This is a sermon by my dad’s friend (who is now a pastor in Taiwan) this Sunday, and it does echo with what I got from the Lord recently, so I would like to share it here.

Ever since we go to Church, we all heard sermons that says something like we should give all our burdens to the Lord, we should not do things our way but we should follow God’s will.  Eventually, when we encounter decisions in life we learned to say phrases like “I need to pray more about this,” “Let’s go pray and discuss later,” etc.  Naturally, whenever we’re indecisive we tend to go pray.

Most of the times, we do need to pray and ask for God’s wisdom, because a lot of questions in life Bible didn’t give us a definitive answer.  Classic examples are: Can you eat food that has been offered to idols?  When your parents pass away should you use a secular burial or a Christian burial, if your family is not saved but your parents are (classic question in Taiwan)?  These questions has no simple answers (and they depend on the exact situation), so it is best that we spend time praying and thinking about it.  Bible does teach us to “be all things to all people” for the sake of the Gospel, but the exact details to being “all things” do require divine wisdom.

But there are also something that you shouldn’t pray about, because there’s only one answer, and it is already given in the Bible.  Some examples are the commandments of God, such as: Thou shall not kill, thou shall not perform adultery, thou shall not steal, obey your parents, etc. (Yes, in some extreme and rare circumstances these might not have absolute answers too, but most of the time my point holds).

Imagine you told your kid to finish his homework before he can go out and play.  But then everyday he still come and asks you “Dad I haven’t finish my homework but I want to play basketball, can I play?” How will you feel?  I’m guessing annoyed and angry.

And there’s one such kid in the Bible, his name is Balaam.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is in Numbers 22.  Basically, as the Israelites was about to enter the promised land, one local king feared them and ask Balaam to place a curse on the Israelites.  Balaam prayed to God and God said “do not curse those people, for they are blessed,” so Balaam refused.  But then the king offered more money to Balaam and asked again, so Balaam prayed to God again, as if God will now say: “Wow it’s 3 million now??!!  you should take it!”, so yeah, obviously God got angry, and you can go read about what happens next.

So what’s the point of this message?  The point is that although we need to be flexible for the sake of the Gospel, there are some core values that never change and we should hold on to them.  When we “be all things to all people,” what changes is the presentation, not our essence itself.  We can be flexible to some extent, but there’s some boundary that if we cross it we will be offending God.  So how do we know these core values?  How do we know these boundaries? Easy! Go read your Bible (and yes, reading the Bible everyday is one of the core values).

One last thing I want to talk about is that sometimes this “pray about every decision” mentality comes from the fear of doing things against God’s will.  to these people, it’s as if God is always playing a guessing game with them, and every time they guess wrong God heavily punishes them under the excuse “you did not follow my will!! Now go burn in eternal regret!! Wahaha!!”.  No, our God is full of mercy and grace, and His Son has already died for our sins.  If you feel that something is right, go ahead and do it, and if you got it wrong God will always be there for you to help you fix it.  God is love, and there is no fear in love.

May we all read our Bible everyday, and pray for God’s wisdom in our lives (and pray for those around us, too).