We are souls who have bodies and our souls, like the Triune God are three part: mind, emotions, and will. How does a transformed will look?
This is Felicia Ferguson with Christian Mix 106, helping you build faith for the journey.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about the process of becoming more Christ-like beginning with controlling our thought life and then our feelings. Today we’ll talk about how to transform our wills. We are souls who have bodies and our souls, like the Triune God are three part: mind, emotions, and will.
How does a transformed will look? According to Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart, “single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his will, to want what God wants for us—and to service to him and others because of him—is what the will transformed into Christlikeness looks like.”
So now that we know the end result, how do we get there? The first step may be the hardest challenge—especially for the American Christian. Surrender. We must acknowledge and surrender to the reality that God is God and we are not. He has supremacy in intellect, in planning, even in our daily lives. Once we surrender our will, our desires and dreams to his will and open them to be in service to him, then we can stand amazed by how he works and feel a supernatural contentment in our lives. That doesn’t mean that we won’t experience bad things. We will still lose loved ones and experience trials, but by surrendering to God we have made everything in our lives available for him to use—for our good and the good of others.
The next step may be just as difficult—we must monitor and control our sinful desires. If you haven’t grown up as a believer, you may have a better idea of the sins you battle. At your confession of belief, you recognized your life radically changed when you accepted Christ as your savior. You could see the distinction between your old habits and your new life. For those of us who did grow up in the church and even confessed our faith as children or teens, we may need to be more discerning. Our early faith may give us a feeling of invincibility or a sense of pride that we would never sin—and therein is probably the toughest battle we have to fight: pride, which was Lucifer’s downfall.
But following spiritual disciplines, spending time with God, in His word, with other believers who we trust to call us out when we slip back into our sin nature will support us on our journey to transform our wills. Regularly crucifying our plans and desires to Christ’s cross will remind us that we are no longer our own, but that we have purchased with the costly blood of Jesus and we are servants and daughters and sons of the living God.
Transforming our human will to that of God’s will is a life-long journey filled with struggle, backsliding, repenting, and returning, but it all part of God’s plan of sanctification. And as his children, our first desire should be to please our heavenly father.
This is Felicia Ferguson, thanks for listening to Christian Mix 106.
