Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets (5 Questions To Help You Determine Your Next Move) Order Printed Copy

Author: Andy Stanley
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About the Book

"Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets" by Andy Stanley is a practical guide that offers readers five important questions to consider when making significant life decisions. By reflecting on these questions, individuals can gain clarity and confidence in determining their next steps, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and regret-free life.

Lilias Trotter

Long before the concept of the 10-40 window was invented or became a popular term in missions circles, a thirty-four-year-old promising artist named Isabella Lilias Trotter (1853–1928) landed in North Africa in 1888 along with two of her friends. They had neither mission agency support nor training but immediately began studying the Arabic language with the intention of sharing the gospel as widely as they could for as long as they could. For the next forty years, this creative, dynamic woman poured out her life, her artistic abilities, and her linguistic skills to make the gospel known amid many difficulties. Her journals tell of her daily experience of desperately depending on the divine resources of the Holy Spirit.[1] “The life of Lilias Trotter challenges the world’s meaning of success, potential, and fulfillment.” The life of Lilias Trotter challenges the world’s meaning of success, potential, and fulfillment. Through Trotter’s art, writings, and life story come glimpses of Christ’s power in the prayers of his child and faithful witness. Her day-by-day, decade-by-decade journals reveal a life characterized by trust in her Savior and inward rest in his power for victory over sin and darkness. Her success should not be measured numerically, but rather in the fact that Lilias succeeded in learning about prayer and love for Muslims. Her life attests to the exceeding value of knowing and preferring Christ above all else. Her personal devotion to Jesus Christ is exemplary and instructive not only for aspiring missionaries but for all who desire to live wholeheartedly for the glory of God. Laying down Her Life Lilias was born into a wealthy Victorian family, and they considered the value of walking humbly before God to be of first importance. A talented artist, she attracted the attention of John Ruskin, the noted Victorian art critic and Oxford lecturer. Some of her paintings and leaves from her sketchbook can be found in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. In 1874, Lilias attended a six-day convention that emphasized the importance of the daily application of Scripture in her quest for deeper intimacy with God. She experienced a renewed vitality in personal and corporate worship. Her call to wholeheartedly follow Christ in obedience came during a call to prayer. She wrote of this in her journal: “To bear His name with all that is wrapped up in it of fragrance and healing and power, to enter into His eternal purpose, is the calling for which it is well worth counting all things as loss.” [2] From then on, rather than invest her extraordinary life in the things of this world, Lilias was compelled by a strong yearning for her Savior and the world he loves. In radical obedience, she left the promising artistic career that Ruskin offered her and the comforts of England for a life of missionary service in Algeria. “In radical obedience, she left a promising artistic career and the comforts of England for a life of missionary service in Algeria.” Praying with Passion Trotter’s intercession for Algerians provides inspiration to those who desire to see all peoples worship God. She spent lengthy, frequent sessions of retreat in the hills overlooking the city of Algiers. She prayed and turned her eyes on Jesus, his Word, and his revelation in creation. As she watched the broken waves pushed by the heart of the ocean crashing on the shore of the bay, she waited with faith to see “God’s high tide” sweep across the Muslim world. Lilias was a contemporary of the great missionary to Muslims, Samuel Zwemer. She learned much from him about the power of prayer to pierce the veil of darkness shrouding the Muslim hearts and to engage in the spiritual battle for souls of those held captive by the adversary. Her example of perseverance in prayer is an encouragement for those today who are interceding for God’s high tide to fill the earth and sweep away the veil of darkness. The writings of Lilias Trotter recognize the work of the adversary to hold nonbelievers captive through their unbelief and his power to keep the life-giving truth from reaching them. She pled for Christians to ask God to do a new work among “hard-bound peoples and to generate a fire of the Holy Spirit to melt away though icy barriers and set a host free!” [3] Proclaiming God’s Word in Power Courageous and innovative in her witness to the Algerians, Lilias observed and learned to witness effectively to her neighbors. In 1919, Trotter began writing tracts for Nile Mission Press. She assisted a Swedish missionary in translation and editing the gospels of Luke and John in colloquial Arabic, “into a language that the Arab mother could read to her child.”[4] She also wrote stories in parable form that appealed to her audience, and she creatively illustrated them in Eastern style, the results of which gained wide circulation. The story of Lilias Trotter continues to inspire and mobilize those who long to worship around the throne of Christ with all peoples. She laid down her life and talents and allowed Christ to use her in creative and innovative ways. Her life was one of passionate prayer, dependence on God’s overcoming power, and confidence in proclaiming the life-giving Word of God. Her story encourages others to follow in her footsteps and consecrate their life to the “hardest work and the darkest sinners.” [5] Paula Hemphill and her husband, Ken, have shared fifty years of ministry together. The stories of missionary pioneers in North Africa captured Paula’s heart as a young pastor’s wife, calling her to a lifetime of prayer for Muslim peoples. The Hemphills have three married daughters and twelve grandchildren. Endnotes: For more on Lilias Trotter, see Many Beautiful Things: the Life and Vision of Lilias Trotter (Oxvision Films, 2016) or read the excellent biography by Miriam Huffman Rockness, A Passion for the Impossible (Discovery House, 2003). [1] One journal entry later became the inspiration for “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus,” a popular hymn written by Helen H. Lemmel: “Turn your soul’s full vision on Jesus and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him and the divine attributes by which God’s saints are made, even in the twentieth century, will lay hold of you.” (I.R. Stewart, The Love that Was Stronger: Lilias Trotter of Algiers (London: Lutterworth Press, 1958), 54.)

