What if my tribe doesn’t support my decisions?

Thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. We recently finished up our series, finding your way. Hearing God’s direction for your life. How to hear it, how to listen to it, how to follow it. Steve talked for two weeks, really about he and Shannon’s decision to move to Brazil to serve with our mission partner down there.

And the big decision that is how they heard from God and then how what they learned can apply to our lives. This last week, I talked about the importance of going together. Don’t just launch on your own, but have a support team around you. Whatever your calling is, we need support and affirmation and encouragement around us as we pursue what God has for us.

So the question comes in this week is what if some of those closest to you are not in agreement with where you believe that God is leading you?

Should you follow what you believe God is leading you to do? Should you listen to those closest to you? How do you know which direction is God’s direction? And what are we supposed to do? So first, I would say the only absolute in listening to God’s calling on our lives is what scripture says.

Steve talked about this in one of the weeks of his sermons is if scripture gives an imperative for our lives, then that is God’s will. He says to do something, we need to do it. If it says not to do something, not to do it. For sure. We know that without a doubt.

But most of our decisions, most of our listening to God or where we want God’s direction are not specifically addressed in Scripture. Do I move here? Do I take this job? Do we have a kid or another kid?

How to have this conversation with one particular person? There’s a lot of. A lot of our lives are not addressed by specific verses of Scripture. So what do we do then? And then other people’s voices are very important.

They do carry weight. We do want to go together. But there are also times where God has placed something on our hearts and the community is not with us. Noah building his boat, right? Everybody’s laughing at him.

What are you doing, this is ridiculous. But he knew this is what God had for him. And in those moments, we do our best to try to help people understand, to lead them into what we believe God is calling us to do. But there might be times where we need to step away or step out, kind of away from the voices of those around us.

There are those times, but there’s also times where we think we have an idea, right? And we need the wisdom of those around us to kind of draw us back in to say, hey, I know you think God is leading you there, but we don’t see that. And we think that you need to listen to us. And I would encourage anybody who’s asking this question to have those conversations.

You don’t have to make a decision today, but to be open and honest with the people around you.

If I really feel this way, you really feel that way. Maybe we need to get a third party involved to see what the next step is. And then at the end of the day, whatever you do, the comfort that we have from God being sovereign and ordering all things and orchestrating history to his ends, the comfort in that is that whatever we decide to do, whether it’s to kind of submit to the community around us, or whether it’s to say, hey, I need to not listen to the community around me, whichever way we pick,

God being in charge of all things, he will use our decision for our good and for his glory. So let’s say you make the wrong decision. You say, I’m going to move.

And that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. Well, when you move and you experience whatever the implications are of moving, if that’s maybe what the decision is, then there will be things that you would have learned that way, things that God would have grown in you that way that wouldn’t have happened any other way.

Even our so called mistakes, God then folds back into his plan for development for our lives. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Whatever choice you make is in a sense the plan and will be what God uses to develop what he wants to develop in your life.

In that sense, there isn’t a wrong decision. Some decisions may have one set of consequences, some decisions may have a different set of consequences. But whichever one you choose, as long as it’s not sin, again, as long as the Bible isn’t speaking specifically about it. Whichever kind of path we choose for life that’s not directed specifically by scripture, whichever path we choose, that is the plan and God will use that to develop what he wants in our lives.

So if you’re on the precipice and you feel kind of stuck, what should I do?

Just make a decision. Whichever one you make will become the plan for you and God will use it for your good. That’s the comfort and that’s where we can rest because he is sovereign. So we hope that helps and we will see you next time.