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Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay



A Question of Wills

Essay Posted March 19, 2008 by James E. Nelson

I didn’t get an essay posted last week because of two projects that came up simultaneously and needed immediate attention. Both required some long hours and there wasn’t a lot of time left over for mere musing. They also involved big financial decisions and because of the stakes, a lot of time was required.

Brenda and I have worked very hard to believe and practice the aphorism, “Don’t worry; it’s only money.” But when a significant percentage of one’s net worth could be affected, the thin beatitudinal veneer gets scraped away, and we find out what we’re really made of. I did worry. I continue to worry (even though I pretend like I’m not), because underneath my veneer, there’s nothing “only” about money.

During the week we also received the regular flyer from the local Christian bookstore. I’ve moved twice since having actually purchased anything there, but they have managed to always find my new address so they can keep sending me catalogs. As I thumbed through it, I expected to find books about Holy Week and the resurrection. To be honest, I was looking for any new offerings from Gary Habermas, my old Apologetics instructor who has gone on to bigger and better things. He pretty much makes his living off the resurrection as an apologetic tool. Along with books, he regularly debates Christopher Hitchens and his ilk about the rational basis for Christianity as part of his overall marketing and evangelistic scheme. I figured if Habermas had any new tomes, this is when I would find them.

But there was hardly a word about Jesus’ resurrection or any other Easter theme. Instead, this issue featured books about finding the will of God. Seeing all those titles I had an epiphany about my week worth of worry. Even though I don’t consciously wonder too much about what God’s will for my life might be any more, that theme was imprinted on my brain many years ago, and much of my fretting had to do with the nagging subconscious question of whether God thought I was doing the right thing or not.

Let’s pause this line of inquiry right here for a moment. This is one of those essays that has two distinct sources which will come together, like the confluence of two rivers. At this point we need to trace out the other tributary.

I know that this is Holy Week in the Christian West, but the Orthodox celebrate Easter at the same time as Passover, and this year that’s not until April, so for the Orthodox, this is only week two of Lent. Let me begin my discussion on Lent by saying that I don’t think God cares whether I eat a hamburger at McDonalds or not. Lenten disciplines aren’t about doing what God tells us to do, they’re about doing what the Church tells us to do. Granted, Jesus clearly assumed that his disciples through time would maintain a fasting discipline, and in that assumption implied that it is a normative practice of any follower of God (Mt. 6:16, 9:15). But scripture never offers a rule or discipline of fasting. That was left to the followers themselve (i.e. the Church).

Before my detractors pull out their Bibles and begin quoting me the passage about obeying God rather than men, let me explain what I mean. Way back in the late 80s I had a heart to heart discussion with Fr. Jon Braun about Lent and works salvation. He said “work” was the wrong metaphor for understanding Lent. He put Lent into the context of boot camp. (It was a metaphor I had heard at Central Baptist Seminary from Prof. John Reist, but it hadn’t sunk in very well.) Fr. Jon told me to think of Holy Week as a great battle. Even though Christ won the victory during the original Holy Week, St. Paul told us that it is an ongoing battle for us. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). “Put on the whole armor of God” (Eph 6:11), etc. Although the battle goes on every day of our life, Lent is the time we focus our whole attention on it. The forty days of Lent are like boot camp for the battle of Holy Week, which then leads to the victory celebration of Easter.

A second metaphor for Lent is “spring cleaning.” Lent is the opportunity to spiffy up, to give full attention to our faith. (In this sense, Christian Lent is very much like Jewish preparations for Passover. Of course, the two are closely related.) Then he added a third metaphor. He said that for the Orthodox, Lent is analogous to the Baptists’ revival meeting. It has nothing to do with earning our salvation. It’s rather about getting in spiritual shape. (Although in popular understanding, both are frequently misunderstood.) Once in a while we need a shot in the arm. For that, the Orthodox have Lent, since the Baptists have cast Lent aside, they try to accomplish approximately the same thing with their revival meetings.

