April 27

Transformation of the CORE: The Will

April 27, 2008 Rev. William “Buck” Day

We are going to look at Luke, Chapter 10, and I invite you to follow along as we read God’s word for us this morning. (Luke 10:38-42)

Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home (Him being Jesus). She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks. So she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

But the Lord answered, “Martha, Martha, why are you worried and distracted by so many things. There is need of only one thing, and Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her.”

God’s word for us today. Would you join me in prayer?

Mighty and Holy God, we thank you that you are here and very much a part of our life here at Faith and beyond. We thank you for the opportunity to see Chris once again; and, Lord, we ask that you would go with us and go with him as we go our ways over this next year. Lord, in this moment right now, we ask that you would quicken our hearts to hear what your Spirit is saying for us. So we ask that in Christ’s name. Amen.

Well, I want to start today by asking you a question. How many of you, when you go grocery shopping, love to do the sampling thing? You kind of go into the grocery store; you know, they have the samples out and you graze through the samples. Maybe it is that something is on sale or something new. Maybe it is a coupon that they want to give you to buy it, whatever the case may be. Now here is the real question. How many of you actually go to the store to sample and that becomes your meal? I know some people who do that, exactly. I know some people who do that.

Well I was recently at Costco doing a little shopping. As I was walking through there I came around one corner and the smell of fresh baked warm cookies slapped me in the face. Now I am trying to eat a little healthier; so, in general, store bought cookies are a no-no for me. O.K. But you see I have this weakness. It is called warm cookies. I don’t care what the cookies are, if they are warm, I will eat them. Then on top of that, these were not normal ordinary warm cookies, these were one of my favorites, Heath Bar Chip warm cookies. Yeah… So I pushed my cart up and I took one of those. I kind of pushed my cart away and I was in hot warm cookie heaven as I walked down the aisle. I loved it. It was good. So I continued to work my way down the aisles and guess what? I ended up back in front of the cookie lady. I thought, well, I might as well have another one, right? So I had one more. I knew they probably had trans fat and I didn’t want to know that. I set my will on having another one of those warm Heath Bar Chip cookies. It was a wonderful thing.

Well we are in the middle of a series called Transforming the Core, and we are talking about transforming our spiritual core. Today we are talking about our will. When we set our will on something, it is what our focus becomes. It is what we must accomplish. For me it was warm cookies at Costco. In Luke it says that Jesus “set his face toward Jerusalem.” That is the same kind of thing that Jesus set his will so that he would go to Jerusalem so that he could complete the work that he had come to do, which was to go to the cross for you and I. So that’s what we want to look at today, this idea of our will. What is it all about, how do we begin to transform that? As we think about that, we think about the will and the heart and the Spirit – all kind of highlight different aspects of our being; but they all refer to the same fundamental core part of who we are as humans. So for our purposes they can actually be used interchangeably. We will talk a little bit more about that in just a second. But as we do that, as we start by thinking about our will, what we have to start with and what we have to think about is this notion that if we are going to transform our will, then we must understand its relationship to the mind.

We started this series a few weeks ago. Stew started it by talking about the mind. He talked about the thoughts and the images that we take into our mind. Then after that I talked about the second half of the mind which was our feelings and how do we deal with our feelings. As we talked about this idea of our mind and its transformation, we spoke about the need to make choices about the thoughts and the feelings that we are choosing to dwell on. Those choices that we make in that process then really have to interact with our will if we are going to make any kind of progress with spiritual transformation. Dallas Willard, who has been our resource person for our series, his main book is called Renovation of the Heart. It is the black covered one. This is a tough read but it is a good read. In that he says this about the idea of the will and the mind and how it works together. He says, “The condition of our mind is much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.” So in other words, where we set our will, will influence and determine a lot of the condition of our mind. So you can see how they go together, how they interact with each other. So if we seek to try to transform one without the other, it is going to be fruitless. It doesn’t matter if we just focus on the mind and not the will. It’s not going to happen and vice versa. If we focus on the will and not the mind it also will be fruitless as well. So right out of the gate we need to understand that progress that we make in spiritual transformation. We have to acknowledge this interplay between our mind and our will and that is critical for us to understand. So that is why I put this back up here, because it starts in the mind and the will, and then it begins to move out throughout the dimensions of us as humans as Willard lays them out. So next week we are going to talk about the body and how the body plays into our spiritual transformation; after that, our social context, and we will finish up the series with the soul. A lot of people have been asking me about this and I want to do this one more time. I don’t get a cut on these books, I should be getting a cut on these books, but I don’t. This is kind of the companion book for the main book. It is called, Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice. It is the green book, available on Amazon and I am sure you can get it at a lot of other places; but it is a very helpful, very practical piece that you can take with some of the things we talk about today. Kind of begin to work them into your lives and see how can you make a more continued practical application of this into our lives, because if we are going to make that kind of spiritual transformation that we have been talking about, coming here on Sunday and just doing it and thinking about it on Sunday for an hour is not going to be enough. We got to make it a part of our lives, O.K.

