Continuing from his book December 19th “The Will of God as a Way of Life,” Jerry Sittser wrote:”
Jesus taught that if we wish to find true life, we must die to our sinful and selfish selves. If we hope to win in a way that counts for eternity, we must lose in ways that matter only to the temporal world. We must take up our cross and follow Jesus. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Christian martyred in World War II, argued in The Cost of Discipleship, “Because Jesus is the Christ, he has the authority to call and to demand obedience to his word. Jesus summons men to follow him not as a teacher or a pattern of the good life, but as Christ, the Son of God.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French nobleman who visited America in the 1830s, understood this difference between popular and Christian definitions of freedom. He believed that the reason America could be so generous in providing the civil freedoms as outlined in the Bill of Rights is because Christianity restrained the American people from abusing those freedoms and disciplined them to use their freedom wisely and rightly. Christianity shaped American values—“its habits of the heart”— and enabled the American people to stop short of using freedom as an excuse to practice vice. De Tocqueville concluded:
Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more needed in the republic they advocate than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics most of all. How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?4
What does this discussion of biblical freedom have to do with God’s will? As it turns out, our quest for freedom as American culture defines it has influenced the way we search for the will of God. The hidden assumption behind the conventional approach to the will of God is that having many options is a good thing, but only one option is God’s will for us. The burden then falls on us to figure out which is the right and true one. God’s will is like the one present under the Christmas tree intended for us though there are many other presents there, all of which could be ours. We must somehow discern which is ours, in spite of the fact that none of the packages has our name on it. We are therefore absolutely confounded in our search for which one is God’s will for us.
But what if there is only one package under the tree? Then having no tag on it would not be a problem. What if choice itself is beside the point, as much a distraction as a benefit? What if the freedom we value so much—the freedom to have anything we want—keeps us from experiencing the freedom we really need—to choose what God wills for us?
The will of God has to do with what we already know, not what we must figure out. It is contained in Jesus’ command that we seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. The will of God then consists of one clear mandate—that we make God the absolute center of our lives. Ironically, it is exactly in making this choice that we find true freedom. It is freedom of obedience. That is the will of God for all of us. ~Jerry Sittser, the Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grande Rapids, Michigan, 2004). 56-9
For the first of these two posts, click * The Will of God as a Way of Life.
(Posts wit a preamble asterisk * are for general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
