2,000 Percent Living Lesson Fourteen: Stop to Consider What You Are about to Do from God’s Perspective

Examine your conduct before acting
to see if it will be pleasing to God.
Let us search out and examine our ways,
And turn back to the LORD; ….

— Lamentations 3:40 (NKJV)

Parents teach youngsters to look left and right before
crossing a street, even when walking in a crosswalk with
a walk signal or a green light. Those who are learning to
drive are taught to look left and right before pulling
away from a stop sign. These excellent habits can really
pay off when a nearby driver behaves recklessly or you
are in a foreign country where the traffic comes from
the opposite direction than what you expect.

Unfortunately, many people drop the excellent habits
and proceed in their own ways by taking risky short
cuts. For instance, a pedestrian crossing a street may
only look to see if the walk signal or green light is in his
or her favor and that there are no nearby vehicles. A
driver pulling up to a stop sign may only slow down
before proceeding rapidly in the desired direction.
Harmful consequences can follow for those who use
these short cuts: The pedestrian crossing a street may
not notice that a speeding bike is on a collision course,
and the driver may not observe someone pulling out of
a nearby driveway or making a quick U-turn. An
accident can follow almost as quickly as you can say
“Bam!”

Even when no one has taught us a good way to proceed
in a potentially dangerous situation, those whose souls
have been saved by the blood of Jesus have a helper:
God has put the Holy Spirit in us to tell when we are
about to make a mistake. Unfortunately, those who act
as rapidly as possible often don’t give themselves
enough time to notice and to act on a warning that the
Holy Spirit has provided.

As Christians, God wants us to learn an important
lesson: Before acting, stop and consider your conduct to
see if it will be pleasing to God. This decision-checking
approach has these important advantages:

• It gives us time to consider our motives and the likely
consequences before acting. If there is a problem with
either our motives or the likely consequences, the extra
time helps us to notice that an adjustment is needed and
to make it.
• If the Holy Spirit is trying to warn us, the pause can
create a space in our awareness for that message to be
more easily noticed and acted on.
• If we become conscious of not feeling good about what
we are about to do, we can usually stop from doing
anything until we understand what is the right thing to
do.
• Our attention is turned toward God and His holy Word.
As a result, the right answer for doing His will, and not
ours, is likely to push to the forefront of our consciousness
during our search for Godly answers.
• Each time we avoid sinning, we eliminate or reduce a lot
of harm and avoid creating situations that may cause
others to sin.

I describe more about these advantages and how to
obtain them more often in the following sections.

Consider Your Motives and the Likely
Consequences before Acting

The prudent see danger and take refuge,
but the simple keep going and suffer for it.

— Proverbs 27:12 (NIV)

Lesson Thirteen describes the importance of
considering your motives in the context of how people
might react to seeing a celebrity they admire. A pure
motive may not be enough, however: You can make
enormous blunders with harmful consequences from
the purest of Godly motives. For instance, you might
want to help starving people by raising money for a
charity; but if your methods of delivering the aid upset
many donors so that they never again give money to
that organization, you have probably done more harm
than good. In fact, the purer we consider our motives,
the easier it is for us to act without love towards those
we want to influence and to help because we can start
letting the ends justify the means. Let me encourage you
to instead consider whether God would approve of your
motives, your planned activities, and their effects before
committing to doing something.

Let’s start with your motives. It is rare that anyone does
something purely from a Godly motive. It’s common for
there to be personal, fleshly desires involved, too. Let’s
consider a different person who wants to help starving
people. Let’s say that a charity approaches the person
about being the honoree at a special fund-raising dinner.
Someone might accept such an invitation with pleasure
knowing that starving people will benefit. If the flattery
involved in being asked is appealing to the ego, it’s easy
for that selfish motive to become stronger than the
Godly one. If in doubt as to your motive in such a
situation, it would be better to decline being an honoree
and instead anonymously provide a generous donation
and serve in a subordinate role on a fund-raising
committee for which no public recognition is received.

Thinking through the potential consequences of your
action will usually take more time and care than simply
watching out for and avoiding mixed and impure motives.
Potential consequences can be especially hard to
anticipate when you don’t know very much about the
circumstances. Take enough time to find out. The
representations you receive may be quite different
from the reality.

Here’s an example to show you how subtle the challenges
of determining consequences in advance can be. A highly
regarded charity located near me offers a chance to
contribute the cost of holiday meals for poor people on
Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Although the
charity presents an opportunity to be recognized for such
gifts, you can simply send in a note that says that your gift
is from a person who loves Jesus. Someone who didn’t
check further into the situation would feel confident that
all would be well. And that’s what I did for many years.

