God's will/my will

I got to thinking after a recent sermon about a typical religious phrase ...

“Empty yourself of your will…”

This phrase hits a core wound in me that responds with fear. The terminology is confusing and possibly heretical.It sounds as if it's calling us to empty ourselves of the ability to choose freely.

The confusion

There are real situations in which demons or human perpetrators literally try to “empty” someone of their will (i.e. suspend or destroy the ability to choose) and impose the perpetrator’s own will via mind control. If successful, this destroys huge regions of the victim’s self. It is a violation of the essence of what it means to be human and a tragedy. God made us free to choose. If that freedom is taken from us by force, subterfuge, manipulation or other means, it is a violation of that essence. Further, if I of my own initiative “empty myself of my will,” i.e. give up the freedom to choose --even to God, I would argue -- I abdicate both the responsibility and the glory of who He made me to be. I believe, in fact, that the enemy seeks to destroy human will, because in the end our freedom to choose is our only true ability to act against him. When we freely choose God, the enemy can do nothing to stop us. He can abuse, violate, hurt, taunt…but he can’t overcome us when we align ourselves by choice with God.

Part of the confusion stems from the word “will”. The word can refer to either intentions that are the target of the act of willing (“God’s will for my life…”) OR the faculty of will/choice itself. “God’s will” and “my will” can mean either God’s or my ability to will/to choose, OR the intentions that God or I choose to focus our wills upon.

Short “theology of will”

A: God IS Reality; He IS Love. He created humans as real free agents. When we Fall, we choose (“my will” i.e. ability to choose) to believe that Reality is not real/true, that God is not really God, and that His intention (God’s will) for us is not Love. We choose ( my will)– and then become bound – to believe we can live on our own, without resorting to God for anything. We actively separate ourselves from relating to God, even though He is the one who created us and everything that sustains us. We presume on His creative act and pretend that we somehow made it happen, or at the very least, can continue to make it happen, now that He’s gotten everything up and running.

B: What we have really done, though, is abdicated our place in the creation as both benefiters of and servants to the whole. We in many ways gave our wills (ability to choose) and ourselves over into the hands of the enemy. By separating ourselves from God, we effectively made survival our primary intention (“my will”), and found that we can’t make even that happen without help. The enemy has been more than willing to take advantage of our need for help, thwart our freedom and drive us even further from God through active oppression, piling up lies, distortion and their consequences through time.

C: In all of this, we gave up the intentions God had (God’s will)… to create with us and continually release us into unimaginably brilliant futures in and with Him. Who knows how many stars we might now inhabit, how many space-time dimensions we might be playing in, how many creatures we may be interacting and talking with now had we chosen to remain in Him? God weeps at His loss and our long separation. He continually reveals what is Real to us. His commands are an urgent Lover’s call, warnings to the beloved as we flirt with disaster, instructions for how to align ourselves with what is Real, not just to avoid disaster, but to Really Thrive.

Unfortunately, stubbornly clinging to and helplessly bound by the lies that blind us, we continually run along – even eagerly step over -- the edge of deadly cliffs. As our Primary Lover, desperate to save us, God shouts commands intended to save us from death. His laws are directions, instructions for lives that really work because they are founded on what is Real (True), free from distortion. Finally, He sent/became a Rescuer, Himself in human form, to woo, entice, call and draw us back from death so He could re-make us, make us Real again.

The Core: God implores us to choose (my will) Him freely, to be and to do in committed, loving unison/union with Him. However, we cannot do this if we have been “emptied of our will” (i.e. the faculty to choose). Rather we need our wills to be healed of lies, brokenness and bondage so we can increasingly choose Him, and freely align our intentions (my will) with His intentions (God’s will).

So, reading Colossians 1 in this context: 

1. The “knowledge of God’s will” refers to more than which “path” God might want us to take, what choices he might want us to make (God’s will).
2. It does not refer to letting God actively suspend our ability to choose and use it directly to impose His choices (“possess” us like a demon might).
3. It refers first and foremost to the Primal Fact that His intentions(God’s will) toward us and for us are LOVE, that His choices (God’s will) regarding us are all motivated by LOVE.
4. As we “get” this in our core, and increasingly let it in, we will find our own intentions (my will) beginning to untangle from the lies and find the grace to align them with what is Real – God.
5. In this way, we increasingly “put to death” our old (i.e. former) intentions (my will), our old self.
6. Our ability to choose (“my will”) begins to be healed from its multiple bondages and brokenness.

Addendum:

Hearing God by Dallas Willard has a lot to say about God’s will, as does Greg Boyd in books like Is God to Blame. And here is C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity 

 “…I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up yourself to Him you will not have a real self. But there must be a real giving up of the [illusory/old] self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak … Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” (Mere Christianity, from pp. 218-227)