Making Right Choices – Part 3
Update: 2025-01-23
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Are you struggling to make decisions? Today on 15 Minutes in the Word Joyce shares how God's Word equips us with all the wisdom needed to live a fulfilling and satisfying life, one choice at a time.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Welcome to Fifty Minutes in the Word with New York Times bestselling author Joy Smire.
00:00:06
On today's program, Joy's will be teaching from her series Unleashing God's Wisdom.
00:00:11
On any given day, there can be multiple decisions, all of them needing answers.
00:00:16
Whether it's one big decision or many small daily choices, each of us face these dilemmas in life and it can be overwhelming to confront them alone.
00:00:24
But there is hope.
00:00:26
God has the answers and in this series, Joy's will help teach how to receive God's wisdom and guidance for every single day.
00:00:33
Now here's Joy's with today's series Unleashing God's Wisdom.
00:00:37
If we look at verse 15, it says, "Then name and return to the man of God and he and all of his company and stood before him and he said, 'Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.' So now please accept a gift from your servant and Elisha said a very wise thing.
00:00:56
He said, 'As the Lord lives before whom I stand, I will accept none.' And he urged him to take it, but Elisha refused.
00:01:06
And then if we look at verse 20, it says, 'But Gahazi, the servant of Elisha, the man of God, said, 'Behold, my master spared this name and the Syrian.
00:01:18
And I receive him from his hands, and in I receive him from his hands what he brought.
00:01:24
But as the Lord lives, I will run after him and get something from him.' So Gahazi followed after name and when name and saw one running after him, he lighted down from the chariot to meet him and said,
00:01:36
'Is all well?' And he said, 'Yes, all is well, my master has sent me to say to you, 'There has just come to me from the hill country of Ephraim, two young men,
00:01:46
the sons of the prophets.
00:01:47
When I pray, if you will give them a talent of silver and two changes of garments, he's lying, he's not telling the truth.
00:01:54
He's making up a story now by these other two needy people, and all just so he can get money for himself.' Verse 23, 'And name and said, 'Be pleased to take two talents and he urged him and bound two talents of silver and two bags with two changes of clothes,
00:02:09
yada yada yada.' Verse 25, 'He went in and he stood before his mastery, Elisha, who said, 'Where have you been?' He said, 'Oh, I didn't go anywhere.' See,
00:02:20
Elisha was like God in this instance, where Gehazi went, his spirit went with him.
00:02:28
Can I tell you something?
00:02:29
God sees everything we do.
00:02:33
Even you guys way up there, and you watching at home curled up on your couch, thinking nobody knows you're there.
00:02:45
I had a guy give a testimony, a few weeks ago in our TV studio that just cracked me up.
00:02:55
He said, 'I was not living for God.
00:02:57
I was doing drugs and drinking and all kinds of stuff.' And he said, 'One day I was leaned back in the recliner, drinking a beer.' And he said, 'You look, my mother had you on,
00:03:08
he said, 'You look through the screen.' He said, 'You leaned back in that recliner, drinking that beer.' He said, 'It's scared the tar out of me,
00:03:20
I got saved.' It's so amazing to me to think that we have this conference here, but people are going to see this in 40-some odd different languages and many, many, many different parts of the world.
00:03:33
Can you imagine just a little thing like start making better choices?
00:03:39
Or a radical shift that can make in your life?' I mean, when God said, 'I said before you life and that's, please choose life that you and your descendants may live.' And he didn't mean breathe,
00:03:53
he meant live, he meant have a life like God knows life, righteousness, peace and joy and victory and a reason to get up and bear in good fruit in your life.
00:04:03
For whatever reason, Elijah didn't want to take the guy's money.
00:04:07
He didn't think that that was, he didn't feel like he needed to be taking money for healing somebody.
00:04:13
But his servant, standing by, said, 'Here's an opportunity for me to get some money.' So he ran after the guy and lied and took the money,
00:04:24
but Elijah's spirit went with him.
00:04:27
Verse 26, 'Elisha said to him, 'Did not my spirit go with you when the man turned from his chariot to meet you, was it a turn to take money, garments, olive orchards, vineyards, sheep,
00:04:37
oxen, men's servant, and made servant?' He didn't say it was wrong to have it, he just said, 'This is not the right time.
