shows us that it's just the opposite. We make a decision and then look for data or reasons to support our decision. decision. I am so guilty of this. When I make decisions, and I don't even think about it, let's say I want to buy this particular car. I'll go online and I'll search for reasons why I should buy a truck or reasons why. I don't say, why shouldn't I? I'm already just automatically looking for someone to tell me why I'm making a great choice in my life right now. Well, and on a big picture level, this is easy to see, say, in something like media, people have political

beliefs and then they watch the media that confirms the beliefs they already have. They're not really open to evidence or changing their mind. But instead of talking about this on a big level, I want to talk about it on a smaller level and how we make decisions in our life. If we're not careful, instead of trying to be on a quest to find truth and quest to make the best decision, what happens is we get on a quest to have the thing we want confirmed to us. I saw a study that said back in the 1960s when it wasn't clear that smoking was necessarily bad for you, that people who are already smokers were far more likely to express interest in reading an article headlined, smoking does not lead the lung cancer than one with the headline,

smoking leads to lung cancer. So here are people who have already committed themselves. They're already in the habit of smoking. And now they want to read evidence that confirms that this is a good decision. One more thing on this is I posted on Twitter the other day about people who were willing to take less money in order to not have to read things that they disagreed with. So think about this. Somebody's going to offer you money if you will read something you agree with. And they go, no, no, no, I'd rather have less money and not have my beliefs challenged.

It's just a weird way to live life, isn't it? And yet we're all guilty of it. We all fall into confirmation bias. It's so true. I mean, again, Twitter's a great example. If you follow someone on Twitter, go look at who they follow back. And you'll discover that for a lot of people, they're only following those who agree with them. They don't have anybody in their feed who's saying anything that disagrees with them, or at least not many people who do that. And it's because we don't like hearing people who disagree with our politics, with our moral views, or with our way of doing life. And I don't think it's just on Twitter. I think we do this on a friendship level. When you have a friend who is not going to buy into your confirmation bias, we all have different kinds of friends. You've got the friends who will actually challenge you. You've got the friends who will say, you go, girl, or boy, in my case, say whatever you think is best for you, you should do. And these days, in fact, we talked about it last week in our podcast on wellness and self-care, those are the kinds of friends that people are actually saying you should find. If a friend doesn't encourage you, tell you that you're right all the time, then they're toxic, and you need to cut them out of your life. Well, that's just a really pretty way of saying, find friends who confirm your own biases and tell you that you're doing things right. And if you find those friends, they will only lead you astray. They're not going to help you make smart decisions in your life. Yeah, I have a friend who says that he knows which pastor to ask depending on what he wants to hear. And so we have a lot of pastors at our church and he'll have a question and he just goes, okay, this is what I want,

I know who to ask, to get them to affirm that I'm in the right. Oh, that's amazing. Have you got him to tell you what he asks you about. Oh yeah, he's not very subtle about it. I'm evidently more permissive. I'm the permissive pastor. I'm like, oh, yeah, go for it. By the way, Patrick and I have both up to our Twitter game. I got back on after having gone silent for a while. You deleted your account. I deleted my account because a couple of years. In a feat of self-righteousness. No, that was not the case. I had preached a controversial sermon a couple years ago and some... We'll link to it in the show. No, we won't. And some people

were kind of coming after me a little bit. And I thought, oh gosh, if they see my Twitter, because I'm kind of irresponsible. I'm the guy who just says the first thing that comes out of his mouth and tweets the first thing. And there were some things on there that probably weren't appropriate. Nothing weird or racist or sexual. Nothing like that. Don't freak out. Just things that

probably weren't appropriate for a pastor to tweet. So anyway, I just deleted the whole account to be away from it. But I'm back on now at Keith Simon underscore. I think that's right. That's right. I had to help Keith. That's what he's asking.

Are you sure that's right? Keith Simon underscore. Yeah, so we've both been back on Twitter and we mentioned this. Patrick's far more active than I am. Yeah, you can follow me, Patrick K. Miller underscore. And I'm sure I make lots of bad decisions on Twitter, but I'm trying to make better decisions on Twitter in terms of the things that I say and communicate. But let's keep walking through different ways that we make bad decisions.

