By Botsio
Every challenge, every issue, everything we are encountering now at this level, is a revelation and an invitation for us to surrender that issue and its root cause in us, to surrender it to You, Holy Spirit, so that You can transform it into its counterpart in heaven (so that things can be as they are in heaven, here on earth). The challenges are not annoyances; instead, they are spotlights on the areas Holy Spirit wants to transform.
If the things that are out of order (God’s order) are a result of a broken heart (broken “will” according to the late Dallas Williard), the only thing that is stopping us from being healed, he continued, is our self-will. He believed that self-will is what has stopped us from having our hearts transformed by Holy Spirit. A broken heart is a heart that has gone through many disappointments and other issues in life and has been rendered non-functional, i.e, it does not function as it should. Willard concludes that a broken heart is a broken will.
RE-EXAMINE OUR LIVES
“Lord, help us to now re-examine, with Holy Spirit, the areas of shortcomings in our lives against this background, make a list of the issues and challenges that are unearthed, and surrender them one by one to You for transformation. Let us be sure to be deliberate about this, listen for Your instructions, and follow them with our will.” As Willard said, the “will” is a good thing because it is what allows us to do anything in this world. He equates the “will” to the heart/spirit.
KILL SELF-WILL
One way to kill self-will is to do it the “Jesus way.” In the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus’ self-will reared its human head, Jesus prayed. His self-will said, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me…”; then He immediately shut it down the way we also should. He said, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” What an amazing and practical formula! (Matt. 26:38–39).
I noted that Jesus applied two things to kill self-will: one was prayer, and two was what He prayed. In the first place, He prayed to the Father. When we are feeling lost, burdened, depressed, or pulled down by the challenges in life, we have the choice of facing them head-on by ourselves or we can pray to God. The second part of the death of self-will is what Jesus prayed, which went like this: “…Not as I (my self) will, but as You will.” He was immediately giving up self-will—I loosely say “killing self-will”—and surrendering to God’s will. This is one of Jesus’ formulas for dealing with self-will. Go forth and do likewise.
THE POWER OF NEVERTHELESS
Put anything you are facing and feeling you want to “not go through with,” but you know in your “knower” that it is God doing a work (pruning work maybe) in you…if you put those issues in the place of Jesus’ cross-ward journey (as small as it is compared to Jesus’ burden of a real crucifixion), then your human tendency to give up may rise up in you. This is where you enter the most profound word that ever divided two opposite sentences. The word is “nevertheless”; Jesus used it at His most vulnerable point in the history of His life, and we, as His followers, should use it quite often to allow God’s Will to come through every time.
Jesus prayed to the Father at His most vulnerable time and dropped a “nevertheless” in there, calling for the Will of God to take pre-eminence over His self-will. This showed that He was human and also tempted to throw in the towel because of the hardship of the dire situation He was facing. All of our situations in life cannot compare to what Jesus faced, namely, taking on the sins of the world, taking unto Himself, the sins of everyone who was living, is living, and will be living in the future. That is a lot of sins—in fact, that is all the sins of the world.
HOW WE ARE TRANSFORMED
In the final analysis, we are transformed when we can look at the areas of our lives that God points out when challenges expose them and surrender them to the Holy Spirit, killing our self-will in the process and embracing God’s Will in and for the situation. Since Jesus felt like giving up, we may find at times we feel that way, too, but apply the Gethsemane principle and give in to God’s Will. Like Jesus, you will die to that issue and be resurrected to the next level on your journey, where that “thing” will no longer be an obstacle in your way.
Can we do that this week? Yes, we can!
Shalom! Shalom!