00:04:43
That's not what we need to be concerned about now.
00:04:47
Therefore, the leprosy of namens shall cleave to you and get this end to your offspring.' That doesn't sound very fair,
00:04:58
does it?
00:04:59
What the truth of the matter is is being a parent is an almost unbelievable, heavy, major responsibility because the decisions that we make,
00:05:15
every decision that we make, does affect our kids.
00:05:21
My grandfather's decisions affected my father, my father's affected me, somewhere in the middle of all the mess in my life.
00:05:29
I managed to start making good decisions, and now my kids have a much better life than what I was having at their age.
00:05:39
And their kids are even ramped up way beyond that because now, you know, at just seven, eight, nine, ten years old, they know stuff from being in Sunday school their whole life that I didn't know I was 50.
00:05:54
And so every choice that you make, you deciding to be here tonight will affect your family.
00:06:00
Those of you listening to the word by TV and I mean taking this seriously, this will affect your family.
00:06:06
We see it all the time, turn people's lives around.
00:06:10
It's an amazing thing.
00:06:12
So he got, he said, 'This leprosy will cleave to you and to your children now.
00:06:19
And we went back to the second Kings 2, and it's a little bit too long to read all of it, but I suggest you read like the first 16 verses sometime on your own of chapter 2.
00:06:31
And I'll just kind of tell you about it.
00:06:33
Elijah, who did this miracle for Naman, had been the servant of the great prophet Elijah.
00:06:41
And Elijah was going to be taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.
00:06:46
And for some reason, he kept trying to get rid of Elijah.
00:06:51
You stay here and I'm going to go over here and Elijah kept saying, "No, as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.
00:06:56
I will not leave you.
00:06:57
I will not leave you."
00:06:58
Now, it might have been kind of hard if you're serving this guy all of his life for him to keep trying to get rid of you.
00:07:05
But I think it was a test.
00:07:07
You might say a final test that Elijah had to pass, because I'll tell you one thing that God loves.
00:07:13
He loves people who finish what they start.
00:07:18
I'm sure you guys think it's great that I'm on TV now and it's like, "Wow, wow, that must be great.
00:07:23
Praise the Lord.
00:07:24
Hell do you?"
00:07:25
Oh, but dear God, nobody knows what I went through to get from where I started, to where I am.
00:07:34
And I just so encourage you to finish what you start.
00:07:40
Finish your walk with God, grow up, go after spiritual maturity, not just stuff, and whatever you do, don't let money rule your decisions.
00:07:50
Don't be like Gehazi and let money rule your decisions.
00:07:55
Well, I know that Gehazi knew about Elisha.
00:08:00
He knew this situation that Elisha had with Elijah and long story short, Elijah finally told Elisha, "What do you want me to do for you?"
00:08:10
He said, "I want a double portion of your spirit."
00:08:12
It was a bold little guy too.
00:08:17
I want a double portion of your spirit when you go.
00:08:20
And so Elisha said to him, "If you see me when I go," and I think there's a hidden message that says, "If you stick with this thing till the very last minute,
00:08:30
if you see me when I go, then God will give you what you're asking for."
00:08:35
And sure enough, his mantle fell, Elisha picked it up, and it had the same power in it for him if not more so than what it had for Elijah.
00:08:43
Well, I don't know when Gehazi came into the picture, but maybe he was around to see some of this, if not, he certainly heard about it.
00:08:50
And I just wonder how many times in Gehazi's life, after he sold out for a little bit of money in a change of clothes and a few olive trees or whatever it was he traded for.
00:09:04
I wonder how many times he thought about the man he could have been.
00:09:13
What can you be if you make some better choices even right now?
00:09:19
What kind of life can you have for you and your family if you make the hard choices when it's hard to make them?
00:09:26
Don't wait for a more convenient time.
00:09:29
The Bible says in Ecclesiastes that if you wait for a more convenient time, you never get around to sewing.
00:09:36
You never sew those seeds of obedience.
00:09:38
If you wait until you think it's not going to hurt, or it's going to be more comfortable, it's not going to cost you anything.
