Dr. Ed Young - How to Make Decisions

TOPICS: Decisions

Noah was a man of faith, the Bible tells us, and he had a wife and sons, married wives, and they had a household-a family of faith- which was countercultural, going in the opposite direction of everybody else on the planet. So judgment came in the form of a flood. The floodwaters came and destroyed everybody, but they had at least 120 years (Genesis 6:3)-120 years to turn back to God. Oh yeah, because that’s when God said to Noah, «Go build a boat.» Now, that’s crazy. He was 100 miles from any body of water. Nobody had ever seen it rain; moisture came from the earth. The first rain that was recorded in history was with the floodwaters that came those 40 days and 40 nights. Here he is, building a boat-this righteous man, this God-fearing man, this worshiping man-and you can imagine the ridicule. «Well Noah, what are you building there, man? Ah, large proportions, isn’t it? By the way, do you remember the dimensions of the Ark? 150 ft long-a football and a half long, in honor of the Super Bowl. I’ll give you that; most measure a football and a half long. Feel long-uh, 25 yards wide, 15 yards high. It wasn’t for going anywhere; it was for existence.

Now, people have studied the Ark for many years, and some scholars and people who are supposed to know about boats say, 'You know, that boat wouldn’t float; it couldn’t possibly inhabit two of every kind and keep people alive for all those 40 days, 40 nights, etc.' But now, go to Branson, Missouri, and you can see a replica of the Ark. Go to other places on Earth, and you see the Ark has been exactly reconstructed. Now, there is common belief that what is reported in the Bible-that many people just said, 'Oh, it won’t work'-now they see exactly how it could have worked and it did function. Amazing, isn’t it?

Noah built that big old Ark by faith. He got in, the rains came, then he floated out there a million miles from nowhere, and his boat ended up on Mount Ararat. Remember we climbed up Ararat a few months ago, and I can imagine that Noah walked out of that Ark, and he looked around: there was nobody, no people, no inhabitants, no landmarks, no nothing. He started over from zip. A lot of people think that Noah exercised more faith after the flood than he did before the flood because what’s the first thing Noah did when he got off the boat? The Bible says he built an altar; he worshiped in thanksgiving. The Ark was salvation; the altar was transformation. You can be saved and not be transformed, but that’s the transformation that took place as Noah had a new chance to begin life on this Earth.

By faith, Noah… Let me ask you a question: what is faith? How would you define faith? How do you get faith? How do you continue to live in faith? Does faith grow? Can it grow? Does faith decline? What do you do when you lose your faith? Can you get it back? Is there such a thing as losing your faith and then reclaiming your faith? We have a lot of questions about faith. Go to Hebrews chapter 11; there’s a whole chapter on faith. It’s the centerpiece in the Bible on faith. It gives us, in the opening verses, sort of a general definition of faith. Look at Hebrews 11:1-3: „Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.“ And by the way, this is the rest of Hebrews: you have a general definition of faith, and then the rest of the chapter tells us about men and women in history who lived by faith in all kinds of circumstances.

Then he says a key verse in verse 3: „By faith we understand.“ Understand here means something you come to believe by evidence, by proof. By faith, we come to believe, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. In other words, by the way, the scientists came up with a Big Bang. Remember the Big Bang? — bang! The world came into being; there it is right there in Hebrews, is it not? The world was made by God out of things that were not seen, and boom, there was an explosion, and now there are things that are seen. This gives us understanding.

Now, let’s talk about faith-three levels. Three levels of faith. Now, they’re all sort of subsets here, but let me tell you a basic understanding of faith. First of all, faith is reason; it’s understanding. It’s reason, and then on top of reason, faith is belief, and on top of belief, there is commitment. And then you have faith as reason, and then reason leads to belief, and belief leads to commitment. And then with those three, you have certainty. You see, a lot of people try to move from reason to certainty: „I’m going to figure all this out; I’m going to work through it, then I’m going to be certain.“ It never works like that. Reason is the base; it moves to belief, then it moves to commitment, and then hopefully it comes to certainty. Up to that point, it’s all tentative; it’s all „I hope,“ it’s „perhaps,“ it’s experimental.

