Take Back your Life
Pastor Dave opened the new year with a simple question most of us didn’t need much time to answer:
Have you ever made a bad decision?
He shared a painfully honest story from the week he was planning to propose to Eva—deciding to get a haircut at the wrong place, trusting the stylist’s instincts, and walking out with a buzz cut down to nearly the skin. It was funny, a little painful, and instantly relatable. And it set the tone for the morning: we all have stories like that. Some are about bad haircuts. Others are heavier. But all of them remind us of the same truth—our decisions matter.
Pastor Dave invited us to think about what really separates fulfilled, healthy people from those who constantly feel stuck or overwhelmed. It isn’t intelligence, talent, or appearance. We’ve all seen smart people who are miserable, talented people who are broke, and attractive people who can’t hold relationships together. What makes the difference is decisions. The quality of our decisions shapes the quality of our lives.
The problem, Pastor Dave admitted, is that most of us aren’t very good decision-makers. We want to be, but our habits often tell a different story. We plan to eat well and then don’t. We want to speak kindly and end up saying things we regret. We want to be wise with money and still overspend. We don’t usually decide to live with anxiety, fear, or poor communication—we drift there.
He illustrated this with another story from his first job as a teenager, staying late to clean up after a party, getting locked behind a fence with the trash, sliding his phone under the gate before realizing he needed it, and ultimately climbing a barbed-wire fence—only to have the security footage shared in the employee group chat the next day. Another bad decision. Another reminder that reacting in the moment rarely leads to the best outcome.
That’s when Pastor Dave shared a surprising statistic: the average person makes around 35,000 decisions a day. That means over the past year, we’ve each made about 12.7 million decisions. And he posed the question that framed the entire series: What would it look like to make 12.7 million better decisions in the year ahead?
That question launched the new teaching series, Pre-Decide—a conversation about how to stop drifting through life and start choosing it intentionally. Pastor Dave explained that over the next few weeks, we’ll look at specific “pre-decisions” that can shape a people-loving, faith-filled, God-honoring year.
To ground the conversation, Pastor Dave took us to Isaiah 43, a moment when God speaks to Israel while they are living with the consequences of past decisions. They are marked by failure, regret, and exile. And yet, God doesn’t begin by giving them instructions. He begins by reminding them who He is—the God who made a way through the sea, who rescued them when there was no way forward.
Only after grounding them in His faithfulness does God say, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing.” Pastor Dave pointed out that God was already at work ahead of them—but not everyone could perceive it. Some were so stuck in past failures that they couldn’t see what God was preparing next.
That’s where the idea of pre-deciding comes in. New things from God often require new postures from God’s people. Israel couldn’t step into the future God was offering while continuing to make decisions shaped by fear, habit, or autopilot. And neither can we.
Pastor Dave named something many of us feel but rarely articulate: most of us aren’t consciously deciding the lives we’re living—we’re reacting to them. Pre-deciding is about choosing now what we will do later. It’s letting faith, not impulse, shape our responses. It’s aligning everyday choices with the future God is calling us toward.
He described pre-deciding in practical terms:
When faced with this situation, I have already decided to do this.
Waiting before impulse purchases. Pausing to pray instead of spiraling in worry. Choosing restraint and grace before anger takes over. These aren’t dramatic gestures—they’re intentional patterns.
Pastor Dave showed how Scripture is filled with people who lived this way. Abraham trusted God before climbing the mountain. Ruth committed herself to Naomi before knowing the outcome. Daniel resolved not to compromise before facing pressure. None of them made perfect choices, but they had clear values—and those values guided their decisions.
That led to one of the most important questions of the morning: What do you value?
What do you want to be known for? What kind of person do you want to become? When values are clear, decisions become simpler. Our values shape our choices, and our choices shape our lives.
Pastor Dave encouraged us to reflect honestly on the direction our decisions have been taking us. Do we like where they’re leading? Are they aligned with the life Jesus calls us to live? And if not, he reminded us that it’s not too late to take our lives back—to pre-decide that the year ahead will be different.
The invitation was not to rely on willpower or perfection, but to commit everything to the Lord, trusting God to establish our steps. Our standing with God is not based on the quality of our decisions, but on His goodness and grace. And because of that grace, we’re free to start fresh.
Pastor Dave closed by inviting the church to lean in—to reflect, to prepare, and to trust that God is doing something new. Not just through resolutions, but through millions of small, faithful decisions that shape who we become and how we live for His kingdom in the year ahead.
