Do you struggle to make good choices?

We humans can be quite different when we are faced with a choice. Some seem safer than the bank. Others are more wobbly than a child on his first bike ride. There are many factors that play into our ability to make decisions, including our personality, our sense of self and the endless list of possibilities that lie before us. But common to all is that there are good and less good choices. So how can we, with the starting point that each one of us has, prepare to be able to make good choices?

Choosing is a complex process. Therefore, it is not immediately easy to provide a checklist that ensures that the choice is the optimal one in every situation. A choice that is perfect for you can be a complete disaster for me, simply because we are so different as people. And what appears to be a good choice next week may turn out to be quite as problematic in a couple of years. There is no universal instruction manual and therefore I will not attempt to provide one in this article either.

Having said this, there are good tools to be able to optimize our choices. Here there can be a lot of interpersonal wisdom and experience that can be worth listening to a lot. But based on my Christian convictions, I want above all to orient myself towards how, based on the Bible, I should think about various choices. In this article, I will start from a prayer that Paul prays for the church in Colossae. Based on this text, I will try to give some reflection questions that may be helpful. In a small article like this, we obviously do not get the opportunity to go into everything that the Bible says about this topic. But hopefully the article can be a small contribution to you in terms of the choices you are facing.

The Bible text in question is found in Colossians 1:9-12:

A good choice is contained in prayer. The congregation in Kollosai faced its challenges where they had to make some choices. And when Paul looks at their situation, he prays for these people and what they are going through. The fact that life's challenges and Paul's ministry of intercession are woven together reminds us that life's challenges are something that we too must present to God. This applies both to our own path choices, but also to the path choices of the people around us. If you are wondering what to do, the first piece of advice is that you should put the choice before God in prayer. When a new apostle was to be installed after Judas' death, the disciples put this choice before God in prayer (Acts 1:24). Therefore, be bold both to pray yourself and to get others to pray for your path choices.

Paul's prayer is a prayer that "you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will and receive all the wisdom and insight that the Spirit gives". What is God's will? It is a question that all Christians should be concerned with. This will in many ways constitutes the map with which we must relate. God's will shows which roads we should be allowed to walk on, and which roads we should stay away from. But when we approach the topic of God's will, it is something that can often become a bit diffuse. It can be easy to equate the gut feeling, or what in spiritual parlance can be called "getting calm about something", and God's will. God is also God over our emotional life and our gut feeling. So we should not underestimate being able to get peace for something after asking God for it. But the question is whether too strong an emphasis on this can still lead to a subjectivization of God's will, where we can end up using a spiritual language to defend that we make the choice we want most.

Another approach to the question, which in my eyes is just as fruitful, is to start from the distinction between God's hidden and revealed will. We do not fully understand God and His ways. He is inscrutable for us and we are often left with big question marks in the face of God's intervention or what we experience as a lack of intervention. God's will is often hidden and it will remain hidden from us humans. What we also have, however, is God's revealed will. That is where God shows himself and what he wants. In the Bible we meet God's revealed will in God's law. It shows what is good and what is bad. When we are to make good choices, we first need this knowledge of God's will.

Therefore, it is absolutely fundamental when a Christian has to make a choice to ask himself the question: Will my choice lead to life aligning itself in accordance with God's revealed will in the Bible? Or will my choice lead to my life aligning itself to a greater extent against God's will in the Bible? This is the map. The map is black and white, and many of our options become quite clear by taking a look at the map. No matter how deep calm or peace you claim to feel for your choice; if your choice is on a collision course with God's revealed will in the Bible, it is not a choice according to God's will.

The Bible shows us God's ways for our lives. But it is still the case that we can pitch our tent in many different places along these roads. We can settle in Trondheim or Bergen. Get married or stay single. Go to one or the other Bible school. Be part of one or the other congregation. Apply for a new job or remain in your current workplace. And then the next question becomes: how should we navigate between all these choices which are basically within the framework of what is God's will?

In Paul's prayer, knowledge of God's will is connected with the wisdom and insight that the Spirit gives. This close connection between knowledge of God's will and wisdom is important to our choices. Without wisdom, the knowledge of God's will is often of little use. It is possible to know the Sermon on the Mount by heart and still be ill-equipped to make choices. Why? Yes, because the knowledge of God's will is not complemented with wisdom. But what exactly is wisdom? A possible definition of this was given by the Old Testament theologian Gerhard Von Rad, who referred to wisdom as "competence in the realities of life". The reality is that in everyday life we are constantly challenged by questions and challenges where we cannot find the answer in black and white in the Bible. We need wisdom to navigate life's realities. And that is why I liken wisdom to a compass that we can use to navigate life's path.

Wisdom is important, yes, in many cases crucial to making good choices. So how can we grow in wisdom? Firstly, the Bible emphasizes very clearly that it is the wise God who gives his wisdom to us humans (James 1:5). We also see this in Paul's prayer, as he asks for the insight and wisdom that the Spirit gives. Wisdom and insight are thus gifts God gives by his Spirit. From a Christian perspective, wisdom thus springs from the relationship with God. By living a life of faith in Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate (1 Cor 1:30), we learn to know wisdom better and better. A faith, which is constantly being shaped by him who is the originator and perfecter of faith (Heb 12:2), is therefore the most important thing for growing in wisdom.

At the same time, it is not just at the church service or in your personal devotional life that wisdom is allowed to sprout. On the contrary, our whole lives are arenas for wisdom to grow. By consciously observing what we see (Ord 6:6), by learning from our mistakes (Ord 12:1) and by listening to advice and exhortation (Ord 4:1) we can better and better understand ourselves and our world. And through learning to know these factors better, we can also think more and more clearly about what is shown to do and think in our time.
To make wise choices, the compass of wisdom must be constantly calibrated. The orientation points that I have mentioned in this section can be summarized in these different main questions:

• Does faith in Jesus cause certain factors to become less or more important in your choice?
• What do you think is wise to do in light of what you observe in everyday life and the world around you?
• How can past choices you've made, good or bad, help you navigate this choice of path?
• What advice do you get from people you respect and want to listen to?

Hopefully these questions can be of help in assessing what is a wise and a less wise choice.