Let me tell you something: except in math, every decision you make, every decision I make comes by way of faith. Therefore, somebody might say, „Well, you know, I don’t need faith; I don’t think about those things.“ Every decision, every choice we make about everything on the planet comes by the way of faith. You say, „Well, is it practical? How practical is that?“ If we can’t do anything, accomplish anything, or make any decision without faith, that’s pretty practical, isn’t it?

So, let’s seek to understand faith. From the very, very beginning, when you decide who you want your plumber to be, it’s a faith decision. You decide who you want to marry, a faith decision. You decide if you need surgery, who your surgeon is going to be-a faith decision. Pretty important, wouldn’t you say? How does this work?

Let’s take a plumber, alright? You’ve got pipes that are rusted all over your house; you need to get a plumber. So you go and use what? Reason. You try to find a plumber who can do this. You use your mind; you use understanding, reason. Then you move to belief. You say, „You know, I believe enough; I’ve investigated enough, and I have reason that this would be my plumber; now I believe he will do it.“ Then you commit, and you give him the job. Once it is completed, all those processes are sort of tentative; it’s sort of, „You know, I don’t know.“ But when it’s completed and it works, you have certainty.

Picking a mate-lots of people are not married. You know why? They think they move from reason to certainty. „Oh, I’m going to figure all this out; she’s the right one, he’s the right one. Bang, bang, I’m certain now!“ No, no, no. It starts with reason, then you go through belief; you begin to put it together. Then you make a commitment, which may be engagement. And then when you say „I do“ and he says, or she says, „I will,“ there is the certainty that comes. Faith has three basic steps; you don’t move from reason to certainty.

Let’s take a surgeon. Your GP says you need surgery. You go and try to pick a surgeon; you use reason, right? Good idea. You use reason, and then reasonably, you think this is the person that can do it. Then you have a certain belief about methodology and how it will be done. Then you make a commitment. In that commitment, you lie on that table, put that thing over, and count backward to whatever. That’s pretty committed, isn’t it? Commitment. And then, following the surgery, things go well, and then you have what? Certainty.

So faith isn’t just something, „Well, pie in the sky over there.“ Faith isn’t something that we say, „Well, Christians have faith and non- Christians don’t have faith.“ No, we all have the same amount of faith. The difference is what you put your faith in and what I put my faith in. For example, let’s look at-go back through and talk about reason, understanding. That’s where we start. Scientists normally operate by faith. Scientists do not discover a whole lot of things through inductive reasoning. What is that? They don’t say, „Well, I see this over here, and I see that over there, and understand that molecule over there and this works over here,“ and they put all this together inductively and come to a conclusion, something that works, something that’s accurate. Normally, that’s not the way science works. Science works with a faith assumption, with a thesis, with an idea and a concept, and then this is deductive reasoning. They begin to deduce from that evidence as to whether or not that faith assumption is accurate. Science operates by faith primarily.

And so we look at the universe: godless people say, „Boy, the universe came together by chance; it all came by accident-by atoms coming together back in some primeval moment billions of years ago.“ It just evolved. Let me tell you something: to say this universe came together by chance is like saying there was an explosion in a print shop and out produced the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Man, what are the odds of that explosion in a print shop and you have a dictionary perfectly put together? What are the odds in that? Ladies and gentlemen, the odds of that happening are less than the odds that this universe would come together without a designer.

