Will

Paul Ford writes in an article on Wired, what happened when he switched his weight loss meds and found a miracle cure. Decades of struggle with an insatiable desire for food, gone in an instant. But his reflection on the experience is less of an advertisement as it is a probing of human nature amid advances in pharmacology. He writes:

This is a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old — and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride?

On this front, the parallels between Ford’s weight loss drug and every other drug are almost obvious (whether they be coffee, THC, or any fill-in-the-blank name brand). The alluring promise that frailty is simply a matter of chemistry. More interesting is what happens to Ford himself after the one signal pathway is silenced — his brain averts its gaze elsewhere:

Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume — there was sudden silence. It was confusing. […] “I urgently need, I thought … Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The flesh is never satisfied and cannot be conquered by human will or science. Impeding one of the desires of the flesh simply ignites another. The church of big pharma might provide a kind of cure, but there is no panacea for human nature, except “the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

One key discovery is that self-control is an exhaustible but buildable resource. A psychologist demonstrated this with a clever experiment. He had college students skip a meal, so that they felt hungry, and then sit at a table. The table had freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, candy, and radishes.

The first group of students—the lucky ones—could eat whatever they wanted. Of course, they only ate the sweets. The second group had the same food in front of them, but they were told to leave the sweets alone, and they could only eat the radishes. The third group had no food in front of them at all. (It was the control group.)

After the students sat at their tables for a while, they were given a complex geometry problem to solve. The trick was that the problem was unsolvable; what mattered was how long they worked on it before giving up. The students in Groups 1 and 3 worked for about 20 minutes. But, the students in Group 2 worked only about 8 minutes. Why such a big difference? The students in Group 2 had already used up a lot of self-control resisting the sweets, so they had less energy left over for working on the geometry problem. Researchers call this ego depletion.

Does this mean that self-control, once it’s used, is gone forever? Not at all. It recharges with rest. In fact, the more often self-control is used, the stronger it gets. Self-control is like a muscle. It weakens immediately after use but strengthens with frequent use.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The strategy is simply being aware of our capacity for self-control and willpower throughout the day. Keep an eye on the gas gauge. Knowing our willpower level tells us when it might be a good time to take on new challenges, or when we should stop and refill. It lets us know when we are most vulnerable to moral failure.

In 2009, a German scientist named Jan Souman took a group of subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, and instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them managed to keep to a straight course for ten or twenty paces; a few lasted for 50 or a hundred. But in the end, all of them wound up circling back toward their points of origin. Not many of them. Not most of them. Every last one.

"And they have no idea," Dr. Souman told NPR. "They were thinking that they were walking in a straight line all the time." Dr. Souman's research team explored every imaginable explanation. Some people turned to the right while others turned to the left, but the researchers could find no discernable pattern. As a group, neither left-handed nor right-handed subjects demonstrated any predisposition for turning one way more than the other; nor did subjects tested for either right- or left-brain dominance. The team even tried gluing a rubber soul to the bottom of one shoe to make one leg longer than the other.

"It didn't make any difference at all," explained Dr. Souman. "So again, that is pretty random what people do." In fact, it isn't even limited to walking. Ask people to swim blindfolded or drive a car blindfolded and, no matter how determined they may be to go straight, they quickly begin to describe peculiar looping circles in one direction or the other.

When Andre Agassi's memoir came out, the key revelation of the book was this: Andre Agassi—a former number one ranked player in the world, winner of eight grand slams and millions of dollars—hated tennis. Listen to this:

I hate tennis. I hate it with a dark, secret passion and always have. … I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop, and still I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.

Possible Preaching Angles: Sin, struggle against; Temptation—In many ways, Agassi's struggle with tennis is like our struggle with sin—we hate it, but we do it anyway.

Do you think you can handle temptation on just the strength of your own will-power? If so, you're probably setting yourself up for a crash. That's not just advice from the Bible. It also comes from current scientific research.

Dr. Loran Nordgren, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, ran a series of experiments that placed college students in "tempting situations" to smoke, eat junk food, or forgo studying. The research found that we often display what's called a "restraint bias." In other words, we tend to overestimate how much self-control we will have against temptation when we're not in the "heat of the moment." Our "restraint bias" causes us to think that we can handle more temptation than we actually can. Dr. Nordgren warned that "Those who are most confident about their self-control are the most likely to give in to temptation."

How do we deal with out deluded sense of self-control? Dr. Nordgren, who works for a secular university, offered some biblically sound advice: "The key is simply to avoid any situations where vices and other weaknesses thrive and, most importantly, for individuals to keep a humble view of their willpower."

