Delve into one of the deepest areas of theology, the will, the freedom of the will, and understanding how the will works in sanctification.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now we’re in the middle of the character section. Now we’re talking about character, or as the Bible puts it, the heart. And we’ve already talked about affection, what we love and what we hate. To conform to Christ so that we love what Christ loves and hate what Christ hates. Last time we talked about desire, what it is we yearn for, what we are ambitious for, what we want, something good that we do not yet have. So, the desires end up describing the heart. Now, today we’re going to delve into one of the deepest areas of theology, the will and the freedom of the will and understanding how the will works in sanctification.
the will is really the servant of the heart. What you love, you will choose and what you hate, you will reject.
The will is what you choose and what you reject. Now this debate on the nature of the will, the ability that humans have to make choices has been the focal point of millennia, of philosophical and theological wrangling. Now, I personally have been helped by the writings of Jonathan Edwards. One of the hardest things I’ve ever read in my life was Edwards on the freedom of the will, but he taught me to understand the will. And we understand that the will is really the servant of the heart. What you love, you will choose and what you hate, you will reject. And for us in sanctification, we desire to have a will conformed to that of Jesus Christ. We want to use our wills the way that Jesus used his will. So, let’s zero in on this concept of the will as the servant of the heart. Frequently people talk about the free will, or do you believe in free will.
Whenever anyone asks me that, I always want to come back with a question. I want to know what they mean by it. Free from what? Free from what? We should not think of the human will as some loose cannon rattling around in the soul of a human being, like we never know what we’re going to do. That’s just not true. That’s not the way that the will works. The will is the servant of the heart. Whatever the heart loves and whatever the heart desires, that’s what it chooses. And whatever the heart hates, what the heart does not desire, it rejects. And so, we make choices. Now, of course, it’s not that simple. We might have an aggregate, a sum total of affections that lead to a decision. I think of an example for myself. I can’t stand seafood. I would never choose it at a restaurant.
I would never choose it at home. But if I were to go to someone’s house and somebody who didn’t know me well served me seafood, I would eat it and I would express thanks to the hostess or to the person that made the meal because I knew that they were trying to bless me. And so, the aggregate of my desires would be I want a good relationship, and so I would choose to eat something I ordinarily would never choose. So, life is complicated that way. But you can just think of it this way, whenever you have a decision to make, you could imagine that you were at a fine restaurant. And someone sat down before you a plate of your favorite food that there is, your favorite protein, maybe a steak or something like that, your favorite starch, maybe a baked potato or something like that, and a salad versus (I hate to even say it, but) a plate of reeking manure, something that would be disgusting.
And then you’re told to choose. Well, there’s no choice at all. You’re going to choose what you love, and that’s the way it is frankly with every choice that we make. So, I want to just challenge the concept of a free will, free from any history of choices that you’ve made before that, anything that you desire or that you love in life. For non-Christians and Christians alike, the will is the servant of the heart. Now, what we cannot do, and we believe this in reformed theology, the will can’t supersede the affections. It can’t get up on top of the affections and choose what we love and choose what we hate. That we cannot do. Anyone who is an ardent sports fan knows that they have a team they follow, and then there’s a rival team that they hate. And they’re happy when their rival team loses, and they are sad when they win.
And conversely for their team that they root for, they are happy when their team wins and sad when they lose. But it’s even intensified when the two rivals play each other. Well, you could go to an ardent sports fan, of course there are people that don’t care about this at all, but there are many that know exactly what I’m talking about. Could you suddenly just of your own free will choose to be a fan of the other team? Genuinely to love the other team. You can’t do it as an act of the will. For me, I grew up in Boston and I’m a big Red Sox fan. Well, the enemy is the Yankees. I can’t make myself root for the Yankees, and I would say for brothers and sisters that are Yankees fans, they know exactly what I mean. They can’t be happy when the Red Sox win.
