The Salvation of the Will

An effective and true salvation has to save a man's will.

Roberto Sáez

"For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure." (Phil.2:13). "...not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9). "who (God) would have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:4).

The want or desire to do something, is directly related with the will. The will is that which defines what we are; it is in our being's center and it is what we might call our "self". The will is free, nobody can force it or enslave; each person gives it voluntarily to that which seems best or convenient to him. However, we know the damage that it suffered with the fall; it was atrophied and contaminated by the enemy of God.

Disobedience

Disobedience took place in day-star's (Lucifer's) rebellion. This was the main angel. Wickedness was found in him and was expressed in the act of refusing to want what God wants. Certainly, such audacity was an attack against God's will. This is the most serious sin that exists within the scale of spiritual values in the Kingdom of God. The will of God is sovereign, absolute, holy and righteous. You cannot contend against the will of God because He is God and the rest are creatures. Clay is not able to oppose the potter to argue about why they are being given such a form.

Rebellious disobedience brought separation and total enmity. From then on, day-star came to be called "devil" which means the "opponent", "enemy" of God, to such an extent that he does not want anything that comes from God. He moved infinitely away from God; being opposed to everything that comes from God. Thus, he doesn't want God's forgiveness, nor His love, nor His salvation, nor mercy; nothing which comes from God.

The devil made the first man fall into his own rebellion. Let us remember that rebellion means resisting the will of God. One act of disobedience was enough to bring ruin upon Adam and, through him, upon the whole human race. God is Holy and in Him there is no darkness. Judgment and punishment came as a consequence, and man, just like Satan, was deprived of the glory of God by not wanting what God wants.

When man fell, his will was bound to the will of Satan. Sin forms part of his nature and, although he knows what is good, he cannot do it, and cannot avoid sin. Thus, he is a slave to sin. However, for man, contrary to Satan and his fallen angels, there was salvation by God. The fall caused tremendous harm to man's will; the salvation of God consists in bringing man's fallen will to the obedience of His Kingdom. Although this is a process that takes a Christian's whole lifetime, in the initial salvation he recovered the desire to do the will of God.

The salvation of the fallen will

The salvation of the will consists in returning man's will to its original state, that is, a free will. The man that God created was free to make decisions; otherwise we would be a puppet in the Creator's hands. God never forces man to obey Him, unlike the demons who always violate this principle.

An effective and true salvation has to save man's will. The believer may experience much satisfaction when believing in God, and obtain much knowledge about the Bible, but if his will has not been recovered, hiss experience with God is still superficial.

Two opposed wills exist: that of God and that of Satan; man submits to one or the other. With the fall, the will was enslaved by Satan; from then on, man has been doing the enemy's will and resisting the will of God. When accepting the enemy's proposals, all his acts come to be controlled by the adversary. When our Lord was here, He found Satan in the Israelite's nature: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do.... for he is a liar, and the father thereof. " (John 8:44). The will and working of the Jews was under the devil's will! They had a religion, a culture, a Covenant and the promises of God; they were proud of being Abraham's descendents, however, their will was subject to the devil's will. How vain the resources of religion and man's efforts are for their salvation!

There isn't another salvation except that which God gives to His own. Salvation belongs to our God. God has decided to save and sends out a proclamation: "It is my will that all be saved". The salvation of God is an ordinance and a work that comes from His own will. Man is dead and, therefore, helpless of doing anything for himself in terms of salvation. Although God wants to save him, He cannot impose it, He cannot force him, He cannot decide for man even though it is His will to save; He cannot force him to want it nor to accept it-at most He can persuade with supplications, sending His ambassadors to proclaim His desire: "we beseech you in Christ's name: be reconciled to God". God wants to! The question is: do you?

Man has to want to because God cannot violate His own laws. However, the salvation that man has to want is the one that God can only give him from above, and not the one that he would like for himself, because anything that comes from man can save him. We must understand that it is God who wants to save and we have to accept or want the salvation that comes from Him. Nothing else.

Salvation never originates in man. All that originates in man is unacceptable in God's eyes. Man's will is fallen and it is God who comes to man to lift him up. Then, he only has to accept what God offers him, but man's will is rebellious and it resists. Do we realize how lost man is?

The responsibility of being lost or being saved relapses in man. Just as the fall consisted in a sin of man's will by disobeying, in the recovery of his fallen will, he must return to an obedience to God. When the man accepts the word of God as the gospel, he is assisted by the Holy Spirit to lift his fallen will and to bring it to the obedience of the faith in the Son of God.

Abandonment and surrender of the will

In the salvation of the fallen will, there must be a desire to abandon one's own will, to abandon their independence and to give it to God to unite it with His will. Paul says that because of " the infirmity of your flesh… ye presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification " (Romans 6:19). "the infirmity of the flesh". We voluntarily made ourselves slaves to sin, then it enslaved us. Nothing could make us free from it. But Christ came and freed us from slavery, and now that we are free, what will we do with our freedom? We are so weak that we would not know what to do, so what we most need is to give our members to righteousness and to make ourselves voluntary slaves of righteousness.

