How to Sabotage Your Life: Wrong Decisions

Last Wednesday our Midweek topic focused on wrong decisions and how they ruin our lives. Here’s a summary of that message:

Ten Surefire Ways to Ruin Your Life:

1) Be ignorant, apathetic, and totally unconcerned with the world around you.

2) Be passive.

3) Be sarcastic and prideful.

4) Be disingenuous and superficial.

5) Have a sense of entitlement.

6) Be spiteful and bitter.

7) Be irresponsible.

8) Have no personal integrity.

9) Be self-destructive.

10) Live in the future (or the past)

The problem we often run into with bad decisions is that we can look at a list like this, and when we self-evaluate we tend to think we’re pretty good. But Jesus knows our hearts, and sees the wrong decisions and desires of our hearts.

He did it with a rich young ruler in Mark 10. The young man believes he’s made all the right decisions, but Jesus sees he’s actually lived a superficial life by choosing to find his value through his money. The young man, unfortunately, walked away from Jesus—the only one who could give him what he truly needed. We can see clearly from this story that our wrong choices can have huge consequences.

But we don’t have to live as slaves to our wrong decisions! God’s grace is amazing and we can rejoice and take rest in that fact. Paul said in Romans 6: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?....You must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Jesus came to destroy our old sin nature on the cross. And then He gave us the Holy Spirit to establish our new, true nature after we choose to follow Him.

So our ability to make the right decisions versus the wrong ones isn’t based on following rules or fixing our behaviors. It’s about learning to respond to the nature of the Holy Spirit that lives inside of us and urges us to bear its fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. As Christians, we must choose this path to walk by faith. It won’t happen without our decision to move forward. You must choose to walk, no one can force you and it’s not going to happen on its own. Trust Him for guidance and act on that trust.