Abraham Lincoln, I said it recently, said, „You go to outer space, you look back on the earth, you may be an atheist; he said you stand on the earth and look at outer space, he said you can’t be an atheist.“ So the idea that all of this came- for example, decisions in your life: faith choices that we make. What if you think that you came into being by chance-that all human beings are here by chance? We came from some primeval mud puddle; there we came here by chance. By chance, something that was inorganic became organic? By chance? If you believe that you’re here by chance or if you’re here because you have been designed by a designer, what a difference by design or chance that makes. All the difference in the world in how we make decisions every day of our life-what’s right, what’s wrong, what will work, what will not work-and these are faith decisions.

So faith is reason; reason. That’s the idea. To say, „Well, you know, I don’t have faith that you have in the church,“ with people here who are not Christians-somebody stands up and tells how Jesus Christ came into their life and changed everything. He gave them a fresh new beginning, a new outlook on life, and there’s a freshness there they’ve never known. Somebody who’s not a Christian says, „Boy, I wish I could believe that, but I don’t have enough faith.“ If somebody from Mars came down to this Earth and we explained to them about procreation-how we cooperate with God and produce life-they would say, „I can’t even imagine that! We procreate by the exchanging of ear wax!“ They have no frame of reference.

You see, we think of people who see someone who comes to Christ as having a new life. They back up and say, „I have no frame of reference for that; I wish I had faith like that.“ We all have the same amount of faith, ladies and gentlemen. It’s just what we put our faith in. And when someone puts their faith into something other than Jesus Christ-and that occupies the core and the center of their life-therefore, it’s no wonder that they have trouble believing. We all have the same amount of faith; we all have the same progressiveness. This is development from reason to belief to commitment, and then to certainty. That’s how it works.

Someone who says, „I just need more faith,“ let me tell you something. Let’s talk about the security of believers, for example: „Once saved, always saved.“ Oh, we Baptists love that one. Why do we believe that? It’s taught in the Bible. But let’s say it another way: how are we saved? If we’re saved by doing good and not doing evil, we can lose our salvation, couldn’t we? If that’s how we’re saved, because when we begin to do evil and not good, we’d be lost. We were saved by doing good and not evil, now we can be lost by doing evil and not good, right? But we’re not saved by doing good, by works. We’re saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Therefore, we are eternally secure. And when we wander away from God in Christ and we slide back, because we are in Christ, we know that, and our faith begins to operate and we feel like someone who is no longer at home in this life.

We become a bomb. You know what a bomb is? A bomb is something that, in the center, in the core, there is a compound that is unstable-that’s the reason it’s a bomb. And in your life and my life, if there’s a compound that is unstable, we haven’t blown up, but we will blow up. We’re bombs in the center of your life and my life when there’s God in Jesus Christ. He gives us stability. Stability. And we understand this through reason and through belief.

You see, as Christians, we look back on the facts of history. You and I can believe that Christmas is real: God visited this Earth in human flesh, incarnation. You could believe that. We can believe that Jesus died on the cross for all your garbage and my garbage. We can believe that our substitute. We can believe that God raised Him from the dead. We can believe in the resurrection-Easter. But you can believe that, but it really doesn’t become yours until that which happens in the past affects how we live in the present.

In other words, we have to live on the basis of our of the Gospel, on the basis of what Jesus has done. Now, Peter and Paul were brought up as Jews, right? And they were taught that a Gentile- and a Gentile is anybody who’s not a Jew in the Bible-if you’re either a Jew or a non- Jew. If you’re a non- Jew, you’re a Gentile. And Peter and Paul were taught that Gentiles could never know God. Why? Because of their pedigree and because of their practice. Their pedigree: a Gentile is not from Abraham. A Jew’s pedigree is Abraham. A Gentile’s practice is not keeping the law. A Jew’s practice is keeping the law. Therefore, a Gentile could never know God. But you read the book of Acts. There is Peter over there, and he gets with Cornelius, who was a Gentile- a centurion-and he tells Cornelius about God in Christ, and zip! Cornelius, a Gentile, accepts Jesus Christ and becomes a Christian. There’s a problem.

