day 677: Pros and Cons

"So I advise you to live according to your new life in the Holy Spirit. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves."

A common decision-making process is to sit down and list out two columns worth of information; the pros and the cons. At the end of the exercise, we can look at the list in front of us and decide what is the best course of action. Businesses do the same thing as we are asked in the workplace to list out the positives and the negatives and then we hope that the positives outweigh the negatives so the decision can be made. In fact, we are expected to think in this fashion before we ever go into a meeting with a point of view. If we just say, "This is what I think we should do", without the backup of thinking, then we won't get very far before someone will ask us how we came to this position and at the very least we need to be able to say that we weighed out the pros and cons. While it may seem a lot heavier and more sophisticated than that, most business decisions are made just that way and our ability to objectively make an assessment of the pros and cons becomes an important decision-making skill.

In our work lives, in the rest of our life, and in our spiritual life we are also faced with constant decisions and our minds are always playing out the pros and cons. In Galatians 5:16-24, Paul provides us with an obvious pro and con list. (It's worth pulling out your Bible of choice now and following along.) First in this writing he tells us the cons of following the desires of a sinful nature. That list alone is daunting and we can only imagine being tagged with these as our identity and who we are. He then goes on to then list the fruits of the spirit as the pros of denying that sinful nature and instead letting the Holy Spirit rule our lives. This is indeed a fruitful list of pros. Paul lists out (depending on the version of the Bible you are using, 16 different sinful ways and nine fruits of the spirit. But like any other decision-making, the numerical size of the list doesn't decide the weight of the decision. The power of the words and the fulfilled life that we can live if we embody the fruits of the spirit are the best pros in life that we could ever imagine.

Reference: Galatians 5:16-26 (New Living Testament)