As Laura listened to the sermon on Sunday morning, she grew more and more depressed. Discouraged about so many areas of her life, she had come to church searching for hope.
Here she was, thirty-one, and back again in another hurtful romantic relationship. Laura felt helpless to stand up to her boyfriend, who in a critical and downright mean way manipulated, dominated, and generally controlled Laura’s life. Every time she decided to confront him, she backed down.
Furthermore, she was sleeping with him, even though she felt bad about it. She had been told many times that men who pushed you to violate your values were not men with whom you could sustain a long-term relationship. But, somehow, she never found the willpower to say no.
Laura was weak-willed in other areas of her life as well. A yo-yo dieter, she tried again and again to eat right and exercise, but never could follow through. Nor could she stand up to her mother, who still tried to control her life. She knew that she must live her own life, but could not find the willpower to resist her mother’s manipulation.
On this particular Sunday, Laura had gone to church yearning for some help. The pastor ended his sermon by saying, “It all comes down to choices. People choose to do what they want to do. If you really want to serve God and live a spiritual life, you will. You will stop sinning, and make right choices. By an act of the will, you will choose God’s ways over your own. Go out from here today and make right choices.”
Laura’s heart sank. She had heard it all before. She had tried to make right choices for years. But try as she might, she could not find within herself the willpower to make the choices she knew she needed to make. If this was all that God had for her, she really was without hope. She slipped out of church and glumly drove over to her boyfriend’s house. At least she would not be alone.
“Just Say No!” advised the popular drug-education program. The sponsors thought that just saying no was the answer to the drug problem. Other people have held the same philosophy about other problems—anger, lust, depression, addictions. If we have problems, they say, we’re merely making wrong choices. What we need to do to correct the situation, they say, is to understand what the right choices are, then make them.
If you truly believe this, life becomes pretty simple. All you need to know is what is right, and then do it. Knowledge and willpower become the tools of spiritual growth. The cause of spiritual growth, then, is making right choices.
It sounds Christian. Indeed, the Bible has much to say about choice. Joshua encouraged the Israelites to choose: “If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the river, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15).
Certainly we have no problem with Joshua’s laying out the choices. We do need to choose whom we will serve—and that choice has eternal significance. The problem, as we saw in False Assumption #8, is that the spiritual life is not that simple. Spiritual growth, or sanctification, does not end the day we choose God. Yes, we can choose God—but we can at the same moment constantly sabotage our own “choice.” That is, we choose the exact opposite of what we have committed to.
This happens frequently in daily life. You choose to diet, but three months later you are twenty pounds heavier. You choose to stay calm, yet you go berserk when your spouse gives away the punch line of your joke. You choose to be sexually pure, yet you can’t help sleeping around. You choose to have a consistent prayer time, but you can’t get up in the morning.
“Just Say No” has failed because the doctrine that willpower is the answer is a human doctrine, not a biblical one. Willpower fails. With the best intentions we choose one thing (as an act of the will) and then do the opposite. Instead of just saying no, we experience what the apostle Paul did: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom. 7:15).
So this crazymaker says, “If I make right choices, I will grow spiritually” If making right choices is our only hope, then we are indeed hopeless. Paul’s experience and our own reveal our inability to just say no.
Why doesn’t making right choices work? It sounds so spiritual, so Christian. Why isn’t it biblical to choose our way to health? Why can’t we grow by an act of our will?
Many Christians teach that if we can change our behavior, our feelings will follow. Act lovingly toward someone we hate, we’re told, then we will begin genuinely to like him or her. Choose what is right—whether you feel like it or not—and you will inevitably begin to desire that right thing.
It works that way sometimes. What happens more often than not, however, is that a person’s initial commitment to do what is right is undercut, and then she is back where she started—or worse.
The undercutting often occurs as what has come to be known as compulsive behaviors. If someone is caught in a compulsive cycle of acting out sexually, overeating, taking drugs, or drinking excessively, he may choose to stop, but he inevitably falls into the same cycle—despite commitments to God, himself, and others to stop.
Ike was a pastor caught up in a cycle of sexual acting out. He preached sermons about purity one night and engaged in illicit sex the next. When his board of elders found out, they gave him an ultimatum: Begin intensive counseling, or resign.
At first, Ike talked a lot about how sorry he was and how bad he felt about his behavior. He made commitments to change, promising never do it again. And then the group confronted him.
