Perfecting Your Will 2
(week 12/03)
Olubi Johnson
In our article last week we saw the necessity of freewill for satisfying love and fellowship, the potential of free will to create evil and God’s solution for this through the sacrifice of Christ.
This week we will see how to perfect our will in Christ.
How to perfect your will
To perfect your will you need to practice exercising your will to obey God especially in situations where to do so would seem life threatening.
For instance, Abraham submitted to God when asked to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis. 22.12).
Esther submitted to God to go before the King without permission, risking death (Esther 4.16).
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, refused to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol in the face of a fiery furnace (Daniel. 3. 17, 18).
In fact, the Bible says God chooses us, as it concerns our destinies and position in His eternal plan, according to the choices we make in the ‘furnace of affliction’ (Isaiah. 48.10).
In the face affliction do you get offended at God or do you submit?
Do you love your life in this world above God and the Kingdom?
Remember Jesus said:
Luke 9:24(KJV): For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.
We need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Is life out of the will God worth it?
When we can honestly say no to this question then our decisions will be made in the will of God and our will will become more and more aligned with God’s will.
When we submit to God in the midst of affliction even unto death, we are demonstrating to God that existence without him is not acceptable to us.
This causes God to know that if when things are difficult your will submits to him, then obviously when things are easy you will never rebel against Him.
This means if He tests you and finds you faithful in this life where things are difficult, He can trust you with His throne and power throughout eternity where there will be no pressures.
This is why God chooses us in the “furnace of affliction”.
One very fundamental difference between men and angels is that angels were created in their mature form whereas men are born and then grow to maturity.
Having experienced rebellion with some angels in their mature form, God in making man more like Himself than angels were especially in the area of the free will, chose in His wisdom to have men born and then grow to maturity.
It was only Adam the first man that was created in his mature form and given the easy choice of eating from the tree life in a stress free environment of the Garden of Eden.
Had Adam made this easy choice, they would have exercised their will in obedience and had their will permanently fixed in the will of God.
They would then have automatically trained their children in the same way and this would have continued from generation to generation.
Unfortunately Adam and Eve rebelled against God and fell into sin.
However in Christ all they lost has been restored and even more.
So now man’s will can be trained to submit to God over time and when maturity is reached the will of man remains fixed in whatever it was trained to submit to during the growth process:
Proverbs 22:6(KJV): Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
If you train them in rebellion, pride, indulgence and indiscipline when they are old they will not depart from these things: their will will be fixed in these things.
If you train them in Godliness, their will will be fixed in Godliness.
You train children, in Godliness, by prayer, example, instruction and discipline so that you break their self will and cause them to submit their will to the will of God.
God does the same to us through affliction: He breaks our pride and self will causing us to submit our will to Him (Leviticus. 26.19, Psalms. 119. 67, 71).
Today, in Christ, if you “‘eat’ of the tree of life'” (John. 6. 35, Proverbs. 3.18) daily, by the Word and prayer, your will will start getting aligned with the will of God and over time will become fixed or perfected in it.
