Decisions We Regret Making

Intimacy with God is challenging if you believe that you’ve made an irrevocable mistake that has brought His disapproval. When we’ve made choices that we believe have fouled things up, it’s hard to really believe that God will give us the very best we might have had otherwise. We sometimes tend to think that even though He will bless us, it won’t be as good as it might have been. Even though we may believe it is our own fault, this kind of attitude will interfere with how we perceive God charting our life course.

Have you made decisions which you believe might have messed up the way your life could have been if you had made wiser choices? There is good news which can set you free from that kind of damaging perspective. The news is that God’s love is bigger than your mistakes! No mistake you have ever made or ever could make will cause your life to jump track.

You belong to God and it is His responsibility, not yours, to insure that you stay the course. That fact is inherent to the very meaning of the word grace, which suggests it’s all up to Him, not you. You may make apparent detours in life, but God’s love for you is great enough that He won’t allow you to veer off His assigned path and wander out of His will for your life.

The Psalmist said that “The Lord has established His throne in the heavens; And His sovereignty rules over all” (Psalm 103:19). This world doesn’t exist in a cosmic setting in which events happen by chance. Everything in existence functions under the superintending guidance of a sovereign God. On the grand scale, “By Him all things were created, in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether [it is] thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created through Him and for Him (Colossians 1:16).

God is a big God who has everything under control. The stars don’t hang there in the sky on nothingness. They are held there by the omnipotent will of a sovereign God. The tide on the beach doesn’t coincidently stop at its boundaries and return to the sea. It is ordered back by divine design. The earth doesn’t keep spinning on its axis under its own momentum. God designed it that way.

However, this same God who attends to the majestic details of the universe also gives meticulous attention to the minutia of life. For instance, the Bible says that He has the hairs of your head numbered. That’s serious attention to detail! Not one baby bird falls out of its nest and dies apart from His direction. (See Matthew 10:29-30). He is God of both the macroscopic and the microscopic. Nothing is too big or too small to be beyond His direct control.

Considering that man is God’s crowning touch in creation and that Christians in particular are His divine workmanship (see Ephesians 2:10), don’t think for a minute that God isn’t up close and personal in the affairs of your life. The Bible says that God “ponders” all your goings. (See Proverbs 5:21) The word denotes the idea of somebody walking alongside you with His face inches away from yours, carefully examining, scrutinizing, analyzing every move you make. Not only does God ponder your actions, but He even ponders your attitudes and the motivation that cause you to do the things you do. (See Proverbs 21:2) Make no mistake about it, God has His eye on you and always has.

There is not one person who is continuously on my mind, but you are never out of God’s conscious thought or away from His immediate attention. He has been obsessed with you for all eternity and can’t take His mind off you. He is so in love with you that He has committed all the resources at His disposal (which are considerable) to your well being. God has never glanced away from you for a moment, so that in that moment you did something He didn’t expect. He has set you right in front of His face and will keep you there forever. (See Psalm 41:12) David, the Psalmist said, “You scrutinize my path” (Psalm 139:3).

Don’t believe the lie which suggests that you have made choices which now negatively affect how God relates to you or limits the extent to which He can use your life for His glory. The prophet Daniel saw it clearly when he said that all the inhabitants of the earth add up to nothing when compared to God’s divine determination. He wrote that God “does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, no one can ward off His hand” (Daniel 4:35).

Before I understood this truth, one time I was scolding myself for a wrong choice I had made. “Because of my own foolishness, now God can’t do the thing it was obvious He had planned!” I thought as I considered the situation at hand. At that moment, a thought popped into my head and said, “Don’t kid yourself. You’re not that strong.” I think I know whose voice that was, don’t you? God will do what God wants to do and we flatter ourselves when we think that we are big enough to stop it.

(This article is an excerpt from my book, A Divine Invitation. For more information about the book, click here: http://gracewalkresources.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=738 )