Free Will

Well-intended patrons arrive every day at 10:00 am at Goodwill locations with truckloads full of cast-off items. Goodwill spokesperson Heather Steeves says, "We hope everyone brings great things that help our programs, but we know some people make some questionable judgments about what is good to donate.”

She holds up a lampshade, which is stained and disgusting and literally falling apart. There's also a small table missing a leg, cracked purple food-storage containers and a used sponge. They're just a representative sample of the useless stuff dropped off the day before.

Along with simply being gross, these items cost Goodwill money. Steeves says, "All this trash adds up to more than $1 million a year in a trash bill, and it's been growing every year for the past five years.” And that's just for the 30 stores she oversees.

Goodwill does recycle lots of what it can't sell. The nonprofit reuses textiles and refurbishes some broken electronics. But last year, it threw away more than 13 million pounds of waste—technically other people's garbage—and that’s just in its locations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

One cause of this growing trash problem is a phenomenon called wish-cycling, where people are hoping that something is recyclable and therefore they put it in with their recycling. Steeves said, "We have seen comments on our Facebook page recently that are like, 'If you wouldn't give it to your judgmental mother-in-law, don't donate it.' "

Possible Preaching Angle:

Offerings; Tithes – Christians are sometimes guilty of giving their second-best to God, while keeping the best for themselves. God wants our best, not our leftovers.

Christian apologist Nancy Pearcey uses the following story to show how "stealth secularism" can bypass our critical grid and hook us emotionally:

In the nineteenth century, a movement called literary naturalism offered novels and plays that portrayed humans as merely products of nature … Virtually every student I have taught has read books by Jack London, like Call of the Wild. But what they don't know is that as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls "a conversion experience" to radical materialism by reading the works of Charles Darwin. He memorized long passages from Darwin and could even quote them by heart (like Christians who memorize Scripture).

He wrote about dogs to soften the blow, but his real message was that humans are nothing but evolved organisms, with no free will, governed by natural selection and survival of the fittest. In London's short story "The Law of Life," an old Eskimo is left behind by his family to die in the snow. As the wolves close in to devour him, the old man ponders that evolution assigns the individual only one task: to reproduce so the species will survive. "Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life." After that, if the individual dies, "What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?"

The story pounds home the theme that humans have no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence. High culture filters down to pop culture, so materialist themes appear in movies and television as well.

Editor's Note: Nancy Pearcey also adds this interesting detail, which also works as a stand-alone illustration: "In a famous episode in Star Trek, the characters debate whether the android Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. He is, of course, but Captain Picard retorts, 'It is not relevant. We [humans], too, are machines, merely machines of a different type.'"

A few years ago, CNN published an article titled "Why I Raise My Children without God." Instantly it went viral. The author, a young mother named Deborah Mitchell, listed several reasons why she shielded her children from learning about God—most of them variations on the problem of evil. Mitchell argued that a loving God would not allow "murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture, and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind."

The classic Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God created humans with free will—and they have made a horrific mess of things. This is called the free-will defense, and it acknowledges the tragic reality of sin and suffering, while at the same time affirming human dignity. It portrays humans as genuine moral agents whose choices are so significant that they alter the direction of history, and even eternity.

Having rejected the Christian answer, what did Mitchell offer as an alternative? She proposed a materialistic worldview in which humans are completely determined, without free will. "We are just a very, very small part of a big, big machine," she intoned, "and the influence we have is minuscule." We must accept "the realization of our insignificance." Is that meant to be an appealing alternative to Christianity? That humans are little machines trapped in a big machine? That their actions are insignificant? Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to "humbleness." But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots. More importantly, it is not true. There is no society without some moral code. The testimony of universal human experience is that humans are not merely little robots.

How free am I? How does God's sovereignty interact with our free will? Do we even have free will or is our life's course determined by God or by other forces beyond our control?