Another version of bad decision making is selective memory. So if you've got selective memory, you only remember the things that have worked out for you in your life and you black out all of the failed bad decisions that you've made. Yes, so for example, think about all the athletes who left college early or who skipped college altogether. And which ones do you remember? Like, I bet you remember Kobe Bryant and you remember LeBron James, but you don't remember all the ones who tried and didn't make it. And what about the billionaires who dropped out of college, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg? We know their story and we think, gosh, they can be really successful. But we don't know the story of countless and countless people who dropped out of college and have been able to find success afterwards.

So when we're trying to make decisions, we often remember the success stories and not the failure stories. Another reason we make bad decisions is emotional reasoning. And this is when we get so caught up in something that we just can't see it clearly. You ever notice that when somebody else gets caught up in a decision, you can see it more clearly than they can? I mean, why is that? Well, you have some distance and you're not caught up and, well, all the emotion. But the same thing happens to you.

It doesn't just happen to them. It happens to you where you get caught up and you can't see it, but other people outside of you can. One key way to fight emotional reasoning, or at least that I try to fight it, is to know what are the specific emotions that you personally tend to fall into when you're, you're, stuck in a decision. So for me personally, I tend to fall into anger. I start getting really frustrated and angry about a situation. And I start making decisions out of my frustration and anger. And they're not smart decisions. They're decisions that are, again, being justified or even

motivated by irritation more than anything else. Yeah, let's keep going. So fifth in our list is short-term thinking. We overvalue today. It's hard for us to prioritize what we're going to feel like or the situation we're going to be in 10 years from now. So this is the reason that we find excuses to not save for our kids' college or not save for retirement or a rainy day. It's hard for me to imagine what it's going to be like when I retire. And so I know what my issues are today. I know what my problems, my hopes, my dreams, my obstacles are today.

So I prioritize today and deprioritize 10 years from now or 20 years from now. And so I know lots of people who have gotten to a point where they had to send their kids off to college and they just didn't have the funds and they were having to take out fairly sizable debt. Now, that wasn't just because they had no choices. It was that they spent their money early on on things that they probably regret now. They wish they would have taken $50 a month, $100 a month and socked it away. It would have come in handy. Another reason that we make bad decisions is that we've narrowed our options too much. We have a whole set of options, but we end up making it into an either-or situation. I actually think this happens whenever we're deciding how to think about things. So people often don't think about your ideas and your worldview as a decision-making process, but we really do decide what to believe is true and not true. And a lot of times people get caught in this black and white thinking.

You either think this way or you think that way, and there's no other options. You either got to be a liberal or you've got to be a conservative. You've got to be a Republican. You've got to be a Democrat. And you don't say, well, maybe there's some other choices that I can pick from in the room. Yeah, Chip and Dan Heath call this whether or not decisions. I'm deciding whether or not I should buy this car, whether or not I should break up with my boyfriend, girlfriend, whether or not I should sign my kids up for the travel team.

Now, we'll talk a little bit more in the next section about how to fight against narrowing our options. But when you find yourself making this kind of decision, a whether or not decision, decision, you should be alert that you're probably getting ready to make a bad decision, or at least you might be. The last reason we struggle to make good decisions is overconfidence. We think that we're great at predicting what's going to happen in the future, but the simple reality is we aren't great guessing what's going to happen in the future. And there are story after story after story.

My favorite one, because we're actually recording this on Super Bowl Sunday, is quarterbacks. It is incredibly difficult to pick quarterbacks. the guys who are the best in college often are not the best in the NFL. You look at Tom Brady. He was not a high-level pick, and yet he's proven himself to be one of the best quarterbacks of all time. Or Patrick Mahomes, he was still a first-round pick, but he wasn't the first quarterback to get picked in that particular draft.

And I remember when I'm a Chiefs fan, whenever we picked Patrick Mahomes, I'm hanging out with my friends, and we all started booming. We thought this was the worst decision that we could have made. Seriously, we're picking him this guy. This is who we want to be our quarterback. This is so Chiefs that we picked this guy. One of my boys is a big Bears fan, and they traded up in that same draft to draft Mitchell Tribisky. So they traded up, spent all these extra draft choices to get Mitchell Tribisky and passed over Patrick Mahomes.

