WHY DO YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE FREE WILL

Why You Believe You Have Free Will?

Our belief in free will makes us think that we are free to do whatever we want to do, such as choose to reject or choose to love and obey God. And we believe free will is essential to express a genuine love for God‒‒so is said in the author’s opinion in his book entitled “Bible Answer Man.” On page 170 we read:
Without choice, love is meaningless. God is neither a cosmic rapist who forces his love on people, nor a cosmic puppeteer who forces people to love him. Instead, God, the personification of love, grants us the freedom of choice. Without such freedom, we would be little more than preprogrammed robots.” [Where is your Scripture for this, sir?]

Since we didn’t experience being force to love God, we think our love for God is our free choice, as stated by the author above. Christians who read this paper indeed experience a sincere love which emanates from their hearts. For those who have such emotion of genuine love is manifested with obedience and deeds that glorify God. It is a voluntary love without being forced or pressured. This experienced is believed to be man’s freedom of choice or free will.

The way we think of loving God has a problem when we come to the Scriptures. We have a problem with this thought of loving God through the operation of alleged freedom of the will. The fact is, “We love because he first loved us,” 1 John 4:19. We cannot will to initiate loving God, humanity as a whole is not free, for the whole world is a prisoner of sin (Gal. 3:22). This is reaffirmed by the following Scriptures:

Romans 3:10-18 and Romans 8:7 tell us about the fallen state of man.
“There is no fear of God before their eyes” verse 18.
“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be”

The gist of the problem is, how then, we have such existing feeling and emotion that comes deep from our hearts that produce a genuine love for God, when the Bible said, by nature and being carnally minded we are hostile against God, and it is impossible for us to submit to his law‒‒it says “Neither indeed can be”. Therefore, what we call free will is impossible to administer in producing this genuine love we presently experience as followers of Christ. This was my dilemma until I found the Scriptures that free will is only in my mind.

Think about this: What happens between being carnally minded and not loving God or being not subject to His spiritual law, AND THEN LATER, loving God and being subject to His spiritual law‒‒that is what we are now. How did this happen? Who was responsible for causing it to happen? Philippians 2:13 (NLT) is the prominent among other Scriptures that will give us the answer.
“For GOD is working in you, giving you the desire to obey (and to love) him and the power to do what pleases him” (parenthesis added).

God, who is in control of everything was the responsible, not what we think our presumed free will. The irony is, we are placing the credit upon ourselves in taking the first action of loving God [which didn’t happen and will never happen], something that we can boast (Eph. 2:9).
How can we have the will to love God, we can’t even come to Jesus, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). And unless he chose us (John 15:16), we can do nothing apart from him (John 15:5). Unless he paid our sin death on the cross, we cannot be set free.

GOD GAVE US THE FREEDOM:
We were slave to sin, but God set us free and become slave to God whom we now serves (Romans 6:16-18). Loving God is not a decision. God works by inspiring our hearts to move with such a passion and emotion of loving Him, overriding our hostility against him for we are controlled no longer by the sinful nature but by the Spirit (Romans 8:7-9). We are now, then, free to make the decision to accept and receive Christ in our hearts, this is the freedom God gave us. We are inspired to love God, we are not force. There is a world of difference between being inspired and being forced. God didn’t work in us to force us to obey loving him, or to threaten us to go to hell if we refuse. #