When I was a young child, my family did not have much financially. I remember making a decision to do whatever I could to bring my family out of lack and poverty. That decision opened the door to what my life is today. Many people look at the success and wealth I’ve acquired and totally disregard the hard work, discipline, and diligence it took to obtain it. They don’t understand that I had to make some hard decisions. But those decisions were based on the Word of God and lifted me from one position to the next. I had to gain more and more knowledge every step of the way.
In Deuteronomy 30:19, God tells us that He made us free moral agents, and that we have the right to choose between life or death, a blessing or a curse. Life constantly offers us opportunities to make decisions on a daily basis. When the alarm goes off in the morning, we decide whether to get out of bed or sleep in. When we receive money, we decide whether to spend it on things we want or the things we need. Our decisions determine the quality of our lives.
Every decision is an open door to reality. Once we make a choice, we have opened the door to a particular outcome. For example, if you are not prospering financially, it’s not that God hasn’t given you what you need to gain wealth. It may be because you have not acquired the practical knowledge needed to become successful in that area. Your financial decisions have been based on the information you’ve acquired throughout your life. However, bad information leads to bad decisions. The question we should ask ourselves is, What information have I based my major decisions on?
The people we have had relationships with throughout the years have impacted our lives in major ways. This is why we should be cautious about what and whom we allow to influence us. Family members are a major source of information for most people, but loved ones may not be the best source of information. We can determine whether to take a person’s advice by looking at his or her life and observing whether he or she has made wise decisions. We may have grown up with a certain mindset that developed from the impartations of family and close friends; however, we should consider the habits we’ve formed and discard the ones that do not line up with the Word. These habits may be hard to break at first, but we can do all things through Christ (Philippians 4:13).
God’s Word is the wisdom we need to govern our lives, and whatever contradicts it will lead us down the wrong path. We can find information that opposes the Word in many media outlets, from TV talk shows, reality shows, and radio talk shows to magazines and books. The producers of a majority of this information seek only to affirm society’s norms and values. The problem is their ideals are so popular that they appear to be normal to most Christians. But if it doesn’t line up with the Word, it cannot be accepted. The Word of God has to be the foundation for our lives. When we choose the world’s way of doing things over God’s, we should not be surprised when things don’t work out the way we want them to.
The Bible is God’s instruction manual for life. It is more than a decorative piece for the coffee table. We must open His Word and study it if we want to make wise decisions. The Word of God will not get into our brains by osmosis. Unless we tap into God’s wisdom, we will do things out of our own belief system or knowledge base that we’ve developed over time, which will be limited, and in some cases flat-out wrong.
Obtaining the right information is critical to our ability to make sound decisions. When we choose to make the Word our final authority, we begin to display wisdom in all our decisions. Wisdom is having the knowledge and understanding about how to proceed when we don’t know what to do.
Making wise decisions is about knowing how to use the knowledge we have in any given situation. For instance, although my mother knew how to prepare a full-course meal, it was wisdom that enabled her to prepare a meal for the whole family with only a few items in the refrigerator or cupboard. We have wisdom when we know how to apply our knowledge to achieve a proper outcome.
Watch Creflo Dollar this Wednesday on LIFE TODAY. This is an excerpt of The Holy Spirit, Your Financial Advisor by Creflo Dollar. Copyright ©2013 by Creflo Dollar. Reprinted by permission of FaithWords/Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