And that's a big oops, but it's a good reminder. But think about the millions of dollars that are spent on people who are supposed to know who's the right person to pick. Oh, yeah, it wasn't a lack of data. No. They had college game film. They had Combine. They had 40 time. everything in front of you, and even with all that information, they still can't get it right

many times. And so when we get in our life, we think we can predict the future and how things are going to turn out, but it turns out we're pretty bad at it. Now look, I got to tell you about these other predictions because I think they're funny. How about this? So John Lennon, Ringo Star, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney were trying out, aka the Beatles. They were trying to land a record contract with Decker Records. And Dick Rowe, who was one of the big talent scouts back then, wrote this to him. He said, we don't like your boys sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly are finished. Now, I love the confidence of that statement. Yeah. I mean, here's a guy who's a talent scout for a big time label, and he hears the Beatles

play. And he goes, yeah, you guys are losers. Oh, that's amazing. Okay, so one more I want to do. This guy's the minister of power and electrification in the Ukraine, and it's two months before the huge Chernobyl nuclear accident. And here's what he says. The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years. Well, I guess that year was the year, right? I mean, dude. And we went dark. Dude. So how do most people make decisions? Well, what I was always told when I was growing up is that you'd make a pro-con list. And I recently learned that the pro-con list dates all the way. way back to Benjamin Franklin. He's the guy who, I don't know, at least popularized it. A person wrote to him and said, hey, I've got this big decision and explained it. And Benjamin Franklin said, well, I don't have

enough expertise to tell you what you should do. But here's what I would do. Here's the process I would use. And it was a pro con list. And it was kind of involved. I mean, Franklin kind of went all out trying to explain it to him. I just think we can probably do better, that we can have a process of decision making that's better than a pro con list. In fact, I would say that for me, personally, pro-con list tend to be a form of confirmation bias. Because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. Whatever decision I want to do, I probably know more pros for it. Now, there are rare circumstances where you do a pro-con list and you realize,

oh, shoot, I really am tricking myself on this. But generally speaking, you're going to decide what you want to do if you do a pro-con list. Absolutely. You're just doing it to say you did it, to make yourself feel better. Okay. So let's talk about how we can make make it. better decisions. What's a process that will lead us to a better story in our life? And we're going to give you six things that we can do to make a better decision. So the first one is this. You've got to be

honest with yourself. Can you do that? Can you be honest with yourself and tell yourself why you're really making the choice that you're making? There was a guy named Richard Feyneman. I might be mispronouncing his name, but he said this. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. Jeremiah 179, the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Andy Stanley in the book, Better Decisions and Few Regrets encourages us to be honest. Why am I avoiding this person? Why am I postponing this phone call? Why do I keep making excuses? Why did I say yes to this thing even though I know I don't have time? Why am I so angry right now?

Why did I buy that car? Why did I move in with that person? See, I convince myself that I'm doing something for my kids, but really I'm doing it for myself. I can convince myself I bought a car for safety, but really it was for status. I experience this all the time. One of my biggest, be honest with yourself moments happened after Emily and I bought our first house. It was located in part of town that is kind of far away from every single. so far away from our community, our friends, whatever else. But it was a nice location for commuting

to St. Louis. And at the time, I was driving out to seminary. And so I said, we should buy this house here because this is going to be great for the commute. The other part, and really the reason why we wanted to buy this house was that it was a small house, but it was a new house. And so everything in it was new. It was just a really nice house. And my wife is an interior designer, and she wanted everything to look nice. And so we just got all invested in, really, the real reason was that it was new. And it was about six months later, we're living there and we're realizing, gosh, people don't want to drive all the way out here. And I wonder this was an affordable new house. And we're far away from our friends. It was making community more difficult. And both of us had a honesty moment. It was honestly because of my wife because she kept pressing. I was like, no, we made the decision for community. It makes sense. She's like, no, that's not why we did it. And as we talked about, we realized, we didn't really talk to friends about this. We didn't really pray about it. We just kind of bought this house because we liked it. And now we're stuck.

because we weren't honest with ourselves in the moment. If we just said we wanted a new house, I think we both had been like, okay, maybe that's not the number one thing we should be deciding a new house on. So it's hard to make decisions if you won't tell yourself the truth. So we're not talking about at this point about what decision we made, what we said, what we did, what we bought, but why did we do it? And one of the ways that we convince ourselves of something is by telling ourselves that our want is really a need. Once we need something, at least we think we need something, we're telling ourselves we need something, then we can justify just about anything in the world to come up with why we need to buy it. So I would just encourage you to get to a point in your