So that’s a trivial choice, a trivial illustration of the free will. There is no such thing ultimately as free will. One other thing I want to say, people usually when they talk about free will talk about God’s involvement, that God does not get involved with our choices. He doesn’t interfere as though the human heart is some kind of holy of holies, and he has no right to get in there and do anything with it. Well, that’s just not biblical. God actually does have power over the human heart. He can put an array of circumstances around us wherein he knows every time what we’re going to do. And so, we still make real choices, and those choices fit into his sovereign plan. And ultimately for us who are elect, for us who are being saved, he puts an array of persuasions and array positively and negatively of delight in heaven, a yearning to go to heaven, a fear of hell and various other things.
our hearts in the unconverted state are slaves to sin. We are going to serve ourselves. …We are going to be rejecting what God wants us to do.
And effectively he heals our perception of all those things so that we love what’s right, hate what’s wickedness, and we do the right thing. We make real choices, but we should not imagine that God doesn’t get involved in the choices of human beings. So, I think that’s the way I tend to look at the will, the will being a servant of the heart. Now let’s talk about before we are regenerate. When we are not yet converted, the free will is a slave to sin. Martin Luther wrote a treatise on that, free will a slave. And again, and again the scripture points out that our hearts in the unconverted state are slaves to sin. We are going to serve ourselves. We are unwittingly generally going to serve Satan. We are not going to serve God. We are going to be rejecting what God wants us to do.
We are going to be unwilling to believe in Jesus. We’re going to be unwilling to come to him. Jesus said, “You are unwilling to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:40). Just as the Jews in the Old Testament were unwilling to go up into the promised land, they rebelled. So, they made real choices, but the choices were wrong ones- to reject God, to not obey him, not follow him. People make real choices, and they cannot choose of their own free will to stop sinning. They can put to death certain habits. There are non-Christians that give up alcohol. There are non-Christians that give up smoking, but they can’t give up sinning. They can’t of their own free will become followers of Jesus Christ. The Bible talks about you or Almighty God taking out the heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh.
We can’t perform that heart surgery on ourselves any more than we could perform physical heart surgery on ourselves. We can’t change our own hearts. And free will is a slave. As Jesus said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers your chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling” (Matthew 23:37). So that’s the whole issue here. Ultimately, our salvation, as it says in Romans 9:16, “Does not depend on human will or human exertion, but on God who has mercy.” If we were left to ourselves, we would continue to reject God and reject Christ and reject the gospel. But thanks be to God, he’s not left us to ourselves.
Instead, what he has done is he has healed the heart so that we can see clearly the choices that need to be made, more and more clearly. Not perfectly clearly now, but more and more we can see clearly. Let me give you an example from the life of Jesus, the choice of Lazarus. Remember the story in John 11 of how Lazarus, a friend of Jesus became sick. And Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, sent word to Jesus, Lord, the one you love is sick. And he intentionally stayed two extra days, so Lazarus died. By the time he got there, Lazarus had been buried for four days.
Now Jesus showed his power over death there making this incredible statement, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26). Then he went to the tomb and to the great astonishment and amazement of everyone watching, performed the greatest miracle that he did in his life, second only to his own resurrection. And he went to the tomb, he said, “Roll back the stone.” They rolled it back and Jesus cried in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.” Now, before Jesus spoke the word Lazarus, Lazarus was dead. But somewhere in the speaking of the word Lazarus and the statement come forth, Lazarus came alive, and he understood the command, probably recognized the voice. He could see where he was in the darkness, and he had a choice to make. He could stay in the tomb with maybe other dead ancestors or just in the tomb, in the darkness.
