Love Story

October 2008

On my way to adulthood, my mother taught me to be polite, study hard, wash behind my ears and stay pure. But she wasn’t able to teach me how to make moral choices in areas that didn’t exist then. Since TV didn’t come on the scene until after she died, I had to decide for myself what was appropriate and not appropriate to watch. We didn’t eat in restaurants because we couldn’t afford it. So, when I did have the money, I had to decide if I should eat in one that served cocktails—a question in my mind because she had been against alcohol consumption.

I was surprised when a middle-aged educator I interviewed for a book told me: “When I have a moral dilemma, I ask myself what my mother would say.” By now, I thought, he should have his own moral compass.

How do we make godly decisions when there are no “Thou shalts” for the plethora of modern issues? What should be my guidelines for modesty in today’s society? Which of the sexually explicit books should I read? What should I do if an employer asked me to lie?

Imagine that you must make a moral decision by next Tuesday and you know that the Bible is God’s inspired words for your life. How can you find an answer to your dilemma? Look for a principle or general teaching that applies. For example, the first commandment, “Worship no god but me,” intimates that I have no right to spend money on a hobby on which I am fixated when my kids need new shoes. The account of Jesus feeding five thousand with five loaves of bread and two fish suggests that I can trust Him to supply my needs even though I lost my job.

Pray meditatively when you study the Bible, ask God to show you principles you can apply to your life. To build a personal value system, it’s imperative to study it regularly, deduce principles for each passage and keep a record of them.

Practice loving God back. What better way to do that than to internalize His principles and apply them in life’s most perplexing situations? Keeping God’s commandments is one way to show that we love Him.

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