life where you can be honest with yourself. You don't have to tell anybody else, just yourself. But if you can't do that, it's going to be hard to make a good decision. Another way to make good is to think about both the short term and the long term. We've called this the eternity test in the past. And there's an illustration, Keith C is that I think you stole it from someone else, Stephen Covey, maybe. Probably always. Everything I say that's good has been stolen. From someone. We've just forgotten where it came from. Yeah, it's called research. It's called reading so many books you can't remember what you've read. So one great question to ask yourself is, eventually, presumably, Jesus hasn't returned, and you are going to die. And there's going to be people at your

funeral and they're going to tell stories about you. Maybe they're going to tell stories about dad or friend or brother or grandpa. What do you want those stories to be? What do you want them to say about you? He was at work all the time so he never really got to know him. He came home and was short-tempered and just wanted to watch TV because he was so tired. He was always worried about himself, his fitness, how he looked. What are the things that you want people to say about you at your funeral. Well, my guess is, if you're like me, you want them to say, he loved me, he cared about me, he wanted to know me, he took time for me, he slowed down for me. And that can't be the things that people say if I'm making decisions which prevent me from doing those kinds of things.

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend who is going through some family issues, and I said, here's the deal. At some point in your life, you're going to be telling your kids about this story. What story do you want? to tell them. In other words, you want to make decisions today that you'll be happy with three, five, ten years from now, or like Patrick said, when you stand before God, decisions that you'll be happy with then. Unfortunately, I talk to people who are thinking about getting divorced, and they oftentimes have good reasons, at least good reasons to them. And I just say to them, I want you to go to the end of your life. So maybe it's 20 years, 30 years, 40 years for you,

whatever it is. I just want you to go to your end of your life, and I want you to think about the story you want to tell your kids about your marriage and their family. And what do you want to tell them? Do you want to tell them that when it got hard, I bailed? Or do you want to tell them, we had some hard times, but we committed ourselves to each other and to God, and we got through it? What kind of story do you want to tell when you stand before God? God, I bailed on this marriage, even though I made a covenant or promise to you, I bailed? Or do you want to say, God, by your grace, you saw me through it. Yes, there were some very difficult years, but you saw me through it. Jesus says in Matthew 25, he's telling a parable about the talents. And he says to two of the guys,

it's in verse 21 and 23, I think. He says, well done, my good and faithful servant. And isn't that what you want to hear? Well done, my good and faithful servant. So we need to make decisions today in light of eternity, in light of standing before God, don't get caught up in the short term. Think long term in your decision. Another practical thing you can do is take the conscience test. Just ask yourself, look inside of your own conscience and ask, am I hiding something right now? Am I doing something in this decision that I'd feel uncomfortable sharing with others? Are there ulterior motives or secret things happening that people don't know about? One of my favorite stories comes from 1st Samuel 24 when David is on the run from Saul. Saul's trying to kill David, and David's hiding in a cave,

and as it would just happen, Saul comes into that cave to relieve himself. And David sees Saul relieving himself. I love how the Bible is just so wrong. Here's Saul and... Let's just say, I think it was a number two, because he's there for a while. They have a whole conversation while this is happening, and David's men say, hey, you need to go kill him. Yeah, they said, God has delivered him to you. I mean, this is of God. You've been praying for this. Saul's got a Johnny on the spot right in front of you. This is the point. What are the chance of him walking into this cave?

God must be sovereign. He wants you to do this. And so David comes up to Saul and sneaks up behind him. And he doesn't kill Saul. He takes his knife and he cuts off just a little part of the hem of his robe. And he leaves. And in chapter 24, it says that just doing that, just cutting off a little bit of the hem of his robe, it leaves David conscience-stricken.

That's literally the language. This is verse 5. afterwards, David was conscience-stricken for having cut off a corner of his robe. And this shows us that David took the conscience test. He gets out there with Saul, and rather than murdering him in cold blood, which could have easily done, he allows his conscience to hold him back. And even the little that he does, he walks away and says, you know what, I shouldn't have even done that. That was too far. And so you have to imagine in our lives, we have opportunities, not hopefully to murder people all the time, but we have opportunities where we could say,

ah, see, God's given me this great thing. But really, we would be breaking your own consciences. We'd be doing something dishonest. We'd be gaining something dishonestly. And so we should take the conscience test and just ask, is this what God wants me to do? Yeah, if you find yourself uncomfortable with the decision, if there's something bothering you in your conscience,

if you find yourself hiding or hoping other people don't find out, if you're embarrassed to share your decisions with other people, don't pass over that. And let me just say, I think these kinds of decisions, snowball. So often when we break our conscience, it starts with a very small thing and it becomes an enormous thing. I will never forget. My dad was a high school administrator. And so that meant I got to know the secretaries who worked inside of the office at the time. And I knew them all pretty well. And maybe as my sophomore or junior year of high school, it came out that one of the secretaries

