I'm going to take just a few minutes and talk about an encouragement for making the kind of choices you have to make to be sustained in ministry

and to give some guidance for how you make those choices. It seems to me that in

order to both get started in a life of ministry or mission and to stay on the road for decades,

you have to think a certain way about decision-making, about choices that you can make.

And I have in mind just hundreds of choices,

not just a few big ones, like your vocation or your spouse

or your spouse or where you're going to live or go to school. I mean just daily choices

about whether you take this course or read this book or make this visit or make this phone call.

Just thousands of choices that you make and how you go about that, how you think about that and I have I put it in an acronym A B C D E F G H.

There's a word that begins with each of those letters and that will take us 15 minutes or so and so we'll go at it.

So here's my strategy for helping you stay in ministry when you have to make hundreds of choices

that are sometimes so perplexing you don't know what to do. A. Answer the call of God yes. So let's just start

there. We've already heard John Pray it. I'm yours.

When I and I have in mind here the call of God to be his, to be his, I assume that's happened to you in this room. He has called you to be his. I assume that's happened to you in this room. He has called you to be his and you've said I am yours.

And I have in mind the call to follow him in decisive ways. This morning it was going across a culture for a longer

season. So that's the the answering of a prompting of a call and so we begin with simply a answer the call of God yes whenever

you discern that God is leading in a certain way answer it yes now that just creates the problem, that doesn't solve any problems, that just creates the problem of how do you discern that and how do you stay in it and how do you keep making decisions that keep you on that track.

So here's B. Believe what the Bible says.

What I have in mind here is not merely that you're searching through the Bible for concrete directions for a

particular decision. What I have in mind is believe it all so that when you can't find in it the particular guidance for any particular

decision you find many other good things that give you stability for that moment of uncertainty and indecision.

Because Paul said, all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness that the man of God may be equipped for every good work.

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