It is not enough to stop serving defilement. The way to unite our will to that of God's is to find out how horrendous the "self" is. How disobedient it is, how augmented, astute, deceiving, individualist and difficult to know! It hides itself, it is subtle, a specialist in self-defense, sometimes emotional and at other times intellectual. How selfish a person it is, what a nuisance for the work of God it is! It doesn't have a remedy! The best thing is that it die! -oh we so want it to die- oh, if we understood the necessity to die to the "self", how many blows we would avoid!

The gospel that we preach has to produce a union of our will with that of God's, and if this is not happening, something in our mission is failing. Perhaps you have had an attitude of intellectual consent to the word of God-you knew from childhood that God exists. But to know those things in your mind won't count for anything if you have not surrendered your will to that of God. You will agree with God on many issues and in many others you will have felt very close to the point of crying when feeling His calling and His presence; however, you still retain your will. Neither the mind nor emotions will make you united with God but rather, only the surrender of your will to His. Men have invented religions for the mind and for the ability to reason: both are completely useless in saving man's fallen will. Some present the Christian life as a "feeling of joy and peace", and others present it as "a very deep knowledge". Neither one nor the other will suffice. If God's calling has not made you surrender your will so that you want whatever God wants and hate whatever He hates, it is still not enough.

The discipline of God

Due to the obstinacy of our will, God will allow many unpleasant things to happen to us in order to get us to unite our will to His. God will rob us of our goods, of our health, family, fame, whatever it may be -with the exception of our will-in order to subject our will to His. There is no other way. Many times we will be deprived of the joy of His presence; He will make us go through spiritual dryness so that we yearn for Him alone. We will sometimes go through dark days, we will be without the comfort of God, we will be robbed of all that is pleasant if it is necessary. God is love, but regrettably, many times we don't respond to the love of God, but to His discipline.

The believer's will must be broken, and for this reason God allows His disciplinary hand to fall upon His children, afflicting them, in order to achieve the union of His will with theirs. God will make His children surrender; He cannot force them, but He can persuade them and can use many means of persuasion until He manages to make them abandon their ego.

The life of the soul has a lot of strength and trust in itself. The discipline of God will gradually make the believer lose this class of life and prefer to change to God's life in him. The most spiritual men are those who have most learnt how to deny themselves. They are those who have gone farther on the way to union with God and are those that no longer live, but Christ in them.

To discern the will of God

Although in our initial experience of salvation, when we were found by God, we were saved from our fallen will, the damage that the fall caused was such that one needs the whole lifetime of a believer to perfectly unite their will with that of God. The believer doesn't know the will of God and needs to discern it every day and in every circumstance.

"Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding; Whose trappings must be bit and bridle to hold them in, Else they will not come near unto thee. " (Psalm 32:9). This illustration reflects our condition very well; we are like the horse or like the mule, without understanding; we need God to harness us, and so we must ask Him not to let us stray and to pull the reins to submit ourselves to Him. God will respond by creating circumstances that regulate us; but in the same way as when the mule bucks, the same will happen to us because our will cannot accept those circumstances. Let us see God in our circumstances! Don't resist what God prepared for our formation.

The Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth and He has the mission of guiding us into all truth. "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). The form which God has provided in order to free His children from their damaged will is that their heart confront the truth. Each believer must discern the will of God by means of this act of internal revision: "Is this true? Is there any deceit in this? Is this of my flesh or is it of God?" There is no way being mistaken: the Spirit gives testimony of the truth. We know that the truth is Christ and all that doesn't correspond with Christ, is not of God, be it a thought or an action. In fact, the will of God is Christ. God by His Spirit is telling us: "Just as my Son acted among you, so you too must act." To discern that, means coming to the truth, and for us it will mean the will of God.

Restoring the distorted will

There are many Christians who have not progressed onward because they have allowed the enemy to conquer them in some kind of sin. They gradually lost their own self control and reached the conclusion that the Christian life was not for them Where did they get lost? In what point of the race did they get diverted off the route? It is possible that they have harbored the enemies' whispers in their thoughts. They accepted impurity, then the enemy took control of his will; they accepted the temptation time and again, sin gave birth to wickedness, and they got entangled to the point of losing self-control.

Let us remember that the will is a sacred temple that was created for the freedom of making decisions. When man is faced with a certain reality, he must make a decision. The enemy a liar and will, of course, use all kinds of tricks so that the believer thinks that he is not able to make that decision. But the truth is that he can get up and tell the enemy that he no longer wants anything else to do with him. It will be an enormous struggle, a tremendous fight. The Christian needs to take hold of all the means of grace: to recognize that his desire to be free and to be restored comes from God, and for that reason repentance will come upon him, causing him to ask for forgiveness and to humble himself before the brothers to ask for help. He will confess his sins, he will face the light through confession, and will humiliate his flesh, he will humble himself before all the people that he affected asking them for forgiveness, and will seek to be in the church meetings because he knows that he needs Christ's body.