had embezzled about $20,000. And how did it all start? Well, she was managing money. Money was coming through and she took a few bucks. She just needed a few bucks. She took a few bucks. But a few bucks over a lot of time, started becoming $20 bills, $50 bills, bigger amounts of money, and then it becomes thousands and thousands of dollars. And as you can imagine, not only did she lose her job and her reputation, she was put in jail, started with a small conscious decision. And I think there's a lot more people doing stuff like that than actually get caught. But a lot of them do get caught. So number three was pay attention to your conscience. Number four, and we're going to get a little more practical here is expand your options. So we said earlier that one of the problems we have in making decisions is that we narrow our options and we think in terms of should I buy this car or not, whether or not

decisions often lead to a bad place. So what can you do to combat that? Well, you can expand your options. So let's say you're a manager and you have hired someone who is not as good a fit into the job you hired them for as you hoped. This person has some of the skills, but they don't have all the ones that are really necessary to do this job. Should you fire this person or not? Well, there are probably other options. I mean, let's widen our options. Let's think of other possible solutions to this problem. Like, for example, maybe you could put this person in the area that they're doing well in and find another way to solve the problem of the area that they're not as skilled in. Another example of this comes from the world of relationships. You're thinking about

asking a question, should I break up with someone or far more seriously, should I get a divorce? Again, I've had lots of conversations with people who say, look, I remember a civic one said, our sex is terrible, we fight all the time, we're not happy around each other, we have to get a divorce because we are so unhappy. How did you know Emily said that to me? Oh my gosh. After the vasectomy, I'll take that one. I didn't know. Were you listening in? I had the mic on and turned towards you, just crank it up real loud. You can hear conversations. No, so, but I asked them, I said, okay, pause for a second. What have you guys actually done to make your marriage better other than coming in right now?

Well, nothing. Okay, have you gone to a marriage seminar? Have you gone away? And I said, you can go to this place for two weeks and they will take really good care of you and they're going to take you both through counseling or they're going to help you connect. Would you spend? Well, no, we don't want to do it because it's $4,000. So you don't want to pay $4,000 to get your marriage back together.

That's the cost of, you pay $4,000 to keep your dog alive. But you won't pay $4,000. I wouldn't. And again, the point was they saw it as an either or. Either we stay together and we remain miserable or we get a divorce and we can be happy. And I said, no, there's a third option here. You can invest in making your relationship better. It's going to be hard for a while, but what you get on the other end is going to be worth it.

Think about this example of expanding your options. Let's say you're trying to choose between two cars. One car is $20,000 and the other car is $15,000. And of course you like the one that's $20,000 more. But the $15,000 saves you $5,000 and you just can't decide, is it worth it, is it not worth it, which one should I buy? Now, what if you thought about it like this and thought, well, I could buy the $20,000 car or I could buy the $15,000 car and then save the other $5,000 for my family vacations? Now, when you hear that, you might go, well, I'd rather have that $15,000 car and some extra money to do fun stuff with my family for the next couple years. Or you might decide, no, that really helps me solidify that this is the right decision.

The $20,000 car is better to me than the cheaper car and some vacation money. What you're saying is that the way we frame a decision in our head really, really matters. Another example of this is people were asked if you found $100 and then you came across tickets to see a musical group that you absolutely love that cost $100. Would you buy the tickets? And most people say, yeah, 75% of people say, yes, I'd go ahead and buy the tickets. But researchers found it. They just reframed the question. They said, hey, you found $100.

And you could either go and buy tickets for this group that you really like or save the money towards something else. When they reframe the question, now only 55% of people said, yes, I'm going to go to the musical show. And you would think that would be obvious. Of course, if you don't spend the $100 on the concert tickets, you could use it for other stuff. but we get sucked into this weather or not thinking. And it doesn't just happen to us. It happens to really smart business owners. So Quaker Oates, I don't know why, but I like the story.

