4 Signs God Is Quietly Preparing You for a Life-Changing Decision

We rarely know when a life-changing decision will need to be made.

All of a sudden, you may meet the person God wants you to marry one day.

Without having a lot of time to mentally prepare, you may be presented with an amazing job opportunity; but you will be required to move to a new state.

Or perhaps someone has been hiding a secret that will suddenly get exposed and you will be forced to deal with the fallout.

While we cannot see the future, God can. In love, he is often preparing us to make life-changing decisions before we even know what these decisions are.

Therefore, here are 4 ways God will quietly prepare you for this without you even realizing it.

1. Discontentment

We should always be content in Christ (Philippians 4:4). However, God is often planting the seeds for a life-changing decision by allowing your discontentment in a certain area of life to build up. For example:

• Perhaps for years you have assumed God has called you to a life of singleness. However, quietly within your heart, your discontentment with being alone has been building up. Perhaps you meet someone that sparks your true desire for marriage that has been buried. Through the discontentment, you have been prepared to make this life-changing decision to actively pursue a relationship instead of remaining single (1 Corinthians 7:36).
• Maybe your community has been slowly dwindling over the years. Little by little, you are growing more and more discontent with your church, with your shrinking friend community, and with your family’s effort to stay in touch with you. Maybe you are then presented with an opportunity to move to a new state that has many good opportunities for you to regain what you have lost over the years. 

The personal examples are countless. The point here is that God can often prepare your heart for a life-changing decision by allowing you to become discontent (1 Thessalonians 3:1-2).

2. Discipline

Discipline is often used to prepare us for something in the future. God disciplines those he loves. Hebrews 12:11 (NIV) states, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” For example:

• It’s possible that over the years, you have been less effective in ministry than you could have been because of impatience towards people. Perhaps God loving begins to convict you of this sin and gives you opportunities to increase your patience. And then perhaps a new door for ministry opens up. You would then be prepared to walk through that door.
• Maybe you have struggle with a secret sin for years. But now you have been lovingly exposed and you are humble enough to see that this is God’s loving discipline working in your life. Perhaps you had to overcome this secret sin before God was free to bless you with something you’ve been wanting. When the blessing comes, you will then be prepared to steward it well.

3. Dilemmas

A dilemma is a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more undesirable ones. Dilemmas can be used by God as tests that will also train us to have greater discernment. Hebrews 5:14 states, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

Like anything else in life, your ability to make the correct choice will increase with practice. So it makes sense that if God is preparing you for a life-changing decision in the future, he will teach you how to make good decisions through presenting you with many smaller decisions first.

It’s like the life of Joseph. He first had to learn lessons with his family (Genesis 37). He then had to learn lessons in Potiphar’s household (Genesis 39). He then had to learn lessons in running the prison (Genesis 39-40). And only then was he prepared to rule over Egypt as Pharaoh’s second in command (Genesis 41).

4. Devotion

When it’s time to make a life-changing decision, you will end up doing what you have consistently been doing. If you have been consistently taking the easy way out in life, you will take the easy way here too. If you have consistently been making choices to please your flesh, you will choose to please your flesh when the big decisions come too.

Thus, God will prepare you to make the right choice when the life-changing decision comes through first teaching you how to be devoted to him in the day-to-day matters of life (Colossians 3:17, 1 Corinthians 10:31).

Proverbs 24:27 says, “Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.” This verse is saying there is wisdom in rightly ordering your affairs. Before you make your home nice, make sure you have fields and food to support you as you live in the home.

Likewise, never wait for the moment of testing to see what you will do. Prepare to pass the test before the test even comes.

If you have not learned to choose the right friends, you will not know how to choose the right spouse. If you don’t know how to manage yourself at work, you will never be ready to manage others at work. If you can’t be faithful to God with the little, you will never be prepared to honor him with much (Luke 16:10).

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