The Heart Versus The Will

Have you ever said to yourself, “man, I wish I could stop sinning”? And are you like me, at the very moment we say this, we start to think of ways on how to stop? Do you have that internal battle that plays over and over in your mind of your sin being so big and that it happens so often, you think, man, do I even know God?  So we start that vicious cycle of trying to figure out how not to sin. So often we go to our will to help produce better behavior. But we have to understand that our will in no way can produce behavior. We have to understand that our will is a servant to our heart. The will can only make decisions on what our heart desires. Meaning, the heart supplies the desire to the will; our will follows our heart. The dog wags the tail; the tail does not wag the dog.

I think we would be amazed on how often we depend on our will to change our behavior. My question is, if we were successful in using our will to change a certain sinful behavior and our heart stays in the same sinful desire, is that true transformation?  The answer is no. If we just employ our will for change, then we are doing nothing more than applying the law to our sin. The law cannot produce the holiness that it commands. So you ask, “what is God asking from me”? God is after our faith and our faith resides in our heart. Faith does not reside in our will, but only in our heart. Faith is a living un-shakable confidence in the grace of God. God is looking for good works, but it’s His good works. So you see, God is not calling us to “do” the law; God is calling us to fulfill the law. There is a big difference between doing the law and fulfilling the law. Doing the law is an outward work, whereas fulfilling the law is an inward work that is more about who we are. The only one who can fulfill the law was Jesus. Now, through the power of the Holy Spirit, God has fulfilled the law in us through Christ’s death on the cross. So when we see in the letter from Peter him calling us to be holy, we can see that God isn't calling us to moral perfection where we labor at our sin. God is calling us to see what He has done, rather than what we have done and are doing.

I think it's the same thing when we buy the lie that once we sin we have to find our way back to God. Religion is man seeking God; Christianity is God seeking man. We can't read the scriptures in hopes to find God, we read the Scriptures to see how God found us. We have to see that God flipped the script. It's not about us; it's about God. So when we find ourselves in that seemingly huge sin, don't try to figure out how to stop. Don't look to your will to get yourself out of it, but look to the cross and rejoice that God got you out of it by crushing His son for your sin.