“I don’t believe that you’ll change at all,” said a group member. “I think that you will just act out again and again.”
“But this time I really mean it,” Ike said. “I will do it this time. I just made some bad choices.”
“What makes you think you won’t make them again?”
“Well, because this time, I’m really serious about wanting to change. I’m really committed.”
“Weren’t you ‘really serious’ all the other times? You always felt bad about what happened, and promised to change. But that never does it. And if you don’t do something other than choosing to change, why should we believe that it will be any different this time?”
Ike looked depressed. He was beginning to see that he would repeat the same cycle if he did not do something different. But he did not know what to do. He was hopeless. He saw no options other than trying to make a stronger commitment in the future.
What was wrong with Ike? Why didn’t his efforts and commitments work? What he began to realize was that, although he wanted to change, he wanted other things just as deeply, things he had denied. These desires were deep in his heart, where motivation arises. He strongly desired to be accepted and admired—a desire that wasn’t being met within his congregation. He wanted to hurt his wife because he resented her criticism about his haphazard way of handling household finances. He wanted to rebel against the spiritual obligations he had taken on and now resented. All of these motives produced destructive fruit in his life.
In short, Ike’s heart didn’t respond to his “act of his will” theology, primarily because, in his understanding of his will, there was no place for his heart. The Bible makes it clear that the will is not separate from the rest of the person. We do things with our entire person, not just our will, or intellect. The greatest commandment reveals this fact to us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Jesus paints a picture of an integrated person who takes all of himself—not just his conscious will—to God.
Ike lacked integration. He chose with his will to stop acting out sexually, but with his heart he chose to continue. Unless we will as a whole person, our minds and our hearts willing the same thing, our choices are short-lived because we end up doing what our heart chooses. We are divided on the inside. God confronts this split: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matt. 15:8). If we fail to own the conflict, the disowned part of us will sabotage our choice.
Ike eventually learned to confess to God and others what was actually in his heart. When he was honest, he found he had conflicting desires. He had never faced how dark his heart really was. He admitted that a part of him really did not want to serve God at all. He resented God. He had a lot of pain and grief that he had never faced, and he was trying to cover up that pain by acting out sexually. His true self was not in relationship with God or others at all. And so this self had a life of its own; it willed him into an entirely different direction than where his intellect told him to go.
Our mind, soul, and heart are often in conflict with one another, and we do not like to face conflict within ourselves. We may know what is right and what our values are; but in our hearts are deep loves and affections for things and people that are contrary to our values. For this reason, the Bible always calls for change from the inside out, not just making right choices.
Stan had a problem obeying his boss. He wanted to do well in his work, but inevitably he would sabotage his own best intentions. He met with his boss for planning sessions, where they reviewed Stan’s goals. He initially looked forward to meeting those goals—after all, he was paid extra for good performance—yet shortly after these first few meetings, he began procrastinating and not fulfilling his commitments. He simply didn’t get the job done.
So he came to see me. “I don’t know why I do this,” he told me. “I really want to do what I am supposed to. I just need to make better choices.”
“What do you mean by ‘better choices’?” I asked him.
“Choices that please God and get me where I want to go. Choices that accomplish what I want to accomplish.”
“What makes you think you aren’t doing that now?”
“What do you mean? Of course I’m not accomplishing what I want to accomplish.”
“I’m not so sure. Maybe there are things you want to accomplish other than achieving your and the company’s goals.”
“Like what? My behavior is ruining my career.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “But maybe your career is not the most important thing to you. I think something else is much more important to you than achieving your business goals.”
“Like what?”
“You are much more interested in feeling like you are in control of yourself; no one is going to have power over you. In a work situation you feel one-down to your boss, and you resent that. So you resist doing what he wants you to do so that, even though you fail, you are in charge;
“Basically you hate authority so much that you can’t exercise any in your own life. And it is hurting you very much. But the pattern is also keeping you from feeling some very old feelings that you have never resolved about being one-down to power figures. So what you have never really recognized and owned is that thwarting authority figures is a much more important goal to you than making money. Your head knows that to do the right thing would help you, but in your heart is still so much hatred for authority, that your heart overrules your values. Until you deal with that conflict, you will continue to win by losing.”
