Living Out of Our Will, Part 1 of 2

We are three part beings – body, soul, and spirit. And our soul is three parts – mind, will, and emotions.

As Christians, our spirit is alive and connected with Christ (Romans 8:10). Our spirit gets it's direction from the Holy Spirit, which in turn directs our will, which directs our body; that is, how we live. In theory. At least that's how it's supposed to work.

But sin trips us up and instead of living out of our will, sometimes we live out of our emotions or our intellect.

Our emotions are there (1) so we can enjoy life – what a tremendous gift God has given us, and (2) to let us know something's wrong. Like the indicator lights on the dashboard of your car, emotions should not be ignored – but they shouldn't drive either. We take the indicator lights on our car seriously, but we still use the steering wheel to drive. When we live out of our emotions, our life is driven by how we feel at the moment with no thought to long term consequences. We continually make bad choices based on what we want or how we feel in the moment. Then we wonder why our life is spiraling downhill. You know people like this – they live from crisis to crisis.

Just like our emotions, our mind should never drive. It's the tires on the car, working out the practical day-to-day routes, not the steering wheel. Our mind is there to figure out how to get where our will wants to go. If we live out of our intellect, there's no room for faith. We don't do anything we haven't got all figured out in advance. You know people like this – they are the most boring people.

But God designed us to live out of our will. We'll talk about what this means on Friday.