I later felt drawn to attend a church that regularly does
volunteer work at this charity, and I also felt called to
serve at the charity. During my first service visit, I was
astonished to discover that virtually no money was
needed to provide meals for poor people there during
holidays: Various other charities and businesses were
delivering far more food than this charity could use, and
volunteers were doing all the cooking, serving, and
cleaning on those days.

While no one said as much, I realized that the charity
was probably using the powerful appeal of feeding poor
people on holidays to attract donations for its other
activities. Whenever I sent money for the stated
purpose of food for holiday meals, I was inadvertently
encouraging the charity to sin by misleading people
about what it was doing. During my visit, I concluded
that the charity was doing good work that should be
supported. I followed up on my discovery about the
free food resources and volunteers by meeting with
one of the pastors at my church to discuss how else I
could contribute to the charity’s work so that I
wouldn’t encourage the charity’s leaders to sin.

From then on, I made my contributions to the worthy
work of the charity in the ways that my pastor
suggested, by serving food as a volunteer and through
providing Christian books and testimonies to those being
helped by the charity. Following these conversations, I
was pleased to see that the next holiday dinner
solicitation I received mentioned that the funds
might be used for other purposes by the charity.

This experience with the charity was a very valuable
one for me in learning to be more careful about being a
good steward of the resources that God has given me to
share with His people. When I consider the charity and
its needs, I also feel much more humble in my desire to
serve. I’m pleased that the lesson has been good for my
spiritual development and for strengthening the
charity’s work.

Give the Holy Spirit Enough Time
to Attract Your Attention

I listen carefully to what God the LORD is saying,
for he speaks peace to his faithful people.
But let them not return to their foolish ways.

— Psalm 85:8 (NLT)

Many things can disrupt messages from the Holy Spirit
so they are not received, understood, and acted on:

• distractions
• pride
• bad motives
• inexperience in listening
• impatience
• pressure from other people
• not putting God first

With so many ways that critical warnings and
encouragements can be missed or ignored, how can a
Christian hope to hear and to appreciate all that the
Holy Spirit is saying? Let me offer some of my
experiences to suggest methods to notice and to
understand the Holy Spirit’s gentle whisperings more
often.

The Holy Spirit rarely sends me messages that resemble
orations (such as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address) or conversations (such as the Bible records
that Adam, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses had with God).
For many years I expected that all the Holy Spirit’s
messages would be very explicit and detailed, much like
instructions for installing a new computer. Some
messages I receive are spelled out, but most of them
aren’t. Now that I know better what to expect, I look
for more subtle clues.

The first message from the Holy Spirit that I notice is
often just a tight feeling in my chest along with
queasiness. Initially, these feelings resemble the effects
of eating a large unhealthy meal. As soon as I stop to
think and realize that I didn’t just eat a large unhealthy
meal, I can begin to focus on what the Holy Spirit is
telling me.

After paying more attention to my feelings, I will
eventually perceive that the feelings are made worse by
thinking about some particular place, person, plan, or
action. Eventually, I’ll be able to narrow down that I’m
supposed to do or not do something through mentally
rehearsing what I might do. The process is similar to
that used when blindfolded people try to find something
by following verbal clues that they are getting “hotter”
as they near the sought object or “colder” as they move
away from it. Some mentally rehearsed actions will
make me feel worse. Other rehearsed actions will make
me feel better. Eventually, one mentally rehearsed
action will leave me feeling totally at peace. When that
happens, I know what the Holy Spirit’s message is.

Another way the Holy Spirit communicates with me is
by making it all but impossible to accomplish what I’m
trying to do. This way of sending a message seems to be
the equivalent of the brake pedal that driving
instructors can use to avoid accidents after a learner
fails to perceive the need to stop. It’s God’s way of
protecting me when I’m in the process of making a big
mistake and I’m not paying enough attention to Him.
I don’t know why messages come in these forms. I’m
sure God is equally capable of sending me louder, more
explicit, and harder to miss messages. I suspect that
the purpose behind sending more subtle messages is to
encourage me to focus more on God. When I only look
to Him, He fills my life so completely that just His
breath can sound like thunder while it shakes me like
an earthquake.