If you're a film-goer, you may be able to think of a number of big-screen characters who've struggled with these questions. First, there was Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey. The Truman Show told the story of his dawning realization that his entire life—including his job, house, marriage, neighborhood, friends—was constructed and orchestrated by TV producers who had turned his entire existence into a reality TV show viewed by millions of people around the world. When the penny finally drops, his mind is sent into turmoil and he becomes desperate to try to escape his phony existence.

Then there was Neo, in The Matrix, famously swallowing the red pill and having his eyes opened to the reality that all human experience was just simulated reality. The truth was that human beings were simply an energy source for the machines which held them in slavery. Neo made it his quest to fight for freedom against these machines.

A third film, The Adjustment Bureau saw Congressman David Norris (played by Matt Damon) bristling at the idea that his relationship with the only woman he has ever really loved must be ended because it's not part of the predetermined "plan" for his life. He won't stand for it and promptly decides to fight this destiny using nothing but the brute force of his own love-struck willpower.

These are just a few of the films that explore issues of human freedom and determination. That it is such a common subject only serves to underline how deeply such themes resonate with us. The thought of being mere puppets in someone else's show, or pawns being moved around some great chessboard, is an outrage to us.

In many parts of the developing world, aid workers have often struggled to get people clean, disease-free drinking water. Surprisingly, it hasn't always been easy. For a while, aid workers helped people get clean water by digging wells. But by the time people got the water into their homes it was often still contaminated. The next step involved adding a tiny bit of chlorine, which keeps water free of germs for days. So aid workers started trying to get people to use chlorine. In Kenya today, you can buy little bottles of chlorine, made just for purifying water, for pennies. Problem solved? Unfortunately, surveys show that only a small percentage of people buy the chlorine, even though it's cheap and widely available.

So the next step to help rural areas get clean water involved putting chlorine right next to the spring or well. It's basically an upside-down bottle with a dispenser that releases chlorine into the containers people use to carry water. A tiny bit is enough for 20 liters of water. It's simple and it's free.

But it turns out that only 40 percent of people who have access to the dispensers actually use them. Some people don't like the taste; some people don't believe in it. The American aid workers sometimes don't use the dispensers either. One aid worker said, "Sometimes you're in a rush, or you're thinking about something else and you just don't do it. I've had malaria five times now. I have a bed net hanging above my bed, and I don't use it."

What's the real problem? The article zeroed in on one issue—human nature. In other words, people from Nairobi, Kenya to New York City often know what's right but we don't do it. Interestingly, the NPR blog that reported this story was titled "A Surprising Barrier to Clean Water: Human Nature."

Michelangelo's final work was called Rondanini Pietà, on which he worked for ten years. Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Michelangelo, wrote that Michelangelo "ended up breaking the block [for this sculpture], probably because [it] was full of impurities and so hard that sparks flew from under his chisel." The sculpture was rescued by a servant and survives to this day. It bears the marks of Michelangelo's chisel, but none of the beauty of his earlier work Pietà.

What happened? Another sculptor named Lorenzo Dominguez once summarized the dilemma and unpredictability of working with stone. He said, "The stone wants to be stone; the artist wants it to be art."

The same dilemma exists for those of us who are the work of God's hands. In an attempt to free the image of Christ that's within us, God begins chipping away everything that isn't Jesus. The stone of our lives either submits to the chipping or it resists.

If it submits, features of the Savior begin to emerge from our life. If it submits long enough, the Savior himself emerges. If, however, it resists, and continues to resist, there will come a day when God will let the stone be stone.

C. S. Lewis said as much when he stated that there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "Okay, go ahead and have it your way."

Possible Preaching Angles: You can use this story to either talk about disobedience and rebellion in the life of the Christian or to illustrate the gift of human free will we can use to reject God and end up in hell.

