Cheryl Schatz

TL, comment #456,
You said:

Christ is God and knows all things, but does not make our decisions for us at all. He gives us wisdom and understanding as we ask and as we can handle. But God has given us the ability to choose many things. That is how we are able to sin. It’s a bad choice.

I would like to key in on this very wise statement of yours. Some people think that the authority God has over us means that He makes all of our decisions. This isn’t true. He hasn’t promised to tell us what to do in every circumstance, but He has promised that if we ask for wisdom, he will give it to us freely.

What we are then to do as maturing Christians is to take the wisdom that God gives us and to apply it. The application is ours while the wisdom is God’s. Paul speaks about this in 1 Cor. 6

1 Corinthians 6:5 (NASB)
5 I say this to your shame. Is it so, that there is not among you one wise man who will be able to decide between his brethren,

If we are promised that God will give us wisdom if we but ask for it, the implication is that mature Christians will use this wisdom to “decide” a matter. This means to pay close attention and to evaluate and separate the issues so as to make a judgment. We are all called upon to be mature, ask for wisdom, and then use the wisdom that we have been given to make our own godly decisions.

When I was a young girl a lady in our congregation wrote a book where she detailed all the “decisions” that God made for her each day. She asked him every day what hat he wanted her to wear and what pair of gloves, what dress, what shoes, etc, etc. She honestly believed that God wanted to dictate His will to us so that we merely received direction instead of becoming wise in making our own decisions through His principles. However when people think that God wants us to be passive in receiving direction for every single decision that we are to make instead of working hard to find out God’s principles, seeking God’s wisdom and then making our own wise decisions that bring glory to God by the expression of our mature faith, we are distilled down to remaining as children who are unable to make their own mature decisions.