Remain at Rest until You Know What to Do

See that you do not refuse Him who speaks.
For if they did not escape
who refused Him who spoke on earth,
much more shall we not escape if we turn away
from Him who speaks from heaven,
whose voice then shook the earth;
but now He has promised, saying,
“Yet once more I shake not only the earth,
but also heaven.”
Now this, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal
of those things that are being shaken,
as of things that are made, that the things
which cannot be shaken may remain.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom
which cannot be shaken, let us have grace,
by which we may serve God acceptably
with reverence and godly fear.

— Hebrews 12:25-28 (NKJV)

So, how much time should you wait before acting? Keep
waiting until you are completely at peace. That’s true
even if it looks as if some huge problem will occur or
some valuable opportunity will be missed if you don’t
take immediate action. God knows things that you don’t
know. The delay may help you avoid a bigger problem.
Let me give you an example. I was working on a book for
which I was interviewing a lot of CEOs. One CEO was
particularly hard to reach. During the planned telephone
conversation, a huge thunderstorm broke out that kept
causing the telephone line to go dead. I persevered
through dialing the person again and again, and
eventually concluded the interview after hours of
effort. I wish I hadn’t. The information that the person
shared should never have gone into the book: It was
incorrect information. The Holy Spirit was trying to lead
me, but I was resisting. I later fixed the problem as best
I could during the writing, but I would have been better
off never having completed the interview.

I had similar, but not as severe, problems with four
other CEOs, and the information each of them gave me
should never have gone into the book either. My
heavenly Editor knew what He was doing, but I was too
dumb to realize I was receiving His editorial feedback. I
later received more warnings that I was on the wrong
track by dealing with these people. Fortunately, I
heeded some of those alerts and dropped some of the
CEOs from the book. Thank you, God!

I find that it takes me less time now to gain that Godly
peace than when I was younger. Experience seems to
help, but trying to keep Him in mind at all times is a
better way to proceed. If God tries to stop me, I stop
now. I’ve learned my lesson. You should too. Many
people will tell you that all difficulties that are
experienced come from the consequences of sin or the
machinations of the enemy who is in the world. When
you believe those things are causing problems, you may
try twice as hard to accomplish what you are seeking.
Realize that difficulties are also sent by God through His
Holy Spirit to stop us from doing harmful things. Seek
peace instead in your spirit rather than trying to
overturn the universe through exercising your will when
it is opposed to God’s purposes.

When in Doubt,
Concentrate More on God and His Word

“For the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what
you ought to say.”

— Luke 12:12 (NKJV)

One of the other ways that the Holy Spirit speaks to us
is through directing our thinking about God and to what
the Bible says about Him. Let me give you an example
that happened while I was writing this lesson. I don’t
think of myself as an expert on the Holy Spirit, and as
preparation I began to read what the Bible says about
the Holy Spirit. I could feel myself becoming more and
more peaceful. At the beginning of the section about
giving the Holy Spirit enough time to speak and to
attract your attention, I originally included the quote
that you see at the beginning of this section. At the time
I was writing the section, I felt comfortable with what I
had done, but not completely at peace.

I intended to finish writing that section the next day.
Later that night, I followed my usual Wednesday practice
and watched two live church services on the Internet.
During the second service, the two Bible quotes that you
now find leading the immediately prior sections were
read. I wrote those verses down at once, as they
crystallized in my mind exactly what to write for those
sections. As this occurred, I felt as if I was simply taking
dictation from this book’s real author, the Lord. I felt
more than peace at that moment: I felt bliss. The
experience gave me a first-hand appreciation for the
term I’ve so often heard about writing, that a particular
section was “God inspired” prose.

Had I not watched those two services, I’m sure God
would have gotten my attention in some other way
(such as through a later search for Bible quotes) so that
I would have eventually found those verses.

As an example of how well He has such things planned,
my local church was scheduled to do Bible studies of
both verses in the next few weeks. Just as long as I was
faithful in attending and paying attention at those
services, I would have eventually heard the verses.
When you focus on God and His holy Word, what you
need to learn will be presented to you, just when you
need it.

Pause to Avoid Sin and Its Consequences

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.

— 1 John 1:8 (NKJV)

Many Christians rest comfortably in the knowledge that
God’s grace covers their sins so that they can still enjoy
Salvation. While that belief is correct, the view is
incomplete: All sins have negative consequences while
we are on Earth. In addition, dealing with sin’s
consequences can lead to years of pain, effort, and
frustration for you and others.