Os Guinness traces our contemporary idea of human freedom that "began in the Renaissance … blossomed in the Enlightenment and rose to its climax in the 1960s." The classic statement of the Renaissance view is that of Pico della Mirandola, as he imagines God addressing Adam: "You, who are confined by no limits, shall determine for yourself your own nature …. You shall fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer."

Throughout the centuries this same view of human freedom—limitless potential apart from God—has been expressed by other key thinkers.

• Leon Batista Alberti: "A man can do all things if he will." (15th century, Italy)
• Karl Marx: "Man is free only if he owes his existence to himself." (19th century, Germany)
• Friedrich Nietzsche: "If there were gods, who could bear not to be gods? Therefore there are no gods." (19th century, Germany)
• Herbert Spencer: "Progress is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect." (19th century, England)
• Walt Whitman: "One's-self I sing, a simple separate person." (19th century, America)
• John F. Kennedy: "Man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." (20th century, America)
• Ayn Rand: "Man's destiny is to be a self-made soul." (20th century, Russian-American)
• E.O. Wilson: "Humanity will be positioned godlike to take control of its own ultimate fate." (21st century, America)

What if God took the radical step of setting a deadline for ridding the world of evil? Suppose God announces that next Monday at midnight he will step in and stop all suffering caused by evil people. How would he do that? Let's say God decides to use a tool carried by many police officers—a Taser gun.

A Taser gun shoots an individual with a temporary high-voltage current of electricity. The makers of Taser guns claim that a shock lasting half a second will cause intense pain and muscle contraction. Two to three seconds will cause a person to become dazed and drop to the ground. Anything longer than three seconds will drop an attacker for up to fifteen minutes. The makers of Taser guns boast of a 95 percent compliance rate. In other words, hit a person with enough electricity and you can get him to do anything.

When the deadline for stopping evil comes, God gets us to comply with his wishes by shocking us. Start to tell a lie, and you are hit with a half-second zap. Try to rob a person, and you get two seconds of shock. A would-be murderer would be incapacitated. However, knowing that evil thoughts often lead to evil actions, God also zaps us for sinister thoughts. But God's still not finished. Since it's evil to fail to do good when given the opportunity, God zaps us for failing to show mercy, kindness and justice. As a result, people are zapped for doing evil acts, thinking evil thoughts, and failing to do what is right.

What would be the result? A world of twitchy people, who obey God like cowering, beaten dogs.

Many of us act as if repentance is a matter of the will. [But] we can't "will" ourselves into change. We can't "will" ourselves into feeling contrition or remorse. Repentance isn't doing something about our sin; rather it means admitting that we can't do anything about our sin. We cannot woo ourselves into anything but the most external form of repentance.

All our effort, striving, and willpower have only momentary, external value when it comes to fighting an opponent as crafty, intentional, persistent, powerful, and experienced as sin. …

Understand this: The intention not to sin is not the same as the power not to sin. God did not design us to conquer sin on our own. To think we can is an incalculable undervaluing of sin's power combined with a huge over valuing of our own willpower!

These are the unanswered questions of Martina Phillips, a mother with a wayward son whom she hasn't seen for four years:

How How does a parent, who has prayed daily, deal with the rebellion of a child?

How does a loving parent accept the rejection of her offspring?

How does a parent keep from giving up hope?

How does a parent resist envy and bitterness when other people's children progress?

Why Why does free will have to take us so far from God?

Why is it so hard to accept that this might be part of the Master's plan?

Why do the happy parents never ask about the unhappy ones?

Why do children see loving parents as their enemies?

Why are these children choosing the wrong path first?

Why are they so selfish?

Where Where is all of this chaos going?

Where are the answers?

Where is the glimmer of hope?

Where are the others who are needed to walk alongside?

Where can a parent find comfort?

Where does a parent learn to understand this pain?

Where do the tears go that are shed for these wayward children?

What What is the parent of a wayward child to do?

What does a parent do to dispel her fears?

What next?

What can I say?

What can I do?