Stan had no idea how to deal with his conflicting feelings and wishes. Ever since adolescence he had been in conflict with authority figures. On the outside he was a “good” boy, agreeing to do what those in authority wanted because he wanted their approval. But he disappointed them with his ultimate performance. He had so fooled himself into believing that he wanted to please his father and other authority figures that he had gotten out of touch with his conflicting feelings about them. As a result, he complied on the outside, but was determined on the inside not to be controlled. The inside always won.
“A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matt. 7:18). As hard as the bad tree tries to bear good fruit, it cannot. This is what can happen to Christians who try to choose good fruit, but have not faced the bad aspects of their heart. Jesus gave a better answer than the “make right choices” model; he called for character change: “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. … The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him” (Matt. 12:33, 35).
Internal character dictates what we ultimately choose to do. If we have problems in our heart, no amount of trying to make right choices will produce good fruit in us. We must deal with the things that are on the inside and driving our choices.
Stan needed to deal with the deeply conflicting motives in his heart. He needed to confess his hatred for his father and for other authority figures. He needed to forgive them, to own his sin of rebellion, to seek forgiveness, to find care and affirmation from other Christians to fill the empty place inside that his father had never filled. He needed to face his sadness about what he had always wanted and never gotten from his father.
And he needed to face his fears of failure, to step out and try new things. Avoiding responsibility had kept alive his fantasy that he really knew more than all his bosses; procrastinators can never be proven wrong or inferior to doers, because they can sit back and passively criticize. Stan had to take chances and occasionally fail—a painful process in which his pride had to die.
If making right choices cannot ensure spiritual growth in us, then how do we grow? First of all, realize that choice is necessary but not sufficient for growth. Spiritual growth is always a combination of choosing the good, gaining the support and strength to do it, and dealing with the bad.
So equally important to our choices is submitting ourselves to God and to his church for support and absorbing his Word and his truth. Through relationships we forge in the body of Christ, we must confess the deep aspects of our heart. We must learn to depend on God’s Spirit to discover what is choking our spiritual growth. We must dig around inside the root system of the tree to remove what is choking its growth. And then we must practice what we are learning (Heb. 5:14).
The Bible calls for painful surgery. Resolving again and again what you will do is easier than submitting to the knife that cuts into your deepest motives and feelings, and exposing them. Deluding yourself into thinking you will change this time only delays the pain of actual transformation. If we do not change on the inside, we do not change at all. No magic act of the will transforms character.
Spiritual growth is both cultivating the good and weeding out the bad. To make right choices, most of us do one or the other—cultivate the good or weed out the bad. We usually work only on one side.
To the contrary, the Bible says we must take care of both sides of the problem. Only then will we be able to sustain good choices. We must add what good things we need as well as uncover the bad things—both internal and external—and turn from them.
People who try to stop eating, for example, will fail precisely because they deal with only one side. Without food, they feel the isolation driving their lust for food. They try to say no to the bad (overeating) without replacing it with something good (deep relationship with people that would end the isolation).
When people say no to drugs, they begin feeling the pain that they tried to cover up with the drugs. When they stop acting out sexually, they get depressed because they have to face the inner emptiness and pain that was driving the sexual behavior. If all they do is make the right choice—to stop the behavior—they leave themselves in misery. They are unable to sustain the choice simply because the driving motivation is still there. The need drives the lust.
The Bible confirms that when we stop sinful behavior, we begin to suffer (1 Peter 4:1–2). When we stop living after lust, we will suffer in the flesh. People experience the underlying pain when they stop acting out their addictions.
The apostle Peter says that “since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude” (1 Peter 4:1). We need to prepare for the suffering to come when we stop bad behavior. Yet God does not leave us there. He wants us to fill the needs that are driving the lusts. He wants to provide for us through the grace of his people. He does not want us to give up one thing without replacing it with another.
Sally was forever getting into destructive relationships with men. She made poor choices about romantic relationships. Each time, her friends told her to to leave her current boyfriend; she usually agreed wholeheartedly that it was the right thing to do.
But when it came down to it, she never could make that choice. She always felt so horrible after breaking up that she could not sustain it. The depression would override her will. Her “act of the will” wouldn’t act. And soon she was back in similarly hurtful situations.
Sally is an example of destructive behavior patterns, whether about relationships, eating, or drugs. She attempted to say no to the bad, but she did not deal with the entire picture. Not only did she need to say no to the destructive choice of going back, she had to face the absence of the good within her as well. She did not have the love she needed to ward off the depression she felt when she broke off a relationship.