I think because I used to drink Snapple. Anyway, so Quaker Oats, they bought Gatorade, and it turned into a huge financial success. It was a great decision. Well, a few years later, Snapple is for sale. You might remember they had like iced teas and fruit drinks and things like that. Snapple was for sale for $1.8 billion. At the time, Snapple was this hot commodity.

oddity. And Quaker Oats said, yeah, we want to buy that. And they bought Snapple for $1.8 billion, and it almost took the whole company under it. They sold it for $300 million just a few years later. So one-sixth of the price that they paid for it. Now, why did they get into that place? Well, they got into that because they just asked the question, should I buy this or not? Should we buy Snapple or not, they didn't think through all the other options that they could have used that money on. And when we get sucked into that either or thinking, when we don't expand our options, well, we tend to make bad decisions. That's why you don't make a decision in a Snapple. Okay. Oh gosh. That's good. I'm getting good at my dad. Joe. It's been working on it.

Okay. Number five, we need to get an outside perspective. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you are making especially big decisions in your life, but you are not, not talking to anyone except for maybe your spouse or your mom, there's a good chance that you've missed out on an opportunity to get wisdom from a friend who could maybe guide you in the right direction. We both do weddings. How many people come to you and say, should I get married to this person? Can I go lower than zero percent? Nobody does that. It's a lot of than zero percent because if I told them you shouldn't get married to each other, they would say, we're finding another pastor. That's back to the thing we talked about earlier about. Confirmation bias. Asking the

that you want to get the decision that you want. Yeah, you're exactly right. Nobody asked that question because nobody really wants honest feedback. Proverbs 1215 says, a fool seems right to themselves, but the wise ask for advice. Sometimes what really helps is if you'll just ask another person who's got some distance, some emotional distance, some perspective on your situation, and just explain it to them and listen to their advice. You can almost do this yourself. you almost don't have to ask someone else. Sometimes you can just say, what would an outside consultant tell me that I should do? If I ask a counselor, what would they tell me about how I could improve my marriage? If I asked a financial advisor, what would he or she tell me about savings? And to that

point, if you're wondering who do I ask about a particular topic, my general rule of thumb is ask someone who's successful there. If I want to ask a marriage question, I think of someone who I think has a good marriage, and then I'll ask them that question. If I want to ask a question about business or something that we're doing here at the church, I'll think about someone who's doing that same thing, and they're doing a good job with it, and I'll ask them, what do you think about this? Whether you're in a business setting or a personal setting, one thing you can do is ask someone to make a case against your decision. So if you're going to buy a house, like Patrick talked about earlier, he could have asked a friend to make the case for why they shouldn't buy this house.

Or if you're in a business setting, assign someone on the team to make the decision why you shouldn't use this company, this vendor. I want that job. That'd be a fun job. This is actually something I feel like I've learned from you over the years because I 100% love a confirmation bias. So when I think I've got a good idea, I go into, I'm going to make the case for my idea mode. You're smiling up because you know it's true. And you will always ask the question, well, how could this go wrong? what have we not thought about? What are the problems that we haven't foreseen? And that's helped me a ton

because it's definitely helped me avoid some bad decisions here at the church. Well, remember back to the Quaker Oates story, they bought Gatorade, it went well, then they bought Snapple, and it was horrible. It turns out when they just kind of laid all their cards on the table that no one in their company had been assigned to look into why they shouldn't buy Snapple, they literally didn't even really have a whether or not decision, a yes or no option, they were choosing between yes and yes. We need to always make sure someone is out there saying, no, here are the four reasons why you shouldn't do this. Now, they might be wrong. We might not make that choice. We might go ahead with the merger. We might go ahead with the purchase, but at least know what the potential problems are

out there. One last practical thing. Get some distance. Give yourself some time so that you can fight against emotional reasoning. What I find about myself is that when I get frustrated or irritated, if I give myself a day, usually I will be past the point of that frustration and I'll be a lot more clear-headed. The other issue is if you're like me and you're an impulsive person, you don't struggle with being indecisive, you have to give yourself time, you have to expand your options because it is all too easy to have one option in front of you and say, this looks good enough, I don't want to wait, I'm ready to go, let's make the choice. And then you end up in a situation that lasts for years and is terrible.

In other words, you end up in the situation where we are with our crazy website. So Patrick and I are part of this team. I wasn't going to say the specific one. I was going to do. So Patrick and I are part of this team that are trying to redevelop our church's website. And we're in a meeting, I don't know when it was. Seems like ages ago, early last summer maybe. And we have one.