Or he could come out into the sunshine and be with his friends, be with Jesus and have a big feast celebrating his resurrection, his death or life. And you could say, well, that’s no real choice. If I were to say if you had a 100 Lazaruses that were raised to life, how many would choose to stay in darkness bound up in a grave? A 100 % of them would choose to come out, but that’s the whole point. What happens is when the Holy Spirit works life in us, we suddenly see things as they really are. We see God as perfectly good and righteous and desirable. We see evil and sin and Satan as wicked and disgusting and repulsive. We’ve been cured. We see things as they really are, and then choices become as clear as that choice that I made earlier, that choice between your favorite meal and something repulsive and disgusting, and then we just make the ultimate wise choice, which is to follow Jesus Christ, to come out of that tomb that we might live. And that’s how God works in us.
We should think of a therapeutic view of salvation, that we have been healed. And we perceive choices properly and we make choices properly. Now, you may ask, well, why do we still sin then? Well, it’s because similar to that man that Jesus healed in stages, remember he asked him, what do you see? And he said, I see people walking around like trees. So, it is with us. We’ve not been fully saved. We’ve been fully justified, but our sanctification, which we’re talking about in this podcast is a process. And so, we’re still easily deceived. We have habits built up in us, we make stupid choices. And we are allowed to make those choices. And so there ends up being within the heart of every Christian, a bitter struggle for control. Paul talks about this at the end of Romans 7:15-17. He said, I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do. As it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
Paul says, I have a desire to carry out the good, but I cannot carry it out. So, there’s this bitter struggle for control. It says the same thing in Galatians 5, the flesh, which is that unregenerate nature, that flesh- the habits of sin we have, the flesh, wars against the spirit and the indwelling Holy Spirit wars against the flesh. They’re at odds or at enmity with each other so that you cannot do what you want. In other words, we’re really not wholehearted in anything we do in this world. We’re not wholehearted sinners. We hate the sin. We wish we would never do it again. But we’re not wholehearted prayer warriors either. We get tired of prayer pretty quickly.
We’re not wholehearted evangelists. We’re not wholehearted worshipers. So, there’s a division within us and we have this bitter struggle for control and frequently it comes down to the will. What are we going to choose to do? We have to make wise choices even when we don’t feel like it, even when we feel like I don’t want to do that, but I know it’s right. I know the Lord wants me to pray longer than five minutes or 10 minutes every day. I want to pray longer. I want to pray with more intensity. I want to put to death my own estimation of myself and my colleagues and fellow workers, and I want to be a witness at work. I want to share the Gospel with unsaved relatives. I know that they’re going to be angry at me, but I know it’s the right thing to do.
And so, it feels like dying. We have to make choices in which we feel like we’re dying. And that really is how we grow as Christians. Let me give you the best example there is in the Bible of this, and that’s Jesus our Lord and Savior in Gethsemane. This is an amazing insight the Lord gave me a number of years ago to see the nature of the battle that was going on inside Jesus in Gethsemane. Now, there are aspects of Gethsemane we can never imitate. Jesus was the son of God. He was sinless. He had no habits of sin. He had no flesh, no evil desires, but he was sorely tempted. Clearly, he was tempted in every way just as we are yet was without sin. And so, if you go with him into Gethsemane and you see what’s going on, it’s incredible. In Mark’s Gospel, we have one statement made and it’s quite remarkable.
In Mark 14:33, you can see this in the King James version. This is what it says, “And he taketh with him, Peter and James and John, and began to be,” listen to this, “sore amazed, and to be very heavy,” amazed, sore amazed. The word sore in the King James language is very or extremely amazed. The word amazed should just stop you dead in your tracks, amazed at what? Well, you know the battle he’s going to have there in Gethsemane, a battle in prayer over drinking the cup the Father is offering him to drink. It has to do with whether he would go to the cross or not. So, what’s amazed, amazing him there? The word is used sometimes of people’s reactions to Jesus’ miracles. And so, we should not imagine for a moment that Jesus didn’t know he was going to die on the cross. He’d been telling his disciples that for a couple of years, he knew exactly what was going to happen.
