In our day and age, we are surrounded by choices. Not too long ago, if you wanted coffee, you could choose between coffee or…..coffee. Now, you go into a place like Starbucks and you have literally hundreds of combinations to choose from: tall (which for some reason is small), grande, venti, single, double, triple, cappuccino, macchiato, Americano, mocha, etc. The choices are endless. The average supermarket has 36,000 individual items to choose from – which is why I walk out with so many things I don’t need. Revlon has 156 different shades of lipstick.

We are completely bombarded with choices every single day – some easy, some hard. Sometimes the difficult choice is the right one. “Do I go in early and work hard to make it to my son’s baseball game tomorrow or break one more promise?” “Do I take that second look at the girl at work or keep my eyes pure?”

The choices we make now have consequences – both big and small. Too often we go through the easy door. Making the wrong choices results in things like debt, messing up sexually, abortion, going to prison, HIV. Making the right choices, on the other hand, will both benefit us and positively impact many others. Also, God is honored in this world as we make good, right, honest choices. In order to do this, we need wisdom.

So, how do we get wise? Start by looking at the life of Jesus. Throughout his life, He asked Himself four questions that enabled Him to make amazingly wise choices. For instance, after spending 40 days in the wilderness fasting and praying, Satan showed up and tested Jesus – sort of a multiple choice test. Jesus’ response to each of the devil’s temptations was, “It is written…” Satan tried to get Jesus to take the easy door, but Jesus knew the Word.

Whenever a choice is presented to us in life, the first question we should ask about it is, “Is it written?” We can’t make good choices if we don’t know the Word of God. The Word of God is the will of God. If you want to make Godly choices, you have to get the Word inside of you.

Now, there are a lot of things that just aren’t specifically addressed in scripture. When that’s the case, the next question we have to ask is, “Is it love?”  We need to evaluate every choice on the basis of love. Jesus said that the world will know that we are His disciples by the way we love each other. What does that look like? 1 Corinthians 13 is an excellent description. Among other things, it says that love is patient, not self-seeking and not easily angered. So, if one of the choices isn’t love, don’t go though that door.

If the issue is still kind of gray after asking the first two questions, then ask: “Is it on the agenda?” God has a plan, a purpose, a hope and a future for every person, family, relationship, city and nation. Jesus knew God’s agenda for His life was to seek and save that which was lost. If we’re going to follow Him, we need to know God’s agenda for our lives, just as Jesus knew His and evaluated His decisions by that.

So, what is God’s agenda for your life? If you’re not sure yet, or if you don’t have anything more specific, you can fall back on this one from Mark 16: “Go into all the world preach the good news…” The cool thing is that after that, it says that all these miraculous signs will accompany you. That means, when we are walking in this calling, the power of God goes with us.

Finally, if the choice still isn’t clear, ask “What does God have to say about it?” That means we have to pray about the choice, and listen. We have to keep our spirits open to hear His voice. Look at the example of Paul. Acts 16:6-10 describes him and his companions going from one place to another because they were prevented by the Holy Spirit from taking the gospel to Asia, and then Bythinia. Then, after heading to Troas, Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia begging him to come over there. That is where God wanted them to go.

This passage is so cool. It shows me that Paul had no idea what he was doing. It really seems like he had no clue where they were supposed to go. But, he was listening. In every choice we make, it is absolutely vital to keep our eyes and ears on God. The thing is, we just can’t see down the road, past the doors of decision. If we could only see clearly what lay on the other side of our choices, they would be so much easier to make. But we can’t. There is Someone, however, who can – His name is Jehovah.

So many people refuse God’s help. They don’t know or don’t believe that He can see what they can’t. They insist on doing things themselves. They’re just like my little boy insisting on pushing his stroller even though he can’t see over the handle and refusing to let me keep even one hand on it to help. No, just like him, they have to run into a few curbs and smash their faces a few times before realizing they need to ask for help. That’s the key: we need to ask God for help. We need His hand on our life. He can see what we can’t.

God has laid out a plan for our lives, but it isn’t usually through the easy door. Choosing the Door of Wisdom isn’t easy. But, when we stop and evaluate the choices life brings us by asking these four questions, the result is godly wisdom. And that makes for an amazing life!