00:09:44
Don't you live your life and then wonder about the man that or the woman that you could have been.
00:09:51
Let's talk about money for a minute.
00:09:54
First Timothy 610 says, "The love of money is a root of all evil."
00:09:56
It doesn't say money is evil, it says loving money is evil.
00:10:01
Now this is my personal opinion.
00:10:03
I think one of the reasons why God asked us to give a portion of our money away, the first fruits of all your increase.
00:10:11
So this is a lifetime ongoing thing.
00:10:14
Every time you get a little something, God wants you to give a little love it away.
00:10:18
Why does He do that?
00:10:21
Because He never wants us to love money.
00:10:23
The only way that you can ever be assured that you won't get greedy is to be generous.
00:10:29
Did you hear me?
00:10:31
I said the only way that you can fight greed is with generosity.
00:10:37
And we should be afraid of greed more than any other single thing because the Bible says that greed takes away the life of its possessor.
00:10:46
Let's just think about a couple of hypothetical situations.
00:10:52
Let's just say George has a nice family, a wife, let me love a couple of kids who he adores.
00:11:00
He's got a job that's not too far from home.
00:11:01
He doesn't have to spend a lot of gas to get there.
00:11:05
He works hard during the week, but he's never required to put in overtime hours and he has good benefits.
00:11:11
You know, they were nice benefits.
00:11:14
He's not in management.
00:11:15
He's not in leadership.
00:11:16
But George has got a good life.
00:11:19
He loves God.
00:11:20
He loves his family.
00:11:21
Loves his wife.
00:11:22
He's got joy.
00:11:23
He's got peace.
00:11:25
And he gets offered a job from another company.
00:11:29
They heard what a good employee he was and they offered him another job in management where he'd have his own office, his own parking place with his name on it.
00:11:40
That's big, you know.
00:11:43
And he would make another $200 a month.
00:11:49
Well, he takes the job because of the extra money and also because of the little bit of importance he was going to feel being a boss and having his own name on this parking place and so on and so forth.
00:12:01
But the truth is, is now that he has people working under him, he's got a lot more responsibility.
00:12:06
Every time something goes wrong with the company, he's expected to be there.
00:12:11
Electricity goes out on the weekend.
00:12:12
He's got to be there on the weekend.
00:12:14
So long story short, he ends up missing church a lot.
00:12:17
He's not home nearly as much as he used to be and when he is, he's rather frustrated and worn out because he's working too much.
00:12:24
And by the way, he was really disappointed when he got his check that month and notice that after federal tax and state tax and city tax and so security tax,
00:12:35
he hadn't get that much of that $200 anyway and then he had to dress differently at that job so he had to buy some better clothes and it was further away so he had to buy more gas and it was more wear and tear on his car.
00:12:47
So he finally ended up realizing that maybe he was clearing $65 to $70 a month.
00:12:53
And for that money, he sold his happy little life.
00:12:58
And so for $65 a month, he got stress, headaches, stomach aches, marriage problems, and his relationship with God.
00:13:09
It came weaker and weaker.
00:13:11
Thanks for listening.
00:13:12
James 1.5 encourages us that if we desire wisdom, we need only ask God and it will be given.
00:13:18
So what are we waiting for?
00:13:20
It begins with trust, trusting him opens the door to his leading.
00:13:24
As we make the journey with God and his word, we'll discover that no matter how big or small the issue, he is ready to help guide us.
00:13:31
As we learn to make right choices today, we'll be happier with our tomorrow.
00:13:35
For more resources from Joyce, visit JoyceMire.org.
00:13:38
Well, you know, I am committed to bring you the word of God on a regular basis.
00:13:45
And I need you to be committed in partnership to help us continue bringing you the programs we bring you and sharing the love of Christ and the Word of Christ all over the world.
00:13:56
As a thank you to anyone signing up for convenient automatic giving for the first time, we'd like to send you a special gift for your donation.
00:14:03
Join us in partnership as we share Christ and love people.
00:14:07
Contact us right now at JoyceMire.org.
00:14:11
Thank you for listening to 50 Minutes in the Word with Joyce.
00:14:15
[Music]
00:14:30