He said, the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. They will condemn him to death. They’ll crucify him. He’ll be buried on the third day, he’ll be raised life, said it again and again. He knew it was going to happen. So then why the amazement? This is what I think is happening. Jesus was fully God. He’s also fully man. And as a human, he grew, he learned, he developed. As a child, it says he grew in wisdom and stature in favor of God and man. There are also some things even in his adult life during his ministry that he seemed to not know, like the woman with the bleeding who touched him. And he said, “Who touched me?” He didn’t seem to know who touched him. He didn’t know the exact hour of his own return. There were some things he didn’t know.
And I do believe that the Father in kindness to Jesus held back from him a full experiential foretaste of what it would be like to drink the cup of God’s wrath on the cross, held it back from him because he couldn’t handle it physically. It would’ve been so overwhelming like a circuit breaker tripping when a million amps went through and would melt the wires. It was that overwhelming. We’re talking about the omnipotence of God zeroed in on the destruction of a sinner. Jesus, our substitute had to drink the cup of God’s wrath, poured full strength, the wine of his fury, he had to drink that cup. And so, he was amazed because I think God the Father gave him a very strong, almost visionary foretaste of what it would be like to be the substitute to die on the cross. And it literally, literally knocked him to the ground.
You could imagine if you had some intense thing that hit you, and you were agonizing. Like maybe one of your children or a friend that’s really on the edge of death and you’re praying so hard that you’re like this and your face is red. Capillaries in Jesus’s skin burst and great drops of blood came out. That was the intensity. Now, why did the Father do that? I think he was asking the Son, this is what the cross will be like. Will you do it? Jesus responded effectively with a question, is there no other way? Is there any other way? “If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Matthew 26:39). The Father then effectively answers that query saying, “No, there is no other way, my Son, if you want to save the elect, you must drink this cup.” And then here Jesus gives the single most heroic and courageous answer ever. And this is the pattern for the use of our wills as well, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
That you learn to say that every day of your life. That the Lord is going to lead you into increasingly difficult choices. And those choices will be hard for you. They will have to do with personal holiness. They’ll have to do with evangelism or missions. God may lead you to do something very difficult for the kingdom, and it’s going to cost you much. You’re going to have to lead yourself or your family into a very dangerous place. Maybe some part of the world where Christianity is illegal or maybe some place where there’s much disease and the likelihood of you becoming sick is very high or of your family, your children. And you look into the cup of God’s will, and you know it’s going to be bitter. And you say, “I’m willing to drink it.” Not my will, but yours be done.
And so, we would make choices like Jesus. We would choose even suffering so that we would have a far greater pleasure. And that’s what the author of Hebrews says, that in Hebrews 12:2, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus … who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame.” Jesus chose to drink the cup of God’s wrath for joy, not the immediate joy of the cross. There is none. There’s no pleasure in the cross. But what did the cross achieve? Would achieve my salvation and yours, dear friend. And the salvation of a countless multitude from every tribe, language, people and nation spending eternity, seeing his glory and being with him forever, that was worth it to him. So, we have to go beyond the immediate suffering, beyond the immediate distress to the joy, the heavenly joy of doing what God’s will is. To learn to use our wills like that, saying again and again, not my will but yours be done.
So, we have to make choices. Now here’s the thing. We make real choices. When I say, I’m not saying I don’t believe in free will. I believe that we do make free choices, but I do think that our choices are submitted to the heart and ultimately to the sovereignty of God. We’re not like zombies going around that God takes over our bodies like some body-snatcher, and I have this blank look on our face saying, “Whatever God wills.” That kind of thing. We make real choices and sometimes we use our wills wrongly.
Say to God every day, not my will but yours be done. Present yourself to him as a living sacrifice.