expect god to do something unexpected

God doesn’t do things the way we think he should. That theme emerges reading de-conversion stories or listening to people explain why they left Christianity based on supposedly intellectual arguments. God doesn’t fit our expectations. He is not like us; he is wholly different. Although not put in exactly these words, the argument goes something like this: If God is perfect and good, he should have revealed himself more clearly, he should have preserved the Scriptures without any textual variants, he should have produced a Bible less open to so many different interpretations (it should somehow be transhistorical and transcultural), he should have completely removed evil and suffering right away. These arguments could be rephrased: If I were God, I would have done things differently . In comparison to our enlightened reason, God’s actions are seen as wanting and deficient. Our preferences, wisdom, rationality, and expectations become the standard to which God must submit or be rejected as false and untrustworthy. There seems to be no place left for a humble assessment of the limits and frailty of human ability and rationality. Scandal and Folly at the Cross God often does not do things the way that we as humans think he should. The clearest example of this is Jesus’s crucifixion. Paul argues that “we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). Paul is not embracing fideism, blind faith, or anti-intellectualism; he is recognizing the limits of human rationality and the reality that God is not bound to act as we think he should. The crucifixion may have been scandalous to Jews and ridiculous to Gentiles, but it was God’s plan to save and restore his image-bearing representatives. Scandal and Folly at Christmas We are so familiar with the Christmas narratives that we often fail to see how they are similar to the crucifixion: certainly scandalous, debatably foolish, but nevertheless, God’s plan to fulfill his promises and save his people. First, the virgin conception was scandalous. Joseph himself assumed infidelity and intended to divorce Mary. Around 100 years after Matthew wrote his Gospel, Origen describes the common non-Christian Jewish counter-narrative. He accuses him of having “invented his birth from a virgin,” and upbraids him with being “born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child.” (Origen, Against Celsus 1.28, in The Ante-nicene Fathers , 4.408) These claims have no surviving first-century corroborating evidence, but it is easy enough to see how they arose in response to Christian claims about Jesus’s virgin conception. Could God have done things in a way less open to ridicule? Or could he not have somehow provided more supernatural proof? Of course he could have; but he didn’t. And skeptics mock. Meanwhile, Christians celebrate this truth as the way God chose to act to save the world through his Son Jesus, fully God and fully man. Second, the incarnation itself is incredible to believe — did God really need to become man? Justin Martyr describes early criticism of Christianity from the mid-second century, You ought to feel ashamed when you make assertions similar to theirs [Greco-Roman religions], and rather [should] say that this Jesus was born man of men. . . . You endeavor to prove an incredible and well-nigh impossible thing; [namely], that God endured to be born and become man. (Justin, Dial . 67–68, in The Ante-nicene Fathers , 1.231–232) It may be hard to believe, but God became man; he entered our pain, our suffering, and our death in order to defeat death for all of us. As the book of Hebrews makes clear, he experienced our limitations and temptations in order to become our perfect and eternal High Priest and to offer a perfect and final sacrifice for sin. Could God have done it a different, less painful, less embarrassing way? Maybe, but he didn’t. Third, why the lowly birth? Why be born in poverty, in obscurity, and in weakness? We are so familiar with the Christmas story that we fail to see how counterintuitive this all is. In saving the world, God seems to have gone the most difficult route imaginable. Like Satan’s temptation to instantly give Jesus global sovereignty without the suffering of the cross, there could have been quite a few quicker and easier ways to get this done. But as Paul notes, God’s “folly” is greater than man’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:25). Trust God to Be God As you reflect this Christmas season on your life, your struggles, your disappointments, your victories, your faith, and your hope, remember that God is God and we are not. Jesus’s death on the cross was simultaneously foolishness to the wise in the world, to those who are perishing, and a demonstration of the power and wisdom of God to those of us who believe. He doesn’t always do things the way we might expect or wish he would, but when it comes to God, shouldn’t we know by now to expect the unexpected? Faith in God certainly doesn’t make us safe (as if we were living in a magical bubble in which nothing bad could happen and we were guaranteed success at every turn), but it does make us incredibly secure. Because he is faithful and good, we can trust and worship without always completely understanding. Christianity did not begin, survive, and expand primarily through intellectual argumentation but through a demonstration of the Spirit, who is the true power of Christmas.