I’ve blogged obliquely about free will before as it relates to God’s will – specifically whether God has a will for our individual lives. Joe Myzia recently covered this topic as well. Based on my study of Garry Friesen‘s work, I’m of the same opinion as Joe, that God does not have a scripted plan for the daily decisions of each one of our lives whereby if we seek it hard enough we can become jerky marionettes that need not exercise the freedom of choice and feel the responsibilities that go with it. Instead, we are to search out his wisdom in the Bible and apply it to our lives, making decisions and choices that are consistent within his revealed moral will (the Bible). If we do that, then presumably our decisions and lives will fit within the unknowable sovereign will of God for his entire Creation.
The passages from the My Utmost for His Highest devotional from yesterday and today (2 Corinthians 10:5) caught my eye related to this topic and I wanted to briefly explore them related to Romans 12:2.
“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5, TNIV)
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2, TNIV)
Essentially, when we are saved and have “entered into the experience of sanctification” (My Utmost…), our minds begin to be transformed so that our thoughts and actions are not guided by reaction and impulse and human pretension, however well intentioned, but by the discipline of obeying God. When we are transformed, our minds are renewed so that we can choose to obey God. This then is the free will of a Christian: it is not the freedom to make any choice that we care to, but the freedom to make the only choice of forcing every thought to be a captive prisoner of Christ and subject to His sovereign will.
