How do we make moral decisions?

Question 12001

Most moral decisions a Christian faces are not the dramatic ones. They are whether to say something about a colleague’s expenses claim, whether the tax return is entirely honest, whether to take the job that pays more and will swallow your Sundays. Nobody writes books about those small choices, and they are where most of us actually live our lives.

What makes them difficult is that Scripture rarely addresses the specific case. So we need a way of thinking, and the good news is that the Bible supplies one. It is not a flowchart, and anyone offering you a flowchart is selling something.

Start with what Scripture says plainly

The first question is always whether God has already spoken. A surprising number of the moral decisions people bring to me are not actually difficult. They are clear and unwelcome, and what is being sought is not guidance but permission.

Where there is a direct command, the matter is closed. You do not need to weigh the consequences of adultery or dishonesty, and attempting to do so is usually the first step in talking yourself into something. Deciding in advance that the clear commands are settled removes a great deal of agonising later, because the negotiation never opens.

Where Scripture speaks by principle rather than by direct command, the work is harder but the material is there. The Bible has a great deal to say about honesty, about the treatment of the poor, about speech, about the use of the body, and most moral decisions touch at least one of those. Read widely rather than hunting for a single verse that settles it, since a verse hunted for in that spirit usually gets misused.

Moral decisions in the genuine grey areas

When Scripture gives no direct instruction, Paul supplies a set of questions in 1 Corinthians that I have found more useful than anything else. Is it lawful but not helpful? Is it lawful but likely to master me? Does it build others up? Would it cause a weaker brother to stumble? Can it be done to the glory of God?

That last one, from 1 Corinthians 10:31, is the widest net. Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Most moral decisions clarify remarkably quickly when you ask honestly whether God can be thanked in the middle of the thing.

I would add three more. What would I advise a friend to do in the identical situation, which cuts through a lot of special pleading. Would I be content for this to be known, since secrecy is often the tell. And what does this decision make me over time, because character is built by accumulation rather than by single events.

Conscience matters, and can be wrong

Romans 14:23 says that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. If you cannot do something with a clear conscience, you should not do it, even if another believer could do the same thing without difficulty. Acting against conscience trains you to ignore it, and that habit is far more damaging than the individual choice.

At the same time, conscience is not infallible. Paul speaks of a weak conscience that needs strengthening and of a seared conscience that has stopped functioning. A conscience formed chiefly by upbringing or by the culture will produce confident verdicts that Scripture does not support, in both directions.

So conscience is a servant to be trained rather than an oracle to be obeyed blindly. The training happens through Scripture, over time, in company with other believers. Moral decisions made by a well-fed conscience are usually right without a great deal of deliberation, which is precisely why the feeding matters.

Ask other Christians before you decide

Proverbs says repeatedly that there is safety in an abundance of counsellors. We are astonishingly good at deceiving ourselves, particularly when we want something, and an outside view catches what we cannot see. This is one of the practical reasons church membership matters.

Choose your counsellors carefully. Ask the person likely to tell you something you would rather not hear, not the friend who agrees with everything. If you find yourself shopping around for an opinion, you already know the answer and are looking for cover, and the shopping itself is the diagnosis.

Take note of the church across history too. Believers have been thinking about moral decisions for two thousand years, and if your conclusion is one nobody has reached before, that is not a good sign. Novelty is a warning light in ethics rather than a mark of insight, and the pressure to be original is almost always coming from somewhere other than the Spirit of God.

The place of prayer and the Spirit

James says that if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach. That is a straightforward promise and we should use it. Prayer over a decision is not a formality before doing what we intended anyway.

How the Spirit guides in the grey areas is worth being careful about. He does not contradict Scripture, and he does not usually operate through a sudden impression that arrives conveniently aligned with what we wanted. The Greek verb dokimazo, used in Romans 12:2 for discerning God’s will, means to test and approve after examination. That is a thinking word rather than a feeling word.

So expect guidance through a renewed mind working on Scripture, through circumstances, through the counsel of others and through a settled peace, rather than through a voice in the night. I have written more on this in my answer on how the Spirit guides where Scripture gives no direct instruction.

Motive, and the questions we avoid

There is a stage in most moral decisions that we skip because it is uncomfortable, and it is the examination of why we want what we want. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things, and I have never found a better description of the process by which a person constructs an excellent argument for the thing they had already decided to do.

The tells are recognisable once you know them. An unusual interest in technicalities. A sudden discovery that a passage is more complicated than you had thought. Irritation when a friend raises an objection. The phrase everyone does it. None of these settles the question, and all of them are worth noticing when they appear.

The remedy is simply to name the desire out loud, ideally to somebody else. I want this job because it pays more and I am tired of being the poorest family at church. Said plainly, a motive can be weighed. Left unexamined, it drives the decision from underneath while the mind supplies respectable reasons on the surface.

Doing that consistently will slow your moral decisions down, and slowing down is usually a gain. Very few genuinely good choices are ruined by a week’s delay, and a great many bad ones are prevented by it.

When both options look wrong

Some moral decisions offer no clean outcome. A whistleblower who tells the truth destroys colleagues’ livelihoods; if she stays silent, patients are harmed. A woman leaves an abusive marriage and her children lose daily contact with their father. These are real, and pretending they are simple helps nobody.

My own view is that in a fallen world we are sometimes choosing between goods that cannot both be kept, and that the responsible course is to weigh which obligation is weightier rather than to freeze. Jesus himself spoke of weightier matters of the law, which implies the weighing is legitimate. Choose the greater good, accept the cost, and do not spend the next decade relitigating it.

And where you get it wrong, and you will, that is what forgiveness is for. Christians paralysed by the fear of a mistake often do more damage by inaction than they would have done by a flawed decision made in good faith. See also my answers on Christian ethics and situational ethics.

So, now what?

Take the decision that has been sitting on your desk and work it through properly this week. Write down what Scripture says by command or principle, what your conscience says, what a wise believer would say, and what you would advise somebody else. Then pray and decide, rather than waiting for certainty that is not coming.

Most of us already know what we ought to do and are hoping for a reason not to. If that describes you at the moment, the honest question is not what is right. It is what it would cost you to do it, and whether you are willing to pay. What would change if you settled that question first, before the next hard choice arrives?

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6, ESV)