Week 3 · Lesson 1
Making Choices and Handling Peer Pressure
Week 3 of 23 · Choices and Peer Pressure
When was the last time you were in something you knew was wrong before it started?
Not after. Before. That moment in the car, or in the hallway, or on the way somewhere, when something in you said this is about to go bad.
You knew. And you stayed.
This lesson is about that exact moment, because that is where a life actually turns, not in the part everybody talks about afterward.
Key ConceptNobody Ever Talks You Into Anything
They showed you a video in school where somebody says come on, everybody is doing it, and you are supposed to say no.
Nobody has ever said that to you in your life.
Here is what it actually sounds like. Nothing. It is silence. It is being in the car when the direction changes and not asking where we going. It is knowing something is off and staying anyway, because leaving means explaining, and you do not have the words, and the words you do have would sound weak out loud.
Real pressure is not somebody talking you into something. It is you not wanting to be the only one standing somewhere different.
So the skill is not learning to say no. The skill is being able to be somewhere by yourself for ten minutes without it eating you. That is the whole thing. Everything else is details.
Journal Question
Write the last time you knew before it started. Do not write what happened. Write the exact moment you knew, and what you thought it would cost you to say drop me off.
Teaching PointEvery Choice Is Made Before You Get There
People think a decision happens in the moment. It almost never does.
By the time you are in the car, the decision is already made. It got made when you got in. Before that, it got made when you answered the phone. Before that, when you decided who you were going to be around that night. Before that, when you decided that being by yourself was worse than being in something.
That is four decisions, and only the last one looks like a decision.
So a man who wants to change his life does not get better at the moment. He gets better three moves earlier, where it is quiet and nobody is watching and it costs him almost nothing.
Deciding in the morning what you are not doing tonight. Deciding who gets a call back and who does not before the phone rings. Deciding where you will be at ten before ten comes.
None of that is dramatic. That is the point. The dramatic part is what happens when you do not do it.
Activity
Take the last thing that went bad. Work backward and find four decisions before the one everybody blamed. Write all four. Then circle the earliest one you could have changed without anybody even knowing.
ScenarioThree People, One Night
Three people get in a car. One is driving and he knows exactly where they are going. One is in the front and half knows. One is in the back and does not know anything, he just did not want to sit in the house.
When it goes bad, all three catch it. The one in the back catches it the same as the one driving, and when he tries to explain that he did not know, nobody cares, and legally nobody has to.
He did not make a decision that night. That is what he will tell himself for years. But he made one at seven o’clock, when he decided he would rather be anywhere than by himself, and that one decision put him in a car he never chose the direction of.
Journal Question
Which one of the three have you been? Write about the night. Then write what you were actually avoiding by being out.
Spiritual Takeaway
Every offer He got was a shortcut to something He was already going to get
Before Jesus did anything public, He went out into the wilderness by Himself for forty days with no food, and that is where He got approached.
Look at what He got offered. He was starving, and the first offer was food, turn these stones into bread. The second was authority over everything, every kingdom, right now, no cross. The third was proof, throw yourself off the temple and let everybody watch God catch you.
Here is the part people miss. Every single one of those things was already His. He was going to eat again. All authority was going to be handed to Him. God was going to prove who He was in front of everybody. The offer was never something false. The offer was the same thing, faster, without the price.
That is what every offer you get is. Not a lie. A shortcut to something real, with the cost moved to somewhere you cannot see it yet.
And notice how He answered. He did not argue and He did not negotiate. He said what was written and He kept moving. He had already decided who He was before He got hungry, which is exactly why being hungry did not change the answer.
1 Corinthians 10:13 says you will not be tested past what you can stand, and that there is always a way out. Always. But you have to have found the door before the room gets hot.
Pick one night this week and decide in the morning where you will be at ten o’clock, and tell one person so it is real. Then be there. One night. That is the whole assignment.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 3 Lesson