The Holy Spirit will speak to him to strengthen him, the fellowship of his own spirit will be reactivated with the Holy Spirit, the enemy will duplicate his traps (one of his slaves is escaping), the brother will return to the Lord fighting within himself in order to be free, the grace of God will take away all his commitments to the darkness, it will use the brothers to minister liberation from unclean spirits -if it were necessary, it will exercise the free determination of his will to make the demons flee and to offer himself once again to God. It will be necessary to insist many times until obtaining the brother's restoration. It is indispensable that in the whole process the fallen brother is sincere and admits his weaknesses, opening his heart to the brothers who are aiding him. If he hides his sins, there won't be any possibility to free him. " He that covereth his transgressions shall not prosper: But whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall obtain mercy. " (Prov. 28:13).

Confronting the heart with the truth is the only way of always maintaining a will that is free from the slavery of sin, to let the truth reprehend us, that it may act as a mirror to show our crooked ways, so that we be confirmed in the truth. This is the healthiest thing that we can do.

Renewing understanding to prove the perfect will of God

"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, and ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. " (Romans 12:1-2).

From this passage, we realize that uniting the human will to that of God's is an act that is linked with the rest of the functions of each member of the body. The Christian's will is harmed when he doesn't maintain a mental hygiene. The consecration of our bodies on the altar of the cross is something that we need to do daily. Most sins are committed with the body, and the entrance to that is the mind. The mind is the closest organ to the spirit and it is also the one that communicates us to the external world. The mind has the function of discerning what comes to us through the spirit and also to decode the messages that come from outside, among which come Satan's whisperings. The form of resisting those messages from the evil one is "presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice".

The will is not isolated from the rest of the members of the body. The mind is the channel of information that all the organs of the body have, and the will is that which is in charge of executing that information, be it spiritual or carnal. The will must be given over to God. A will that is united to that of God's will easily reject all that is not of God, but if the heart (the center of man's affections) yearns and harbors desires that are contrary to the will of God, and the Christian is negligent in presenting his members on the altar of the sacrifice, he will relax and will caress impure thoughts, and the will, finally, will become weakened because it allowed such thoughts to enter. The will is that which determines and makes decisions; the mind only informs what goes on inside and outside ourselves.

To prove (test) the perfect will of God is to prove (test) what Christ's attitude would be in such and such a situation. The will of God is not a doctrine treaty or a collection of knowledge, nor a manual of Christian behavior, but rather the will of God is a person: Jesus Christ the Lord. The will of God being Christ, all that I have to do is to remain in Him, to walk in Him, to live in Him, to rest in Him. Everything is in Him, through Him and for Him.

The mind is a battle field where the forces of evil want to conquer the land, and on the other hand God, who is the owner -because He created us- seeks for this land to belong only to Him. The enemy is an usurper who wants to steal what is God's, and will therefore use all kinds of deceit to achieve his objective. People surrender to one or the other. As for us, we are for the Lord Jesus Christ who has saved us from the enemy's power.

The mind is a land to be sowed with the seeds of the Kingdom of God. In this case, the enemy also has his own seeds, but these are of wickedness. Christians know who to allow to sow. " For they that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. " (Romans 8:5).

Christians have Christ's mind. The new ones and the old ones, but the old ones are more exercised in subordinating their mind to that of Christ's. The issue is in the will. What is it that you want? Do you want to do your own will or that of God? You and you alone are the one who has to decide.

"For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds. Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ". Christians have spiritual weapons. Armaments have been endowed by God which give him the victory: he only has to use them.

These weapons are: 1) Jesus' blood, 2) The word of the testimony, 3) taking the cross. He only has to confront his faith with the devil's whispering and he will know what to do. He will have to confront his heart with God's truth. There he will know what the perfect will of God is, in that fine point where you surrender yourself and you prove the will of God; there, in that point in which you know what the will of God is and you bow before him to obey, then the renovation of understanding takes place. When you obey God, when you don't conform to this era, when you shake the humanist mundane culture and you return to God to obey him. It is not that you first understand, but rather, you first obey what you know in your spirit to be the will of God, and then the renovation of your mind (understanding) will come. The spirit knows before the mind does; the mind only understands what the spirit receives from God.

Let us not think that the renovation of the mind is only freedom from the enemy's chains, but rather it takes place when the mind cooperates with the Spirit of God, allowing Him to fill us with the light and wisdom of God with all its creativity, working for God.

Synthesis of an oral message shared in the Retiro of Rucacura 2004, Chile.

Copyright © AGUAS VIVAS | CHILE 2004