We choose sin. But God is so good to us and teaches us and trains us. And teaches us to make wise choices for the glory of God. And so, you’re going to have opportunities the rest of this week to make choices like that. The question is, what are you going to do? More and more, I want to commend to you the example of our Lord Jesus Christ in Gethsemane. Say to God every day, not my will but yours be done. Present yourself to him as a living sacrifice. Present yourself to him saying, whatever you want me to do today, I will do. So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now we’re in the middle of the character section. Now we’re talking about character, or as the Bible puts it, the heart. And we’ve already talked about affection, what we love and what we hate. To conform to Christ so that we love what Christ loves and hate what Christ hates. Last time we talked about desire, what it is we yearn for, what we are ambitious for, what we want, something good that we do not yet have. So, the desires end up describing the heart. Now, today we’re going to delve into one of the deepest areas of theology, the will and the freedom of the will and understanding how the will works in sanctification.
the will is really the servant of the heart. What you love, you will choose and what you hate, you will reject.
The will is what you choose and what you reject. Now this debate on the nature of the will, the ability that humans have to make choices has been the focal point of millennia, of philosophical and theological wrangling. Now, I personally have been helped by the writings of Jonathan Edwards. One of the hardest things I’ve ever read in my life was Edwards on the freedom of the will, but he taught me to understand the will. And we understand that the will is really the servant of the heart. What you love, you will choose and what you hate, you will reject. And for us in sanctification, we desire to have a will conformed to that of Jesus Christ. We want to use our wills the way that Jesus used his will. So, let’s zero in on this concept of the will as the servant of the heart. Frequently people talk about the free will, or do you believe in free will.
Whenever anyone asks me that, I always want to come back with a question. I want to know what they mean by it. Free from what? Free from what? We should not think of the human will as some loose cannon rattling around in the soul of a human being, like we never know what we’re going to do. That’s just not true. That’s not the way that the will works. The will is the servant of the heart. Whatever the heart loves and whatever the heart desires, that’s what it chooses. And whatever the heart hates, what the heart does not desire, it rejects. And so, we make choices. Now, of course, it’s not that simple. We might have an aggregate, a sum total of affections that lead to a decision. I think of an example for myself. I can’t stand seafood. I would never choose it at a restaurant.
I would never choose it at home. But if I were to go to someone’s house and somebody who didn’t know me well served me seafood, I would eat it and I would express thanks to the hostess or to the person that made the meal because I knew that they were trying to bless me. And so, the aggregate of my desires would be I want a good relationship, and so I would choose to eat something I ordinarily would never choose. So, life is complicated that way. But you can just think of it this way, whenever you have a decision to make, you could imagine that you were at a fine restaurant. And someone sat down before you a plate of your favorite food that there is, your favorite protein, maybe a steak or something like that, your favorite starch, maybe a baked potato or something like that, and a salad versus (I hate to even say it, but) a plate of reeking manure, something that would be disgusting.
And then you’re told to choose. Well, there’s no choice at all. You’re going to choose what you love, and that’s the way it is frankly with every choice that we make. So, I want to just challenge the concept of a free will, free from any history of choices that you’ve made before that, anything that you desire or that you love in life. For non-Christians and Christians alike, the will is the servant of the heart. Now, what we cannot do, and we believe this in reformed theology, the will can’t supersede the affections. It can’t get up on top of the affections and choose what we love and choose what we hate. That we cannot do. Anyone who is an ardent sports fan knows that they have a team they follow, and then there’s a rival team that they hate. And they’re happy when their rival team loses, and they are sad when they win.
And conversely for their team that they root for, they are happy when their team wins and sad when they lose. But it’s even intensified when the two rivals play each other. Well, you could go to an ardent sports fan, of course there are people that don’t care about this at all, but there are many that know exactly what I’m talking about. Could you suddenly just of your own free will choose to be a fan of the other team? Genuinely to love the other team. You can’t do it as an act of the will. For me, I grew up in Boston and I’m a big Red Sox fan. Well, the enemy is the Yankees. I can’t make myself root for the Yankees, and I would say for brothers and sisters that are Yankees fans, they know exactly what I mean. They can’t be happy when the Red Sox win.