In a sermon Pastor Matt Woodley shared the following story:

When I was about ten years old, my dad, a medical doctor, received a special gift from one of his patients: a beautiful globe with shiny sequins. The globe spun around on its base and played one of my dad's favorite songs. My dad proudly demonstrated how it worked: grab it by the base, slowly wind it counter-clockwise, and then release it, letting it spin clockwise while playing beautiful music. He told us, "You can touch it, but don't wind it, because you might break it."

A week later, while my dad was at work, I found the globe and brought it to my room. Although I heard my dad say, "Don't wind it up," I decided to wind it up anyway. I gave it a little twist and let it play. It played, but only for five seconds. So I gave it another twist and another twist and five more twists and then—snap! The globe separated from the base. I desperately tried to fix it. I tried forcing the two pieces together. I tried gluing it. I tried taping it. Finally, as I stared hopelessly at the two pieces of the globe, I realized it was broken beyond repair. So I went into my closet, shut the door, and hid.

It was Genesis 3 all over again.

Our world is like the broken globe: it's been twisted too far, and we can't put it back together again. Relationships break, our sexuality breaks, we're slowly breaking the Earth. Our hearts break, nations break down and go to war, our health breaks, our politics break. All the glue, tape, and positive thinking can't put it back together again.

While most office workers will admit to making mistakes on their computer in the routine hustle and bustle of a workweek, it's doubtful many make a $38 billion mistake. One computer technician in Alaska knows how it feels to hit the wrong key on a computer and create a costly debacle.

A worker at the Alaska Department of Revenue deleted all the crucial information for an oil-funded sales account worth $38 billion. The technician was performing routine computer maintenance—reformatting the disk drive of the computer—when he mistakenly reformatted the back-up disk drive as well. All the data disappeared quicker than one can say, "Oops!"

When the department realized the mistake, they immediately went to the back-up tapes, which are updated nightly. Unfortunately, they were all unreadable. With one click of the Enter key, nine months of information was gone, including 800,000 electronic images that had been scanned into the system. The worst-case scenario had occurred, and the only backup was the paperwork itself (stored in over 300 cardboard boxes). Over 70 employees worked nights and weekends to re-enter all the lost data, costing the state over $200,000 in overtime pay and consulting fees.

Sometimes one seemingly innocent "oops" costs more than one can imagine.

On January 1, 2007, Texas Tech basketball coach Bob Knight won his 880th game—the most by any coach in men's Division I college basketball history. In a press conference after the game, he said: "I did it my way—and when I look back on it, I don't think my way was all that bad."

In May of 1990, the cargo ship Hansa Carrier was hit by a severe storm during its voyage from South Korea to the United States. In the middle of the tempest, a large wave swept 21 shipping crates into the sea, five of which contained Nike shoes.

About six months later, a dedicated beach scavenger named Steve McLeod spotted a clump of Nikes while walking along the Oregon coast. Then another. Then several piles of the gleaming, plastic footwear. Soon, McLeod's Cannon Beach apartment was packed with several styles and sizes of Nikes, each of which he carefully cleaned, dried, and de-barnacled. There was only one problem: the vast majority of the shoes were left-footed.

This phenomenon attracted the attention of local scientists working to decipher the Pacific's ocean currents. With the help of Nike and the Hansa crew, they determined that the shoes had not been connected during their ocean voyage. Furthermore, the slight toe curvature of the right-footed shoes caused them to tack northeastward into the Alaska Current, while the left-footed Nikes slid neatly into the southeast-bound California Current. Thus, for months, a small physical difference forced each shoe farther and farther away from its mate.

Once Steve McLeod had put these pieces together, he began contacting other known scavengers for news of another Nike windfall. Sure enough, he heard about a large number of shoes that had beached to the north along the Queen Charlotte Sound. A meeting was arranged and, in one day, 1,200 pairs of Nike tennis shoes were re-united using serial numbers. Once the pair became whole again, it went home with whomever it fit.