In her soul, in fact, Sally had a lot of empty places—a perilous situation, Jesus reminded his listeners once with a story about a person who got rid of the bad within (a demon), and yet he did not further clean out his house and fill it with good things. So when the demon returned, the house was still unoccupied. The demon found some friends and took up residence again, and things were worse than before (Matt. 12:43–45).
There was no place for love and truth within her, that the Bible says we need in order to survive.
For Sally to conquer her pattern of choosing destructive relationships, she had to do some work inside: Grieve deeply over past pain that she was seeking to alleviate in these relationships, confess old anger that she was acting out in these relationships, take some good things into her soul to ensure that she would choose good in the future. She needed God’s truth and the loving connection of other people.
In the past she would soon feel so empty again after a breakup, that her resolve evaporated and she ran back to the man she had left. Yet she finally took responsibility for her emptiness, saw a therapist, and got into a good support group. She began to feel other people’s care. By taking in some good, she was able to say no to the bad. And this time she was able to sustain it. No inner strength is why codependents (including those addicted to substances) get better only with a support group.
A right intention is the choice to do the right thing. We choose the proper, God-pleasing thing to do, and usually take little account of whether or not we want to do it. We just do it. Many evangelicals base their theology on this old-fashioned “act of the will” thinking. The key to spiritual growth and success, they insist, is to know the moral code and follow it.
We saw earlier that people who have right intentions, who choose to do the right thing but whose heart isn’t in it, are often far from God’s will. They can choose to do the loving thing but gain nothing (1 Cor. 13:3).
A pure intention is wanting what we choose. In the biblical sense this is what it truly means “to will.” The words most often translated “to will” actually mean “to desire.” For this reason, to think of an act of the will apart from a pure heart that desires the things God desires is unbiblical. God wants us to will and want the same things that he wants.
But we do not desire what God desires without having our heart changed. We need to take the deeper desires of our heart—lust, envy, resentment, hatred, revenge—to God for him to transform. Conflicting motives sabotage our lives and produce bad fruit. But as we take those evil desires to God and to others in the body of Christ, we find that they are transformed through confession, grace, and repentance. As we receive from him, we gradually find that our character begins to want and desire what he wants and desires. And then the “right choice” is not nearly such a conflict between what we want and what we tell ourselves we ought to want. We begin to will the things that he wills. We not only choose to treat others lovingly, but we want to.
Through a combination of “work[ing] out [our] salvation with fear and trembling” and a “God who works in [us],” we begin to be transformed—and then we come into line with his “good purpose” that he is working out in us (Phil. 2:12–13). In the process of acquiring pure intentions (instead of right intentions), we begin to hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt. 5:6).
We saw early in this chapter how right choices are often held up as the cause of spiritual growth. But we have seen that making right choices is a result of spiritual growth. The ability to make right choices is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22).
When our theology tells us we can make the right choices, we know we’re being prideful. We are unable to save ourselves, Jesus said—unable to do the right thing. He told us to own the fact that we are poor in spirit, which means we are unable to do what is right. To admit this is humility—which is simply surrendering our assumption that we can make right choices. We admit our spiritual poverty (Matt. 5:3), recognize that we can neither save ourselves (Matt. 16:25) nor be perfected through the power of the will or human effort (Gal. 3:3). God must transform us.
Since we cannot make the choices we want to make, what choices can we make? We can choose to—
• Give up the notion that we can save ourselves
• Submit our inability to God
• Ask for help in searching for our faults
• Repent
• Take account of our needs and let others meet them
• Make amends
• Forgive
• Invest and practice talents
• Seek God
• Seek truth
• Love one another
All these choices assume weakness and humility. They focus not on being good, but on working out problems. These choices will succeed, where trying to be good will fail. These choices are based on our sinfulness and inadequacy, not on our goodness or ability to make godly choices. These choices will produce spiritual growth that bears the fruit of self-control and the ability to make right choices.
Therefore, instead of trying harder to make right choices, surrender your inability to God—become humble, unable—and ask him to begin the process of spiritual growth in you. As you begin to do the hard work of spiritual growth, he will begin reproducing his life in you through the process of internal change. As you cooperate with his pruning and cultivating of your character, you will produce fruit in your season (Ps. 1:3).