So that’s a trivial choice, a trivial illustration of the free will. There is no such thing ultimately as free will. One other thing I want to say, people usually when they talk about free will talk about God’s involvement, that God does not get involved with our choices. He doesn’t interfere as though the human heart is some kind of holy of holies, and he has no right to get in there and do anything with it. Well, that’s just not biblical. God actually does have power over the human heart. He can put an array of circumstances around us wherein he knows every time what we’re going to do. And so, we still make real choices, and those choices fit into his sovereign plan. And ultimately for us who are elect, for us who are being saved, he puts an array of persuasions and array positively and negatively of delight in heaven, a yearning to go to heaven, a fear of hell and various other things.
our hearts in the unconverted state are slaves to sin. We are going to serve ourselves. …We are going to be rejecting what God wants us to do.
And effectively he heals our perception of all those things so that we love what’s right, hate what’s wickedness, and we do the right thing. We make real choices, but we should not imagine that God doesn’t get involved in the choices of human beings. So, I think that’s the way I tend to look at the will, the will being a servant of the heart. Now let’s talk about before we are regenerate. When we are not yet converted, the free will is a slave to sin. Martin Luther wrote a treatise on that, free will a slave. And again, and again the scripture points out that our hearts in the unconverted state are slaves to sin. We are going to serve ourselves. We are unwittingly generally going to serve Satan. We are not going to serve God. We are going to be rejecting what God wants us to do.
We are going to be unwilling to believe in Jesus. We’re going to be unwilling to come to him. Jesus said, “You are unwilling to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:40). Just as the Jews in the Old Testament were unwilling to go up into the promised land, they rebelled. So, they made real choices, but the choices were wrong ones- to reject God, to not obey him, not follow him. People make real choices, and they cannot choose of their own free will to stop sinning. They can put to death certain habits. There are non-Christians that give up alcohol. There are non-Christians that give up smoking, but they can’t give up sinning. They can’t of their own free will become followers of Jesus Christ. The Bible talks about you or Almighty God taking out the heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh.
We can’t perform that heart surgery on ourselves any more than we could perform physical heart surgery on ourselves. We can’t change our own hearts. And free will is a slave. As Jesus said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers your chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling” (Matthew 23:37). So that’s the whole issue here. Ultimately, our salvation, as it says in Romans 9:16, “Does not depend on human will or human exertion, but on God who has mercy.” If we were left to ourselves, we would continue to reject God and reject Christ and reject the gospel. But thanks be to God, he’s not left us to ourselves.
Instead, what he has done is he has healed the heart so that we can see clearly the choices that need to be made, more and more clearly. Not perfectly clearly now, but more and more we can see clearly. Let me give you an example from the life of Jesus, the choice of Lazarus. Remember the story in John 11 of how Lazarus, a friend of Jesus became sick. And Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, sent word to Jesus, Lord, the one you love is sick. And he intentionally stayed two extra days, so Lazarus died. By the time he got there, Lazarus had been buried for four days.
Now Jesus showed his power over death there making this incredible statement, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26). Then he went to the tomb and to the great astonishment and amazement of everyone watching, performed the greatest miracle that he did in his life, second only to his own resurrection. And he went to the tomb, he said, “Roll back the stone.” They rolled it back and Jesus cried in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.” Now, before Jesus spoke the word Lazarus, Lazarus was dead. But somewhere in the speaking of the word Lazarus and the statement come forth, Lazarus came alive, and he understood the command, probably recognized the voice. He could see where he was in the darkness, and he had a choice to make. He could stay in the tomb with maybe other dead ancestors or just in the tomb, in the darkness.
Or he could come out into the sunshine and be with his friends, be with Jesus and have a big feast celebrating his resurrection, his death or life. And you could say, well, that’s no real choice. If I were to say if you had a 100 Lazaruses that were raised to life, how many would choose to stay in darkness bound up in a grave? A 100 % of them would choose to come out, but that’s the whole point. What happens is when the Holy Spirit works life in us, we suddenly see things as they really are. We see God as perfectly good and righteous and desirable. We see evil and sin and Satan as wicked and disgusting and repulsive. We’ve been cured. We see things as they really are, and then choices become as clear as that choice that I made earlier, that choice between your favorite meal and something repulsive and disgusting, and then we just make the ultimate wise choice, which is to follow Jesus Christ, to come out of that tomb that we might live. And that’s how God works in us.