So now, let’s then switch back to this focus of our will. Let’s talk a little bit about the nature of the human will. Our will is the most basic expression of our true selves. What comes from our will is purely and wholly us. It is nothing else. We are the ones who influence our will. A way to think about our will is that the creativity that comes from a person comes from our will. It is what makes us unique and irreplaceable. It is the will where we have the ability to originate something or perhaps to not originate something. It is the will where we bring things into existence in our lives. It is the core of who we are and what we are about and it is what makes us different than the people around us.

When it says that “we are made in God’s image,” I think this is part of what is included in God’s image. Being made in God’s image, our will is part of his likeness in that we have the ability to create within our own limited space in sphere. So we can kind of create within the parameters that God sets for us, but the ability to create for good is really a reflection of God’s image. That is part of who we are and that is part of what it means to be made in God’s image – is this notion of having a will. Beyond that I think our will is the non-physical part of our being, so that is where we get this idea of our human nature. We think of it as our human spirit. Our human spirit is that kind of non-physical part but it is definitely a part of who we are as people.

When we think about the will on a more functional level, it is that place that is most central, most organized; and it is that directed center of our being. That is where the idea of our heart comes from; it a very Jewish concept. The idea that the heart was kind of the center of the person and every thing originated from their heart; that is what we are talking about here, that the will and the heart are very much of a parallel. It is just very much a Jewish perspective on the will. So as we think about our will, as humans we kind of begin to reflect on that. We can see that there is in us this kind of natural drive, the ability to create good. We have seen that in our lives from time to time haven’t we? We say, “Yes, I can bring something good into existence.” That is part of the implanted nature from the Creator. But if we continue to look at our will we know that, but we also know that our will has been corrupted, hasn’t it? Our will has been corrupted and, if you will, it has been turned on itself; it has been turned inside out. It has been replaced by what Willard calls “fragmentation and multiplicity.” We have gone from how can I do good? to how can I get what I want? We have gone from this natural ability to create to bring about good, to using that creativity to raise myself up as my own god, self-deification. Self-centeredness comes out of that. When we set ourselves up as our own god, when we become self-centered, we automatically alienate ourselves from God. We push God out of the picture as much as we can.

There are lots of ways this gets worked out. One of the ways is pretending to feel and think one way while acting in another. That shows how our will, when it is alienated from God, when we have pushed God away because we have set ourselves up as a god, what happens then is that the will has no way to reorient itself back to God. The will needs to be reoriented with God but because we have alienated ourselves from God, the will has no way to check itself, if you will. So what it does is it begins to turn on itself and it begins to deceive itself. So in the situation of thinking one way and acting another, what we do is rather than surrender to what we want, we don’t want to do that because that’s our will, we do what we want but we try to conceal it out of fear of being made known. So there is some self-deception going on within our will at this point. As that self-deception continues to spiral it creates kind of a vortex and just takes us down into more self-deception and more darkness, so that we cannot understand what we do. We don’t know why we do what we do.

So as we begin to see our will in that framework we can begin to see how verses like Jeremiah 17-9 come into play for we are deceiving ourselves. We are locked into this spiral of self-deception and yet God stands outside of that. God stands outside of that and He can see our deception as clear as you can see me standing up here. Our hope in this self-diluted state in which we find ourselves is that God, “the one who calls us beloved,” remember that from a couple of weeks ago, “the one who calls us beloved,” our hope is that He will enter into the state of our will as messed up, as disoriented and self-centered as it is, and He will take it to Himself. He will take it into Himself as we sincerely turn towards Him and that’s that 1 John passage.

One of my favorite verses in all of scripture and, is Alex Lapp here? I don’t think he is. Alex, I had to look up this reference. It is one of my favorite scriptures but I had to look up the reference. It simply says that God does not look at outward appearances. God doesn’t care what the outside looks like. God looks at your heart. God looks at your heart. God is always looking for a heart that is ready to turn towards Him. Even in the smallest, most minute movement God can detect that. He has great sensitivity to the movement of the human heart. I think about a seismograph machine. A seismograph machine can measure very, very small movements in the earth’s crust, can’t it? And when there is an earthquake it goes way off scale. I liken that to God in our hearts. God is monitoring our hearts, or if you will, our will in the same way. For when we turn to God as God, when we push aside and say no more self-deception and we invite God to come back in, there is like a seismic wave that I think goes off in our hearts because God is monitoring our hearts. He responds to that and He gives that gift of life to us. God is in the business of bringing to Him all whose hearts are turned over to Him. That is God’s desire. That is God’s goal for all of us; that our hearts would be like His heart; that our will would reflect His will.

