The blessing of will

[Mike Vande]

My blessing today is will.

I heard Keith Green talk once about what he called "the religion of the will". What he was referring to was the difference between emotionally-driven Christianity that tends to go whichever way the wind blows, and Christianity that is fixed in it's exercise regardless of how the Christian feels. That seems to divide Christians into tow groups; those with enough will to "walk the walk" and those without.

I think this is a false dichotomy Everybody has a very powerful will, and it determines the direction their life will take. Nobody is actually a spineless jellyfish with no will. Some people just use it differently than others.

When your will is not to be hurt, you will try to find ways to keep from being hurt. In that situation, whatever means is handy becomes a tool of the will to be used with that goal in mind. What some people would see as cowardice is really a powerful exercise of the will for self-preservation, sometimes so powerful the person in it's grip cannot resist.

In jr. high & high school, I was called names ranging from sissy to fag for not submitting my body to the daily battering of guys in helmets. I took a lot of abuse over it. They called it cowardice; I called it self-preservation. Either way, it was an exercise of my will.

So, as I see it, the problem of will is not its absence or presence, but rather what it is focused on. In the natural, focusing the will takes a constant effort, so much so that a person has to maintain constant effort to keep the will focused. But as Christians, we have the promise of help from God in all our needs, and I believe that includes the focus of the will.

I see the will as a strong enough force in and of itself. So instead of strengthening our will, I think Christians need a surrendered will. I think that is accomplished by some personal effort, but I see manhandling the will into submission as self-righteousness. I think the way the will is subdued unto God is by daily communion with God, eating and drinking Him, as I wrote about previously.

Eating and drinking Jesus includes learning the scriptures thouroughly and accurately, but as a means of knowing Jesus better rather than exclusively acquiring knowledge to use as a weapon. Granted, the scriptures are a weapon against deception through ignorance, and that is an important part of their purpose as I have come to see it. But I see that as an ancillary part of their purpose, and not the primary one.

For myself, I have found that the abuse I took years ago from, among many others, the guys in helmets, left me with a consuming need to keep from being hurt again. This branched out into my Christian life in ways I had no idea it would.

I heard a teacher named John Dawson say once that it's characteristic of hurt people to look for ways to control their surroundings and relationships, even casual ones, to keep from being hurt again. A lot of times they go at it by means of manipulation and intimidation, one or the other applied in whatever circumstance it will work best in.

My past hurts were bad enough to me that I wanted to dominate my surroundings, and the best weapons I found were my talent and my intellect. If I could get people to like my music and/or recognize my "smarts", I was halfway to controlling them, at least enough that they were unlikely hurt me.

I saw doctrinal debates as personal attacks, and I still believe some of them were. I responded as I always had, with resentment and anger that I tried to keep hidden while I looked for ways to dominate the situations in self-defense. That was where I believe I got off track. It started out subtly, but grew into something I now believe was as divergent from the truth as any heresy.

In trying to find a way to conquer and force others to accept the truth and defend myself, I stopped seeking and representing Jesus and started representing myself and seeking ammunition for my own defense. I may have been right in what I said, but my goal was to shove it down those people's throats and make them admit the superiority of what I knew, and thereby admit my superiority over them, which would coincidentally pay them back for attacking me.

The apologist's approach enhanced what was already wrong in me, and gave me weapons to use in my attempts to maintain control over my surroundings. To me, it seems the weakness in the apologist approach is that there are a lot of hurt people, even among genuinely born-again people, who are desperately trying to control their surroundings and the people they have to deal with. I believe now that if I had spent more time eating and drinking Jesus, as I put it before, than trying to defend myself, I might have found resolution for my hurts, instead of inadequate protections against being hurt again.

My will has to be bent to His instead of the wills of others being bent to mine. I am grateful to God that He is willing to make me willing.