No, no, no. Early two summers ago. Don't know. That makes me even feel worse. Anyway, Patrick and I are in this meeting. And we choose this vendor. Now, a couple other people are at the table. Are we sure? Are we sure? Well, Patrick and I both like to make decisions, make it quick. Yeah, let's get this thing moving. This should have been done last month. Why are we still doing this? So we convinced ourselves in the course of like 30 minutes to go with this particular company. And it's been an utter disaster. The thing was, when they sent us their other websites, we should have looked at those websites and known, right, then and there, this was not the right choice for our particular. I'm sure they do great work for it, but it was not the right company. for us. Yeah, it's not them. It's that it's just not a good fit. You remember the one website? To be honest, I didn't even look at them. It's like I didn't even call it references. The Uranus

chocolate website? Anyway, here we are. Two years later, we're still working the website. Now, it's all kind of worked out in the sense that the work they did. We've been able to transfer to some other people. It's just delayed it. But it should have been a six-month project now two years. And we did it because we didn't give ourselves distance. We literally pulled the trigger right there in that meeting and said, let's go. If we would have slept on it, if we would have expanded our options, if we would have practiced what we're preaching here, it would have been a lot better. It was a huge learning experience for me. Okay, so now we are done with our six, and if you're listening carefully, you probably noticed that we didn't include one. So we didn't include pray about your decisions. What do you

think about that as you hear me say that I personally don't pray about these kind of decisions? Does that bother you? I have two thoughts simultaneously. I have three thoughts. Thought number one is, I know people who use the I'll pray about it thing as an excuse not to make decisions. They're just indecisive and they have to think and they have to process and they might not even really be praying about it. So that's my first thought. So if that's what you're talking about, great. Please do not make the excuse. I have to pray about it. Well, let's just make this specific. So should I buy this car? Which car should I buy? Which house should I buy? So we're going to. We're going to pray. Did God come down and show you which car you should buy?

These are my two simultaneous thoughts. My first thought is, yes, you should probably pray about it. And my simultaneous thought is I am such a hypocrite because I often don't pray about it. Okay, so I'm just willing to admit that I'm talking to both sides of my mouth. But here's why I think. What I don't think it means is I'm going to pray, God, should I buy this truck today? And then wait to hear a voice in my head to give me or some sort of sign from heaven. No, I think what you should do is say, God, this is a lot of money, and you've entrusted me with it.

I've thought through this and I'm trying to be wise with it, but please show me if this is the right decision. And generally speaking, what I would expect is that over the rest of my process making decision, God will bring people or things that will actually come in and help shape that. But if I'm being wise and I'm following his principles, then he's going to do it in a natural, normal, not signs from heaven way. So it's going to turn out that we don't fundamentally disagree. I'm largely okay with that. But if you're talking about confirmation bias, there is nothing that is more prone to confirmation bias than I pray about it. I totally agree with that. And how many people come back and say, God told me to give all my money away? And I will agree with you on this. Nobody. It is probably, I think we should pray through our life. And that's the value I think that we both actually agree on. What I also think is, if you want to make good decisions, it's actually less important that you pray about it and more important that you're ethical system, how you think about making decisions, is in line with how God thinks about making decisions, because then you are far more likely to be wise and make a godly decision.

That's right. And so if praying about it means that I'm going to pray that my heart be in tune with God's heart and that my heart be in tune with kingdom values and that my mind be soaked with scripture and that I live out God's will in my life and that I'm praying for wisdom about my whole life, then yeah, I'm all for praying about it. But if we're talking about God, should I move to this city? Should I take this job? Should I marry this person? I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

I think that God hears those prayers and in some ways responds to those prayers. I just don't know, am I praying to God? Am I praying to myself? Am I saying God that question? Am I just asking myself? It might just be better served to get onto Google and type in 15 verses about who I should marry. as stupid as that sounds, because you might actually hear some words from God, where he does want to guide how we think about these kinds of issues in our life.

Other things you're going to find God doesn't say anything about that, and it goes back to the principle of having a wise heart that's in line with God's values, and that's the thing that will save you from making terrible decisions. Psalm 374 says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Now, that doesn't mean he'll give you a Porsche. It doesn't mean he'll give you what you want. It means that he will change your heart,

that you will want the right kind of things. Delight yourself in the Lord, delight yourself in prayer, delight yourself in the scripture, delight yourself in loving Jesus, and your heart will begin to change so that you want the same things God wants, you want His kingdom,

then you can make decisions that are God honoring. Okay, so you heard it here first. I say you should pray about your decisions and Keith doesn't. Thanks for listening. It's been a great episode. Later.

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