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)

In 1875 a British poet named William Ernest Henley published a short poem that expressed one way to cope with life's circumstances. The poem, called "Invictus," ended with these famous lines: "I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul."

In popular culture, those last two lines usually represent some kind of heroic and self-sufficient stand against evil and injustice without submitting to God. The journalist Danniel Hannan called the poem "a final and terrible act of defiance. The Horror might indeed have awaited [Henley], but he would go there on his own terms, leaving the spittle sliding down his Maker's face."

For over a hundred years, Henley's poem has inspired many people. In the 1980s, the poem encouraged former South African president Nelson Mandala throughout the dark days of his imprisonment. Years later, Clint Eastwood used it as the title for his popular film about the South African rugby team.

Sadly, it was also a great influence on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the deaths of 168 men, women, and children, and the injuries of 800 more. He scribbled out the words of "Invictus" and handed it to authorities as his last words before his execution.

Sixteen years after Henley first published "Invictus," the British preacher Charles Spurgeon offered another philosophy of life. On June 7, 1891, in the closing words of his final sermon, Spurgeon urged people to submit to a better "Captain" for our soul. Spurgeon said:

Every [person] must serve somebody: we have no choice as to that fact. Those who have no master are slaves to themselves. Depend upon it, you will either serve Satan or Christ. Either self or the Savior. You will find sin, self, Satan, and the world to be hard masters; but if you wear the uniform of Christ, you will find him so meek and lowly of heart that you will find rest unto your souls …. If you could see our Captain, you would go down on your knees and beg him to let you enter the ranks of those who follow him. It is heaven to serve Jesus.

In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks summarizes vast amounts of social science research by stating that "information programs alone are not very effective in changing behavior." He writes:

Both reason and will are obviously important in making moral decisions and exercising self-control. But neither of these character models has proven very effective. You can tell people not to eat the French fry. You can give pamphlets about the risks of obesity. You can deliver sermons urging them to exercise self-control and not eat the fry. And in their nonhungry state, most people will vow not to eat it. But when their hungry self arises, their well-intentioned self fades, and they eat the French fry. Most diets fail because the conscious forces of reason and will are simply not powerful enough to consistently subdue unconscious urges.

The evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control.

In his book Generation Ex-Christian, about younger Christians leaving Christianity, author Drew Dyck relates one interview with a young man who left Christianity to join the Wicca religion.

Morninghawk Apollo (who renamed himself as is common in Wiccan practice) discussed his rejection of Christianity with candor. "Ultimately why I left is that the Christian God demands that you submit to his will. In Wicca, it's just the other way around. Your will is paramount. We believe in gods and goddesses, but the deities we choose to serve are based on our wills."

In May of 2010, Indiana congressman Mark Souder resigned his position after confessing to an affair with a part-time staffer. In more than a dozen emails to WORLD magazine, Souder reflected on his downfall. In one email, he shares how difficult it is to keep people in power in check. "Politicians and any top professionals are skilled manipulators and smooth with words," he wrote. "Holding us accountable is hard." Another email reveals the agony he feels over his failure. He writes: "My sin, while forgiven, is greater in that God put me in a position of public trust, so I deserve whatever criticism I receive." He goes on to write about what he did and how he felt in the midst of his affair: "I prayed multiple times a day, sang hymns with emotions and tears, felt each time that it wouldn't happen again, read the Bible every morning …. So how in the world did I have a torrid—which is an accurate word—many-year affair? How could I compartmentalize it so much?" In yet another email, Souder adds: "Bottom line, however, is that the problem is sin …. The problem is getting the will subordinate to the Holy Spirit early enough that the Spirit is not quenched."

On August 23, 1973, Jan Erik Olsson, out on parole from prison, attempted to hold up a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. When the police showed up, Olsson took four people as hostages. A stand-off between Olsson and the police lasted six days. At one point during the standoff, Olsson called Sweden's Prime Minister to say that he would kill the hostages. He put one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, on the phone. She said to the prime minister, "I am very disappointed in you …. I think you are sitting here playing with our lives." Despite Olsson's threats to kill her, Enmark had decided she felt safer with the bad guy than the police. In fact, she wasn't the only one. Other hostages actually resisted rescue attempts and later refused to testify against their captor. Some even raised money for his defense! Now whenever you a hear news of a hostage who identifies more with their captors than their rescuers, their condition is referred to as the Stockholm syndrome. Many years after the incident in Stockholm, Kristen Enmark summed up what had happened: "It's some kind of a context you get into when all your values, the morals you have, change in some way."

It's amazing how people can get so psychologically turned around that they can no longer tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Ephesians 5:3 warns us that this can happen to Christians. We can actually forget which side we're on. Paul writes: "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people."