In subsequent years I’ve discovered that the primary culprit that leads us Christians astray is the will (or it’s synonym, desire). And the will relates to each of the above metaphors. Lent is “buffing up” to prepare for battle the will. Lent is “cleaning up” the mess our self-centered will has left about. Lent is “lifting up” a heart discouraged by a long winter and a year of being dragged down by a will that would rather ignore God and put itself front and center. In short, our own desires get in the way of our transformation by God. Until our human will is brought into control, God will not be able to effectively transform our lives and infuse us with heavenly joy and the victory that ensues.

Which is where prayer, fasting, and alms come in. The Church tells people how and when to fast precisely because people don’t want to do that sort of thing. Doing without meat, etc., for six weeks is a battle of the will—I don’t want to, but I ought to do it. For six weeks I exercise my heart so that it can be strong enough to wrestle my will into submission. As my heart grows stronger than my will (which I, in turn, allow to atrophy), I am able to say with our Lord, “Father, not my will, but your will be done.”

So while there is a deep logic to the fast, at a very important level, it is also quite arbitrary. If I decide to go on a diet and exercise to lose weight, it’s logical. Because it’s logical I can actually use my will as an ally to get the job done. But Lent is not logical, it’s arbitrary. I’m not deciding what’s good for me, the Church is telling me what’s good for me. And my will bristles at the arbitrariness of it. Thus there is a wrestling match between my heart and will. Simultaneously, the Church encourages us to pray a lot and attend a lot of services, and open my wallet, and spend time with others. All these things strengthen the heart and weaken my errant and stubborn will, which along with sending hamburgers down to my stomach, would rather spend my money on my own pleasure, and watch My Name Is Earl instead of going to church.

So it is that God could care less about whether I eat hamburgers, etc. But he cares a great deal about whether my arms and hands are open to him, inviting him to do his will in my being. And the Church has figured out that the best way to get to the latter (the humble heart) is to do the former in a rather arbitrary way. In short, it’s not about the hamburgers, it’s about the stubborn human will which, left to its own devices, blocks God from getting into my heart.

And this brings me back to the bookstore flyer. The core of Christianity is not about “the will of God,” it’s about the human will. The questions of what God wants to do with my life (What job should I have? Whom should I marry? Where should I live?) are essentially philosophical questions, and the truth of the matter is that philosophy is great way of avoiding what should be done here and now and of muddying up the Christian faith so that I can pick and choose the parts that I like and put off the parts I don’t. But Christianity is not philosophical. Rather than worrying about the big questions, its purpose is to prepare your heart so God can come in (as he very much wants to do) and transform it. When we are transformed, the big questions take care of themselves.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that God cares about these big life (and bigger than life) questions, which are at the heart of figuring out just what the will of God is, about as much as he cares about whether I eat a hamburger tomorrow for lunch. God is in the business of transforming lives and transforming all creation; he’s not a 411 service for the spiritually confused.

So back to last week. Did I make the right decisions? Did I do the right thing with my money? Would it be too outrageous to propose that God doesn’t much care? That’s why he gave me an intellect, to figure out these sorts of questions along the way. On the other hand, God cares a great deal about which is more important to me: my net worth or my spiritual health. God doesn’t care about the specific decision (within reasonable parameters, of course: it needs to be both legal and ethical, for instance), but rather whether the decision process opened me up to God or vice versa.

Maybe you think it’s blasphemous for me to propose that God doesn’t much care. But I have a good reason for thinking that way. Jesus asked, “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (Mat 6:28f). If God told us that these things should not be our cares in life, I suspect they are not his either, because God wants us to care about the same things he cares about. Granted, God makes sure those details are covered, but those details are not why God created the universe in the first place.

The truth of the matter is, that it’s much more difficult to be perfect than to figure out intellectually what God’s plan is. God never commanded us to do the latter, but concerning the former he said, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat 5:48). Endless prayer and research about the will of God for my life, likely as not, is a convenient way to avoid the much harder task that Christ commanded us to do.

It’s not a question, but a confession of faith. It’s not, “What is the will of God for my life?” It is, “Yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).