Peter had no problem; he saw that this Gentile had become a Christian. He saw that the performance of Jesus was put into his life. The pedigree of Jesus was put into his life. So, as a Christian, Peter went over there and, while eating breakfast with him, fell in love with bacon! Little I of Jesus, and Peter just loved the way the Gentiles ate. But some big shots from Jerusalem came-some of the family of James, there in the strict Judaism, who believe you had to take all the practices of a Jew after you received Christ as Messiah-and they saw that Peter was eating with the Gentiles. They heard about it. So while they were there, Peter didn’t eat with Cornelius anymore. He did without bacon.

Paul, in Galatians chapter 2, faced Peter with this hypocrisy. He said, „Repent! If these Gentiles are already Christians, and you’ve been told that everything is clean, don’t change how you live because those who haven’t yet caught up with what it means to be born again and a child of God.“ He looked in Peter’s face and pointed it out to him. This is what happens to us, ladies and gentlemen. We know all these facts historically, but we have to take them and incorporate them into our lives and discover this is how we then live.

„Oh, I’m burdened with my sin; I can’t handle this.“ We have to live on the basis that our sin has been covered by the blood of Christ. We’re forgiven. Don’t let that beat you down and keep you down. Live on the basis of that. That’s a part of the belief system that we have. And then finally, look at the last thing we see here-remember, we’re talking about faith, reason, belief, doctrine-and what we have, then there comes commitment, commitment.

You’re walking on the edge of a cliff; slippery rocks, and you slide and you start falling down that cliff, hundreds of feet below, and as you’re sliding down, you see ahead a branch sticking up out of the cliff. You’re going to slide right by that branch. How much faith is it going to take for you to grab hold of that branch? Huh? Oh, it’s going to take-no, it’s not going to take hardly any faith, is it? When you’re sliding down that cliff to grab that branch. But once you grab that branch, that’s a little faith that you have, but that branch in its strength will hold you up and save you.

When we extend our hand to Jesus Christ, we extend our hand to Him. He grabs us, and He puts in you and me His pedigree -He’s the Son of God. Is that a pretty good family to be in? He puts in you and me His practice-a life of perfection. Is that enough for you and me? Therefore, that gives us salvation-faith, faith, faith. It works everywhere. When we’re on top of our game or at the bottom of our game-faith. What is it? Faith. How do we get it? Faith. We can’t lose it once we’re in Christ, and Christ is within us, and then we can handle whatever life puts in front of us on our plate, and that is the certainty of our faith. We see it works; it applies; it keeps us going; it sees us through.

The Chicago Fire was, I think, in 1871. In that fire, Horatio Spafford was a lawyer; he owned property in Chicago. Very wealthy, and everything he had was wiped out. He sent his wife and four little daughters to London to go to a D. L. Moody crusade to try to have a moment of getting over their tremendous loss. On that voyage from New York to London, in the middle of the Atlantic, the ship went down; all four daughters were lost. Anna was saved; somehow she was on a board. And when she became conscious, as she looked around, all four of her daughters had drowned. When she found safety and was rescued, she sent a telegram back to her husband, who was coming over later to be with them, and it said simply, „Saved alone. What am I to do?“

Horatio Spafford went over there, joined his wife, and they saw and were led to believe that God had a special calling for their lives. And so they moved to Jerusalem, and they bought this house, which is now a hotel, and they began to take in offerings. They began to take in street people; they began to feed and love and share with those people-Jews and Muslims-the Lord Jesus Christ. And they did that for the rest of their lives.

On the way over, Horatio Spafford asked the ship he was on to stop over the spot where his four little daughters had drowned months before. And there he wrote, „It Is Well with My Soul.“ „Peace like a river ascendeth my day. Good things sorrow, when like sea billows roll, bad things said whatever, whatever, whatever the cost. Thou hast taught me to say, it is well. It Is Well with My Soul.“

That, ladies and gentlemen, is faith in action.