We should think of a therapeutic view of salvation, that we have been healed. And we perceive choices properly and we make choices properly. Now, you may ask, well, why do we still sin then? Well, it’s because similar to that man that Jesus healed in stages, remember he asked him, what do you see? And he said, I see people walking around like trees. So, it is with us. We’ve not been fully saved. We’ve been fully justified, but our sanctification, which we’re talking about in this podcast is a process. And so, we’re still easily deceived. We have habits built up in us, we make stupid choices. And we are allowed to make those choices. And so there ends up being within the heart of every Christian, a bitter struggle for control. Paul talks about this at the end of Romans 7:15-17. He said, I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do. As it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
Paul says, I have a desire to carry out the good, but I cannot carry it out. So, there’s this bitter struggle for control. It says the same thing in Galatians 5, the flesh, which is that unregenerate nature, that flesh- the habits of sin we have, the flesh, wars against the spirit and the indwelling Holy Spirit wars against the flesh. They’re at odds or at enmity with each other so that you cannot do what you want. In other words, we’re really not wholehearted in anything we do in this world. We’re not wholehearted sinners. We hate the sin. We wish we would never do it again. But we’re not wholehearted prayer warriors either. We get tired of prayer pretty quickly.
We’re not wholehearted evangelists. We’re not wholehearted worshipers. So, there’s a division within us and we have this bitter struggle for control and frequently it comes down to the will. What are we going to choose to do? We have to make wise choices even when we don’t feel like it, even when we feel like I don’t want to do that, but I know it’s right. I know the Lord wants me to pray longer than five minutes or 10 minutes every day. I want to pray longer. I want to pray with more intensity. I want to put to death my own estimation of myself and my colleagues and fellow workers, and I want to be a witness at work. I want to share the Gospel with unsaved relatives. I know that they’re going to be angry at me, but I know it’s the right thing to do.
And so, it feels like dying. We have to make choices in which we feel like we’re dying. And that really is how we grow as Christians. Let me give you the best example there is in the Bible of this, and that’s Jesus our Lord and Savior in Gethsemane. This is an amazing insight the Lord gave me a number of years ago to see the nature of the battle that was going on inside Jesus in Gethsemane. Now, there are aspects of Gethsemane we can never imitate. Jesus was the son of God. He was sinless. He had no habits of sin. He had no flesh, no evil desires, but he was sorely tempted. Clearly, he was tempted in every way just as we are yet was without sin. And so, if you go with him into Gethsemane and you see what’s going on, it’s incredible. In Mark’s Gospel, we have one statement made and it’s quite remarkable.
In Mark 14:33, you can see this in the King James version. This is what it says, “And he taketh with him, Peter and James and John, and began to be,” listen to this, “sore amazed, and to be very heavy,” amazed, sore amazed. The word sore in the King James language is very or extremely amazed. The word amazed should just stop you dead in your tracks, amazed at what? Well, you know the battle he’s going to have there in Gethsemane, a battle in prayer over drinking the cup the Father is offering him to drink. It has to do with whether he would go to the cross or not. So, what’s amazed, amazing him there? The word is used sometimes of people’s reactions to Jesus’ miracles. And so, we should not imagine for a moment that Jesus didn’t know he was going to die on the cross. He’d been telling his disciples that for a couple of years, he knew exactly what was going to happen.