Think about David. What do we know about David and his heart before God? David was a man after what?...God’s own heart. He was a man after God’s own heart. That is God’s will for each of us; that we would move to identify our will with His will. That’s the goal of this transformation that we have been talking about – lining up our will with God’s will. I see that as a movement, a progression if you will, of four movements that Willard lays out. I liken it to a new habit. You know when we start a new habit it typically takes what, six weeks to form a new habit, is that right? Twenty- one days? O.K. It takes some time. It takes some time to form a new habit or stop doing another habit we might consider a bad habit. When we start, it is not much fun, is it? We are kind of grumbling, but over time we kind of morph through different stages to the point to where we no longer are worried about it. We are not grumbling anymore and when we get to the end of it and it actually becomes a part of us, then all of a sudden it brings enjoyment to our lives, doesn’t it? That is kind of what the progression is as we begin to line our will to God’s will.

So with that, the first movement is what Willard calls surrender. Surrender simply means that we are starting by consenting to His supremacy in all things. We are acknowledging that God knows better than us. That is a great thing for us to think about because when we think about God we typically think, O.K. God’s got the moral thing down, He’s got the ethical thing down, He’s got the theology, the bible thing down, maybe even the truth thing down. We got that. We know God’s got that. But do we ever think about God as smarter than our greatest mathematician? Do we ever think about God as smarter than the engineer who designed the 35W Bridge that is being built right now? Do we ever think about God as smarter than Stephen Hawking, if we are going to hold him up as the one who is the smartest guy around right now? God has more intelligence than any of us and all of us put together.

Corinthians says that “our best wisdom (humans’ best wisdom) is folly to God.” It is humorous, it is laughable to God. That is how much his intellectual superiority is over us. That is the starting point. We have to say I surrender to you God. You know better than me; and then beginning to take the steps to live that out. In this stage, we may not be able to do what God wills, but we are at least willing to will it. Does that make sense? It is kind of like we want to do his will but we may not be able to yet. I think of the story where the man comes to Jesus with a demonic son and he says, “Jesus help cure my son.” And Jesus says, “Do you believe?” And the guy says, “I believe but help my unbeliever.” That’s kind of the surrender stage here. We want to do God’s will, we really do; but we may not be able to do it all yet. In this stage there comes with some grumbling, probably, some complaining about our life, maybe even about God, and I was thinking about how we might think about this. I thought about a puppy. How many of you ever tried to train a puppy? It is crazy isn’t it? The dog is just all over the place, he’s running up and down all over. When you finally say, “O.K. I’m going to teach this dog to sit,” when you finally get the dog to sit, more often than not the tail is wagging, because I’m sitting but I don’t want to. That is kind of how it is with surrendering. We are not perfect at this stage but it is a step forward and that is the important thing to acknowledge here. It is a step in the right direction, because we want God to be God even if it is uncomfortable for us. When God sees our heart surrendering, surrendering to His supremacy, then what happens is He brings a little more understanding of His will into our mind and into our hearts. So that is the first step.

Next is abandonment. Abandonment is simply that we have fully surrendered every area of our life to God. We have abandoned it. It includes every life circumstance we find ourselves in. We are giving that over to God, even the suffering, even the tragedy that comes into our lives—the loss of a loved one, maybe a health issue, whatever it might be. We can say, “You know, I know God doesn’t want this. I know God didn’t bring it into my life. But I know that God will use it for good.” I will take Romans 8:28 to heart. “All things work for good for those who love God.” That is what abandonment is all about.

Next is contentment and contentment, that grumbling you may have seen under surrender is long gone, it is not even thought about any more at this point; and we are content with God’s will in our life. Whatever God’s will is for our life we are O.K. with that. We are kind of O.K. with our lot in life. With this contentment there is this steady tone of gratitude, that you are thankful, that you are humble. There is joy that is also a part of this process as well when you are in contentment. You know that God has always been and will always do right by you and so there is great assurance—I know that God has the best at hand here no matter what.

Then there is the last one which is participation. Participation is a unique one because it all of a sudden springs us into action. There is some intelligence and some energy that comes as we move into participation because we seek to join God in the participation of establishing His will in the world. It is this wonderful perspective that not only is God’s will going to envelope the whole world, and that’s going to happen; but that God desires us to join with Him in carrying out that will. God wants that to happen for us. So this participation comes as seeing that we have a role to play in God’s redemptive story. God’s redemptive story has happened throughout the centuries of human history. God has been at work at redeeming people and God is calling each of us to play a role for our little period of this great big story. Think of it as this great cosmic drama that God is putting on, this play. Each one of us has been given our lines to learn or our roles to play in this drama that God is putting on before the universe. And we get to participate in it. It is not that we have to participate; it is not that we are being coerced, or strong armed, or guilted into participation; but we are actually at the point in our lives that we say, “I want to be a part of this. I get to be a part of what God is doing in the world. Isn’t that cool?” That is what we want. That is the kind of participation, that’s the kind of energy, that’s the kind of excitement that comes with it, the intelligence that comes with that as a part of it.

