The Thing About Free Will

Our Freedom To Choose

God has bestowed human beings with FREE WILL. He didn’t create us to be robotic servants to do His every bidding without a choice in the matter. He wanted us, His creation, to LOVE and to serve Him WILLINGLY. He wants us to love Him with our own understanding and free choice, so He gave us free will.

Loving God is a CHOICE. We can choose to believe and love Him or to not believe and not love Him.

And one of the most amazing things about God's love is how it is intertwined through relationship. Love is all about relationship. God has created everything in the world to be connected to each other in relationship.

He is there when we can see birds flying together or ants working in colony or fish swimming in schools. The sun and the moon swirl around the earth connected to each other the same way the stars, planets, galaxies and Milky Way are all connected and move together in harmony.

And God desires us to move closer together with Him in a relationship, but by our own accord. Because we WANT to.

God started this process of teaching us how to love in the Garden of Eden by creating man and woman, in relationship.

"The Lord God said,'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable helper for him.'" Genesis 2:18

After He created us in His image, He wanted to teach us what love means and part of that process is to give us free choice. The choice to say yes or no. To accept or decline. To walk towards or away from love.

By placing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden, He set before the man and the woman, this freedom. The freedom to stay with God and be in a relationship with Him...or go off on their own.

OUR OWN WILL

With the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the new couple was given the choice to obey or disobey. It was their first important decision on what is right and wrong.

Well, the only way we can have our will come forward is to be given a choice in the matter. And the only way we will learn what is good or bad is to experience the fruit of each of our choices because we won't learn the difference until the consequences of our decisions hit us in the face.

Some ask why would God put the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden to allow Adam and Eve to stray – isn’t it a trap? Well hence the name, "The Knowledge of Good and Evil", God wants to give us this knowledge, so we will understand what it means when we make our choices. The test is not a power trip by God, but rather to teach us what is good and bad and the consequences of each. Very much like when parents teach their young children what to do and what not to do so they can make right choices as they grow up. If the children do not listen, it usually winds up being trouble.

And many times when bad situations enter into our lives, we don't realize that it is an important fork in the road. Do we trust God to take care of things or do things our own way? Do we praise God anyway or do we curse Him? Do we continue to trust Him or decide He isn't there? Each of us faces these question several times a day and each decision we make takes us either closer or further from God.

So many of us make wrong self-centered choices which create messes in our lives, yet we still keep doing them...and then blame God. So many times it isn't until something goes seriously wrong that we consider that we made the wrong choice. It is only through experience that we will ever learn...hopefully.

And it is only when we willingly choose to follow God and change direction of our own free will, can our wrongs be corrected, our wounds be healed, and we can start anew.

Everything that happens in our lives is because of the choices we or others have made. If we love someone, they will love us back. If we ignore someone, they will ignore us. If we hate someone, they will hate us back. If we don't have love for someone, then there will be no relationship.

We have seen the fruits of our fellow brothers and sisters who do whatever they want. We live in a polluted world of selfishness, war, hatred, greed, envy, deception, betrayal, lies, fear and loneliness. There is little truth, compassion, goodness, peace and love in the world.

This is what God wants us to understand. The world is a product of all of our bad choices. Our own will instead of God's will.

Many Christians will pray for someone to come to Christ, or for many to be saved, but ultimately, it is up to each individual to make those decisions of their own free will. God never forces anyone to love Him. We have the choice to seek after Him…and find Him. But it has to be with our heart and our soul that we choose God.

Everything in our lives, from the jobs we choose, they words we say, to the friends we make, are because of our free will to choose. And how our lives unfold are the consequences of these choices. Whether lovingly or rebelliously or indifferent, we react to every situation with our free will. It is our soul who chooses to do as we please.

The person who chooses not to follow God is exercising their free will to walk away from Him and God will not interfere in our decisions. As anyone who has ever had a broken heart knows, no matter how much you love someone, you can't force them to love you back if they don't want to.

It is the same with the Lord. Jesus died on the cross of a broken heart. He offered His children a love that they didn't want, though He keeps on loving. It is up to us whether we choose to love Him back.

And no, God doesn't send anyone to hell; rather the person who doesn't want anything to do with God walks away from Him and Heaven (where God is) and chooses to stay in that place where God is absent (hell).

What so many don’t understand is that when one chooses to walk away from God they also walk away from ALL things that are good because God is goodness, God is peace and God is LOVE. And without God, there is no goodness, no peace and no love.

CHOOSING GODS WILL

As Christians, we are constantly wrestling with God about what He wants and what we want. It is through that struggle, that we learn how to have faith, that we learn God's ways and that we learn how to trust Him.

We are hesitant to heed to God's will because we fear that He might make us do something we don't want to do. But His will is the best solution to all that is wrong. But it is our choices that ultimately determine whether God can work in our lives or not. So many times we just don't allow Him to work. Our trust and faith is the activator and our lack of faith just stops everything. We just don't believe in Him. If we do not have faith, then we have chosen not to give anything over to God, and God will never force Himself on us without our permission.

What God desires is for those who want to be with God…to really want to be with Him. To really want Him. To really love Him.

In the Lord's Prayer we ask for God's will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven. His will can easily come to the earth if we only let Him. But we must choose His will and put our own self aside.

So when you pray for His will to be done, look at what your will and wishes are and see if they really correspond to God's will. If not, perhaps it is time to exercise your free choice to change direction and follow Him a little more closely. You'll find that when you do, God will bring all manner of good things into your life and more.

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