So, You’ve Got Free Will, eh?

By Fred Pruitt

Often this whole issue of “free will” is brought up by people who, when you tell them they are complete in Christ and now walk in the world as Him walking, will counter with, “Yes, but I have free will and can choose to sin.”

Is that not giving place to the devil? Isn’t it also interesting that “free will” is associated more with sin than with righteousness?

One wonders why someone would want to promote this so-called “free will” as a means to sin! The whole “free will” issue is a diversion from the truth, often just brain candy for intellects to battle over. Trying to make the good news not as good as we were led to believe, and to spread their false bad news that the statements, proclamations and promises of God are not really in effect. That what the Lord God has spoken over us, what Jesus prayed for at the Last Supper, a oneness of selves in Him and the Father and the Spirit, cannot be true for us, though perhaps it was true for them. Because how can “we,” who perceive ourselves to be such great sinners, be “one” with God?

Some conclude it is not possible and pronounce heresy. Others are driven on by the Spirit, until they have exhausted themselves on the husks and scraps, and there remember their Father and His great substance, all to one day finally find themselves weeping, back in the Father’s arms, received and welcomed with celebration and making merry.

To me it is liberating news that we no longer belong to ourselves, but have now, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, been “bought with a price,” and by that act of redemption we have become “slaves to righteousness.” (Rom 6). In other words, the new boss of our lives is righteousness, and we learn from Ezekiel 36 and many other passages that in the New Covenant it is GOD who works in us according to His will and His good pleasure.

Bottom line, we are in union with Christ, so that it is no longer I, but He living, but here I still am, but it isn’t me, it’s He! My will has become one will with Him. I find in myself no ability to even will what God wills unless He is the “will-er” in me. However, in recognizing that I have been made “dead” in the death of Christ, and my wayward will that used to belong to the devil and will what he willed, has now been filled with another will that takes it over (by our choice to receive Him (we have that one capacity — to receive), and we then will one will with God.

Even Jesus rejected this sort of “free will,” didn’t He? He knew the Father’s will well enough. He knew what was going to happen. And in the Garden his full humanity basically “freaked out” at what was about to transpire, and this is the only time in Jesus’ recorded life that there is any hint whatsoever of Jesus having a “separate will” from God. Jesus had confirmed the exact opposite during His ministry, which is why they killed Him. He said He always did His Father’s will and they said that was blasphemy and for that they put Him to death.

But look back in the Gethsemane Temptation. The “separate will” came as a temptation. That was not the “real Jesus” struggling to align His will to the Father’s will. He didn’t make an “effort” to do that, but simply said, “Not my will, but thine,” which is how He lived His everyday life. In other words, I acknowledge that I have no separate will, “not my will,” his human will swallowed up into the Father’s will, and thereby the only will operating me is God. That is what Jesus sought His way through, by the Spirit, in the Garden and what is the truth for us as well when we come to see it.

Free will (the way people often mean and use it) is a drag. Who wants the liberty to sin? We hear over and over the oft-used phrase, “I sin every day,” coming out of the belief behind it that pronounces inside us that sinning daily is inevitable, because we are still under sin’s power, proved by our preoccupation with it and continuous failures.

But does not this homage to sin’s power in us completely nullify Paul’s clear word, “How shall we, who are dead to sin, live any longer in it?” (Rom 6:2), and, “For sin shall not have dominion over you,” (Rom 7:1), and, “For he that is dead is freed from sin” (Rom 6:7)? Paul never preached the gospel of “I sin every day.” That is the exact opposite of what his message is.

We have a new nature, one of righteousness, which is Christ our righteousness. We didn’t originate it but it (He) has come to dwell in me and be that new nature in our inner union. So it would be mighty hard to go against my inner nature to return to a life of separation and sin.

But the “I have free will” people seem to want to reserve that place for us. Where we can hide and say we cannot help ourselves, we’re just poor miserable sinners saved by grace. “Free will?” Who wants it, if that is its reward? Where shall I reserve a place in me, into which The Lord God is not invited and included in the All and in all? “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” (Heb 10:9). There is no place that the union does not produce the unity. We are one with God in Jesus Christ, and that “one” includes unity of will, knowledge, understanding and experiences. I cannot recognize any will but this in me.

And to bring it finally home, what could union with Christ mean other than a will united with God doing God’s will? “As He is, so are you in this world.” To be in “union” (one) with Christ means that in the depths of our spirit, our inner spirit will-faculty now has the Holy Spirit to “cause” us to walk in His ways. We live free! Because we are living out of the kingdom of God, and not the kingdom of the world or devil.

And where we find this is in our word of faith. Let us speak God’s faith for us, rather than man’s condemning evaluation of himself. God says, “I will dwell in you and walk in you and I shall be your God.” We walk in Christ, filled to the brim with Him, and we take advantage of that in our consciousness when we by faith “agree” with God that what He has said we are, we are. We are vessels of mercy, branches on a vine producing divine fruit, temples filled with Him testifying of His glory, and new wineskins filled to bursting with new wine. No room for “free will” except as some temporary diversion, because our heart is His heart, having been made eternally one heart, even as “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” (1 Cor 6:17).

Wonderful! We’re full of Him and we just walk around being our true selves in Him, just being “human,” and God manifests Himself to the world by us, a bunch of screwballs* and misfits. We begin discovering daily the ease of relaxing into Christ, because you don’t have to work it up, jump up and down to get God to do stuff for you, etc., because now we simply continuously receive inwardly what is coming from the center of the Godhead, right out of our own middles.  The God Life flows out of us, rather than us trying to get into it all the time. It’s already there. It’s a glory Life!

*quoting Burt Rosenberg