The Power of Wise Decision Making
I read something today that made me slap my desk.
I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t punched in the gut, I wasn’t upset.
My mind was absolutely BLOWN.
I continually learn that scripture, no matter how many times you read a chapter or verse, is going to provide something fresh and impactful to your faith.
Today I was reminded of that. I was reading 1 Kings 3 in my office and I was ready to skim through it. My thought process was - “I know that chapter. Solomon asks for wisdom, two women are in a dispute, cut a baby in half, yada yada yada.”
It was going to be a get in, get out type of reading. God proved me wrong there.
Let me show you why.
1 Kings 3:7-9, ““Lord my God, you have now made your servant king in my father David’s place. Yet I am just a youth with no experience in leadership. 8 Your servant is among your people you have chosen, a people too many to be numbered or counted. 9 So give your servant a receptive heart to judge your people and to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of yours?”
As a young leader who tries to raise young leaders, I’ve often thought to myself, As a young leader what do I need to ask God for? The answers were typical: preaching ability, an it factor, knowledge of scripture, good recruiting skills, etc.
Throughout my life, I have heard and read that Solomon asked for wisdom, or another word for that being discernment. Yet, I was missing a very important context piece. Solomon recognized that he was young leader with no experience meaning he didn’t know what to do.
Out of all the things that he could have asked for, he asked for the one thing that is the anti-thesis of being a young leader.
You can naturally have communication skills, the it factor, and be a killer recruiter. God has blessed people with those gifts and we can just have them. Wisdom though? We have been told wisdom comes with time, experience, and sitting in the saddle.
But is that true? Apparently not.
Look at Solomon’s thought process.
Verse 7, Solomon recognizes that he doesn’t know what to do.
Verse 8, Solomon recognizes there are a lot of people he is in position to lead.
Verse 9, Solomon recognizes that he will have to make the right decisions to lead them well.
But why does wisdom matter here?
When you are a leader, you have to make decisions. Experienced leaders get to learn from past decisions. New leaders have no past to lean on, they just hope and pray they made the right decision until they see the outcome of the call they made.
That difference in wisdom matters because leadership boils down to decision making.
You decide what you are going to teach.
You decide who you are going to recruit.
You decide what your calendar looks like.
You decide how hard you are going to work.
You decide how to help someone.
You decide if you will do a connect time.
You decide if you have an attitude of unity.
When we don’t have wisdom, it’s easy to make the wrong decision. But if we have wisdom, we just keep making the right decisions over and over and over again.
If you look at the leaders that you most respect, they are consistently good at doing things well. That is the mark of a good leader.
Decision making can be terrifying, but wisdom takes situations that can feel foreign to situations that feel familiar. When you are familiar with what the right and wrong decisions are - it is certainly easier to make the right ones.
So how do you make better decisions as a young leader? I wish I had a more complicated answer. But it really is just to ask God for wisdom.