“I can do nothing of my own will…..” - John 5:30
Jesus repeatedly said that acting out of His own self-will or personal initiative was of no interest to Him. His focus was on obedience to the will of God His Father and anything other than that was considered both personally and socially destructive. How unlike us He is. Or is He?
We, exactly like Him, have the choice to live out of our own self-defined goals, objectives and lifestyle. Indeed, the busier our internal thought life and reservoirs of perceived emotional needs are, the greater the flack or even chaos that spews out of us as we do our own thing. Now mind you, focused people control that chaos to a measure, but never-the-less the multiple things our inner-selves are constantly saying we need or should do often creates a constant stream of demands. So much for the freedom of defining for myself what one part of my own will says I should do. And by the way, which me is the one which has ascended to take control and claim to use my true will?
Once one sees the true unity and astounding genius behind the canvas of life and recognizes the One who is totally involved at the most minute levels of both micro and macro reality, yielding to Him is not intellectual or moral cowardice, it is the most obvious choice for any rational creature. Spitting into a strong wind is not courage; it is an invitation to get sprayed in the face with your own refuse.
Beyond these most obvious of logical concepts, however, lies the real issue: the sum of humanity’s free will is convoluted, contrived, and most frequently dominated by the most powerful of exploiters. Only a measure of socially enforced enlightened self-interest has historically given us all whatever periods of peace or prosperity have occurred in between the wars and tumults of our collective self-will. Science, The Enlightenment, and our courageous existential self-definitions have given us the bombs which sooner or later some Iranian will succeed in using to enforce their self-will upon us all.
So, was Jesus some kind of historical religious freak or intellectual moral coward too weak to handle the pressure of self-definition and self-actualization? Did He retreat into the religious game of opting out due to inherent internal weaknesses or feeble-minded mental deficiency? Was life too much for Him, so He chose to create an alternative projected alter-ego called My Father, thus relieving some part of Himself and unconsciously submitting to another part of Himself which He couldn’t consciously deal with? I think not.
Simply stated, Jesus saw perfectly the true cost of self-will and said hell no, not for me or those who follow me. I will not go there. The wonder of it all is also what else He saw. True, self-releasing creativity and the human will that builds character and brings meaning to life is only truly released in aligning our will in and under His will. God help us all to see that is the bottom line.
Principle Based Evaluation: One of the most fundamental things we must teach our children is that freedom is only experienced while living in obedience.
For more information on the author, Dennis Peacocke, go to: http://www.gostrategic.org/
