Good Decisions Always Agree with God’s Word - Daily Hope with Rick Warren - Aug. 19, 2015

When you need to make a decision, the first and ideal test is this: “Is my decision in harmony with God’s Word?”

You have to decide what’s going to be your ultimate authority in life. It really boils down to two choices: God’s Word or the world. Are you going to base your decisions on what God says or what other people say?

If you base your life on popular opinion, you’re always going to be out of date, because it changes every day. What was “in” yesterday will not be “in” today and what’s “in” today will not be “in” tomorrow. If you base your life on popular culture, political correctness, or opinion polls, you do not have principles to live by. That’s called a shifting foundation!

On the other hand, if you base your life on God’s Word, the truth never changes. Truth is always true. So if God says something was wrong 10,000 years ago, it was also wrong 500 years ago, it’s wrong today, and it will be wrong 1,000 years from today. I don’t care what opinion polls or political correctness or the media says. If God says it’s wrong, it’s wrong. It always has been, and it always will be. If God says it’s right, it will always be right. That is a solid foundation!

God has set up the universe with certain laws— physical, moral, and spiritual. God built the universe around these laws not because he’s capricious but because they’re all for your benefit. When you cooperate with the principles in this universe, you succeed. If you reject, rebel, disobey, and ignore God’s principles, you’re the one who gets hurt. You don’t ever break God’s laws. They break you! If I go up on top of a building and jump off, I don’t break the law of gravity. It breaks me. The same is true with moral laws and spiritual laws. You cannot just thumb your nose at God and get away with it. There’s inevitably a reckoning. Any time you violate God’s principles, you’re asking for trouble.  

With all this in mind, you can be confident in your decision. If God says it’s OK, then you do it. If God says “no,” then you don’t do it.

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path” (Psalm 119:105 NIV).

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Talk It Over

• How does society try to convince you that truth is subjective?
• What do you need to be doing in order to know the Bible well enough to base your decisions on it?
• How have you experienced freedom when you obeyed God’s laws and direction in your life?