“…Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.” Luke 22:42
Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. We have to make scores of them everyday. Thankfully, most decisions aren’t all that life-altering. For instance, choosing between vanilla and chocolate at the ice cream parlor doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. At worst, you might wish you had made a different choice, but you could always do that later – perhaps immediately after you finish your first choice.
But as we all know, there are other decisions that can make a huge difference in the quality of our lives and in our walk with God. So we just need to choose properly. Right? Well, of course. But that’s not always as easy as it seems. We all have a problem with willfulness. Willfulness is the tendency to impose our self-will in a decision, because we want to get our way even if doing so isn’t best for us, others, or our reflection of the character of Christ.
One of the best examples of willfulness that I’ve seen is the one about a young preschooler who was literally out of control one day. He was jumping on the furniture, chasing the cat, tormenting his brother and basically driving his mother to distraction. After several failed attempts to calm him down, his mom in an uncharacteristically aggressive fashion, grabbed him, sat him on the floor in front of her and said, “Don’t you move a muscle.” His response was classic. “I may be sitting on the outside,” he said. “But I’m standing on the inside.”
That my friends is willfulness. If we aren’t careful, we will find ourselves standing on the inside when it comes to our decisions. We simply want what we want, so we’ll find a way to manipulate things to get it.
This is why there’s a decision to make prior to making the decision that is before us. This prior decision seats the willful self within by surrendering to the will of God. We see this in the life of Jesus as He prayed in the garden prior to His crucifixion. Sensing the gravity of what He was facing, He prayed that the cup of suffering would be removed from Him. Essentially, the decision before Him was clear. Would He drink it or not? Would He go to the cross or not? It was a genuine dilemma for Him.
Thankfully, Jesus understood the importance of another decision first. This was the decision to yield to His Father’s will. Once that decision was made, self-will was put aside, and it was clear what decision He should make. From that moment on, we see Him fully committed to fulfilling His purpose in providing a means of salvation to the world.
Today this decision before the decision is called reaching a state of indifference. Here indifference doesn’t mean that we are apathetic about the decision. Rather we are indifferent to any outcome other than God’s will being done. Even if we aren’t sure what that will is, we seek to yield our spirits to His will knowing that it is always right and good. The willful self takes a seat within, and we are now in a position to go through the process of discernment to identify to the best of our ability what we believe we should choose. Of course, we will need to remain humble even here. We are all capable of misunderstanding God’s will despite our best efforts. Nevertheless, coming to the place of indifference will increase the likelihood that we will find and yield to God’s will in the decision that is before us.
So how do we know when we have reached a state of indifference? The answer is not quick and easy. The willful self will do everything imaginable to maintain dominance in our soul. Perhaps this is why Jesus had to pray three times in the garden before He fully yielded to the Father’s will. So we should expect to wrestle with this over a period of time before reaching the desired inner state.
In general we will know that we have reached indifference when we are no longer trying to justify decisions that merely satisfy our temporal and often self-centered desires. Instead we look for that which will bring life to our souls and will enhance our walk with God. Likewise we will want to consider the needs of others and the importance of bringing glory to God through the decisions we make.
Along the way, we will be released from the tyranny of having to grasp and claw for our own way. We can relax within as we see formerly important things fade into the background. We are free to relate with others without always trying to get them to meet our needs. And we can relate with God in the same way, because we now trust that His will is right and good in all things.
So if you have an important decision to make, I hope you will deal with the decision before the decision first. It will make all the difference.