For evidence, you need look no further than to images
you’ve seen on television of convicted felons who profess
to follow Jesus praying with their pastors and families
after being sentenced to many years in jail. That person
will have to pay for the sin while in jail, and afterward.
The person’s family members will also experience pain
even if they did nothing wrong.

One of the most famous examples of sin’s consequences
came during King David’s reign. Not satisfied with being
the anointed king of God’s chosen people and being able
to rely on God’s favor in battle, David gave in to pride
and ordered that a census be conducted to determine how
many fighting men were available to him (2 Samuel
24, NKJV, and 1 Chronicles 21, NKJV). Even though David
was warned by his military leader, Joab, not to do this
because it was a sin, David persisted. After God became
angry because of his rebellion, David was provided by
God with the choice of three extreme punishments. David
chose to let a plague afflict the Hebrews, and 70,000 died
in just three days before God stayed the hand of His angel
just as it was poised over Jerusalem in preparation for
destroying the city.

Each time that we obey God, rather than disobey God,
the shift from potentially negative to positive
consequences can be enormous for us and those whose
lives we affect. Wanting to protect other people
someone cares about from such consequences would
encourage even the most deliberate sinner to think twice
before opposing God.

We can anticipate these dire consequences by considering
what will happen when the sin is ultimately exposed and
also what God did to those in the Bible who sinned in
similar ways and to their families, friends, and
acquaintances. King David provides another example
through his lust for Bathsheba, lust that led to adultery
and murder.

David slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and she
became pregnant. David tried to cover up his wrong by
ordering Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, home
from war. After Uriah avoided being with Bathsheba,
David sent him back to battle with secret orders to Joab
to put Uriah in a perilous position and then to pull troops
back, leaving Uriah to be killed.

Then the consequences of the sin began to emerge. After
David married Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan
confronted David about his sin through a story about a
rich man stealing a little pet lamb, and David declared
that the rich man should pay back the theft fourfold.
After Nathan told David that he was the rich man in the
story, David confessed and repented. God forgave David
but required a fourfold payment: Bathsheba’s child by
David died; David’s son, Amnon, raped his half-sister,
Tamar; Absalom, another of David’s sons, killed
Amnon; and Absalom later rebelled against David, drove
David from Jerusalem, slept with David’s concubines,
and was killed by Joab during the ensuing wars, causing
David great grief (2 Samuel 11-19, NKJV).

Learn to hesitate to sin. Here’s one circumstance where
procrastinators do better. How can we do that? One
approach is to create a substantial pause before acting
on any idea or impulse. Unless someone’s life or soul is
at stake and you need to take instant action, a
considered action based on an idea or a Godly impulse
is always going to be better than a knee-jerk reaction.
If the action could have important long-term
consequences, use the pause to choose to let more time
pass before acting. Almost all decisions are improved
by being considered after a good night’s sleep. During the
delay, you can disconnect from the momentary urgency
to take an eternal perspective.

You’ll also have time to pray, to read the Bible, to pay
attention to the Holy Spirit, and to consult with your
brothers and sisters in Christ before acting. In seeking
others’ views, go to those who will give you the most
Godly and candid advice, such as someone who is familiar
with the challenges you are facing and knows the terrible
consequences of such sin firsthand. Before you ask for
the advice, pray for a clean and humble heart to receive
the advice with only an intention to do the right thing.

Until you are sure that you are right in taking the action
from every perspective, including how spiritually
comfortable you feel with it, keep delaying action. While
there’s no guarantee that your flesh will yield to your
spirit, at least you will have used your resources to the
best of your ability and sought out God’s will to
strengthen you. If you determine that your impulse is a
wrong, fleshly one, see if there’s some way that you can
make it more difficult or almost impossible to do the
wrong thing. For instance, David could have
permanently closed off the roof and other parts of his
palace that enabled him to watch women bathing. He
could also have put out a decree that no bathing was to
occur on roofs. He could also have left to join his army
rather than lazing around Jerusalem with too much
time on his hands. And so on. You can put up similar
barricades that will make it harder for you to do the
wrong thing.

In sharing the fourteen lessons, I hope you feel blessed
with knowledge and encouragement to accomplish much
more for God. Naturally, these fourteen lessons could have
been extended into many more, each one of which would
have provided some new helpful guidance. If we try to
operate with too many lessons, it’s easy to focus on
establishing spiritually empty daily rituals rather than on
building a God-loving and humble life that is spiritually
fruitful for Him. We can each trust that God has an
amazing plan for our life, one that these lessons can help
to facilitate. Praise God, always!

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.