He said, the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. They will condemn him to death. They’ll crucify him. He’ll be buried on the third day, he’ll be raised life, said it again and again. He knew it was going to happen. So then why the amazement? This is what I think is happening. Jesus was fully God. He’s also fully man. And as a human, he grew, he learned, he developed. As a child, it says he grew in wisdom and stature in favor of God and man. There are also some things even in his adult life during his ministry that he seemed to not know, like the woman with the bleeding who touched him. And he said, “Who touched me?” He didn’t seem to know who touched him. He didn’t know the exact hour of his own return. There were some things he didn’t know.
And I do believe that the Father in kindness to Jesus held back from him a full experiential foretaste of what it would be like to drink the cup of God’s wrath on the cross, held it back from him because he couldn’t handle it physically. It would’ve been so overwhelming like a circuit breaker tripping when a million amps went through and would melt the wires. It was that overwhelming. We’re talking about the omnipotence of God zeroed in on the destruction of a sinner. Jesus, our substitute had to drink the cup of God’s wrath, poured full strength, the wine of his fury, he had to drink that cup. And so, he was amazed because I think God the Father gave him a very strong, almost visionary foretaste of what it would be like to be the substitute to die on the cross. And it literally, literally knocked him to the ground.
You could imagine if you had some intense thing that hit you, and you were agonizing. Like maybe one of your children or a friend that’s really on the edge of death and you’re praying so hard that you’re like this and your face is red. Capillaries in Jesus’s skin burst and great drops of blood came out. That was the intensity. Now, why did the Father do that? I think he was asking the Son, this is what the cross will be like. Will you do it? Jesus responded effectively with a question, is there no other way? Is there any other way? “If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Matthew 26:39). The Father then effectively answers that query saying, “No, there is no other way, my Son, if you want to save the elect, you must drink this cup.” And then here Jesus gives the single most heroic and courageous answer ever. And this is the pattern for the use of our wills as well, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
That you learn to say that every day of your life. That the Lord is going to lead you into increasingly difficult choices. And those choices will be hard for you. They will have to do with personal holiness. They’ll have to do with evangelism or missions. God may lead you to do something very difficult for the kingdom, and it’s going to cost you much. You’re going to have to lead yourself or your family into a very dangerous place. Maybe some part of the world where Christianity is illegal or maybe some place where there’s much disease and the likelihood of you becoming sick is very high or of your family, your children. And you look into the cup of God’s will, and you know it’s going to be bitter. And you say, “I’m willing to drink it.” Not my will, but yours be done.
And so, we would make choices like Jesus. We would choose even suffering so that we would have a far greater pleasure. And that’s what the author of Hebrews says, that in Hebrews 12:2, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus … who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame.” Jesus chose to drink the cup of God’s wrath for joy, not the immediate joy of the cross. There is none. There’s no pleasure in the cross. But what did the cross achieve? Would achieve my salvation and yours, dear friend. And the salvation of a countless multitude from every tribe, language, people and nation spending eternity, seeing his glory and being with him forever, that was worth it to him. So, we have to go beyond the immediate suffering, beyond the immediate distress to the joy, the heavenly joy of doing what God’s will is. To learn to use our wills like that, saying again and again, not my will but yours be done.
So, we have to make choices. Now here’s the thing. We make real choices. When I say, I’m not saying I don’t believe in free will. I believe that we do make free choices, but I do think that our choices are submitted to the heart and ultimately to the sovereignty of God. We’re not like zombies going around that God takes over our bodies like some body-snatcher, and I have this blank look on our face saying, “Whatever God wills.” That kind of thing. We make real choices and sometimes we use our wills wrongly.
Say to God every day, not my will but yours be done. Present yourself to him as a living sacrifice.
We choose sin. But God is so good to us and teaches us and trains us. And teaches us to make wise choices for the glory of God. And so, you’re going to have opportunities the rest of this week to make choices like that. The question is, what are you going to do? More and more, I want to commend to you the example of our Lord Jesus Christ in Gethsemane. Say to God every day, not my will but yours be done. Present yourself to him as a living sacrifice. Present yourself to him saying, whatever you want me to do today, I will do. So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
