Lately I am realising how free we are in the choices we make and it amazes me. Sometimes when I drive my car, my mind takes a trip of its own and when I refocus I’m glad I didn’t miss my exit. But what if I did… I could decide to drive as far as I could, I could decide in an instant to change my plans and drive to the other side of the country, I could decide I would want to go bungee jumping and just do that.
Free will
We all have a certain routine in our daily lives, we drive the same roads, we head to the same destinations, we meet with the same people and we end up in the same house every night. It is not because we have to, but because we want to. We make a choice to keep that routine. But we are free to do whatever, whenever, strange isn’t it? Did you ever wonder why God gave us that freedom of a free will? Because we are free to do whatever, we can do what harms us or others, what brings us in danger or lets us fall in sin. Isn’t this free will the problem where it all started in paradise? Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree, they chose not to obey God, they made a wrong choice and look what came from it….. We are all born into this sinful world and we struggle too with our free will.
The learning process of making choices
Maybe you recognize this when you have kids. You want to help them make the right decisions, you teach them to think of the pro’s and con’s, to think of others before they act etc. But often it happens they do something you did not think was the best decision.
It’s part of growing up.
But making mistakes and feeling the consequences of their choices teaches them and lets them grow. It’s part of growing up to get more and more freedom in making decisions. Little babies don’t have much saying in what they would like or dislike. You as a parent plan the day, choose the food, pick their clothes, decide when its time for a bath or when its bedtime. But the older they get, the more they get their own opinion and use their own will to get their way. And when they finally grow up, we have to let them go, because we can’t control them in any way. They are mature for the law, and they can choose whatever path they want to go.
Real Love
When God our Father made men, He made children, His children, people with whom He could build a relationship, share His love with. Our God is a God of love and in a loving relationship you let the other person free. You do not control the other one or put restrictions on him/her, you don’t limit them. You let the other person free and when he/she chooses to love you back out of free will, then it is real love. That is exactly what God wants. He loves us, so He gave us a free will, so that only by choice we can love Him back. Then it is real love. When God made men with a free will, He also had to plant the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I fnot, there would have been nothing to choose and men could not have used that free will.
“So we can love, because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19
We are not a puppet in the hand of our Maker. He designed us to be free with an own will and mind, to choose our own paths so that if we choose to love God, it will be real.
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