So those are the four steps. That’s the progress. Really we blew through these pretty quickly so I invite you to get Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice because they impact them a lot more and they help you understand more of where they are and maybe give you more of an inside as to where you might be as well. But the road here starts at surrender. It is that single minded focus that we need. That is where we start. It is focusing on doing nothing more than God’s will and that is why I put the story of Mary and Martha up here because I thought that was a great example of Mary really focusing herself on being with Jesus, on surrendering herself to him, being with him, listening to him. What was Jesus’ response? He said, “Mary chose the better part,” didn’t he? So as we think about this idea of being single mindedly focused on surrender, if that is our starting point, what does that begin to look like practically as we kind of wrap this up here? Well if the goal is that our will would align with God’s will, if that’s the goal, then the natural question that we always ask is, “What is God’s will?” Well, we typically ask, “What’s God’s will for me?” What’s God’s will for me and should I take this new job? Shall I move to another town? What school should I go to? Who should I marry? Who should I date? Those are all what we typically think of with God’s will. I would say those are good questions to ask but let’s back up a little bit first. I think as we back up that those questions will maybe even become a mute point.

So where do we start to discover God’s will? Well I think the obvious place would be the one place where God’s will is clearly seen. Any ideas? His word…. Exactly. Where do we know God’s will most clearly? Scripture. Scripture. O.K. We can know God’s will from scripture. There are lots of places throughout the bible where it clearly talks about what He wants for us. So I picked one. This is 1 Peter 2 and it simply says that we “should not have malice or guile.” Malice is that desire to hurt other people. Guile is to mislead others. So if that is God’s will and He doesn’t want us to do that, then it is simply saying, “Starting today I will not do those things.” That’s the starting point. That’s how easy it is and it may seem like a small step but watch out, because what’s behind malice and guile to begin to peel back that onion.

One of the things that is fundamental to both of those is lying. Lying is one of those fundamental sins that get everybody in trouble. When we are lying, what’s underneath that? It’s deception, right? What do we think about when we are talking about the will and what happens to us? We begin to deceive ourselves, right? It’s that deception coming into play again and that’s what gets us into trouble with the will and that starts that downward cycle again and that alienation from God. So as we think about this we say, O.K. I’m going to do this. We attempt to live it out. If we are thinking about, O.K. wait a sec, it’s about deception; it’s about lying. All of a sudden it is a lot harder than we think, because as we go through our day and we are thinking about, O.K. I’m not going to try to mislead others; I’m not going to try to hurt others. We know our thoughts. We know our feelings. We even know our actions at times, don’t we? They come so naturally, they are so much a part of who we are and that shows us how far we have to go. So this seems simple but it is maybe a little harder that it appears at the front end. That is where spiritual disciplines begin to come into play. Those spiritual disciplines of fasting, solitude, worship and even service, all come into play. They allow those kinds of darker areas to begin to bubble up, because we have time to slow down and allow God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit and the power of God’s word to bring those things forth. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago—the power of God’s word. God cuts to the marrow. God’s word reveals truth. It convicts us and combines that with the ministry of the Holy Spirit; and, all of a sudden, God is kind of filleting our heart, our will, open and we begin to see as He sees. So we can say, “you know what God, this is out of line. This is out of line with your will and I need to give it to you; I need to surrender it to you.” And then, “Help me. Help me live out your will even though it is really hard right now.” It is out of those strongholds that are part of probably all of us that keep us from taking that first step of surrendering. Making our will God’s will is hard; but as we keep our eyes on Christ, it shows where we are to live a life so that we won’t be at war with God’s will.

So for you, I invite you to think about maybe what is the next step for you? Maybe it is applying this. Maybe it is thinking through those four steps of progression. Maybe it is simply asking God, “God where am I? Maybe I haven’t even fully surrendered to you yet.” Or maybe it is, “O.K. God what is the next step in participation that you have for me?” I invite you to think about that and to reflect on that as we go forward today. Let me pray for us.

Lord God, thank you that you are here, that you are very much alive and Lord you really do desire that our will reflect your will. Lord we confess that we are not very good at that. We are not very good at that because we truly want our way more often than not. So Lord, help us to submit to you, help us to surrender to you that we might know your will more clearly in our lives. In you name. Amen.