Some of you are undoubtedly wrestling with big decisions right now. According to a study cited in Psychology Today human beings make an eye-popping 35,000 choices a day. If that’s true, and I must admit that is a hard number to believe, then an average person makes 12,775,000 decisions a year. Multiply that over the span of a lifetime and the total number of decisions that we make is truly staggering. Now, most of the decisions that people make will be small and inconsequential, like whether to finish listening to a song on the radio or change the channel. However, some choices will be truly momentous. Sometimes we have a sense of the gravity of a choice as we are making it but often times we don’t fully appreciate the far-reaching consequences of a choice until much later. Our choices powerfully shape our lives for good and for bad.
The 13th chapter of Genesis tells the story of a momentous choice. There were some circumstances that gave rise to a problem, and that problem forced a decision between two men, Abram and his nephew, Lot. Those choices would, in time, lead to some unintended consequences. This Sunday we’ll study the choices that each of these men made and see what helpful principles it holds for us as we wrestle with big decisions in our own lives.