In his Sunday homily, our priest, Fr Thomas, stated that most of us come to God wanting him to fix things when God actually wants to heal things. And he heals by offering himself to us.

This has a lot of good stuff to unpack in light of our apprenticeship with Jesus. Obviously, all of us are broken and carry baggage into our apprenticeship with Jesus. This is why Jesus tells us that we must be willing to give up our own way and take up our cross in order to follow him. This is the ongoing process of repentance that is essential in our apprenticeship.

I think if most of us were honest, we wish God would just take away the baggage. We want him to fix things in our life. Fix our marriage, our kids, our finances, our job, our health, our personality, our sins, our circumstances.

The problem with fixing things is that it bypasses the very thing that God wants to heal and transform — our will or heart. Our will is the core component of our self around which every other component — our thoughts, feelings, body, and relationships — properly functions. And our will is designed to submit into a cooperative union with God. By its very nature, the will cannot be fixed. It must be healed and trained.

For example:

• We want God to fix our marriage, but our will needs to be healed and trained from its selfishness, mistrust, or lack of intimacy and into valuing others above ourselves.
• We want God to fix our chronic illness, but our will needs to be healed and trained from our self-sufficiency, anxiety, or fear and into trusting our well-being in God’s grace and goodness.
• We want God to fix our debt, but our will needs to be healed and trained from the thoughts, feelings and habits that compel us to buy more and spend beyond our means and into simplicity, contentment and generosity.

Now I am not saying that God won’t fix a marriage, heal illnesses, or remove debt. Sometimes our merciful God fixes things. And it’s okay to ask him to fix things. What I am saying is that God’s end-game is healing who we are as his image-bearing people. And he heals us with his powerful and loving interactive presence. Remember, Jesus defined eternal life or “life of the age to come” as knowing God (John 17:3). This deep quality of life, eternal life, is an interactive relationship with God in which we grow in our experiential knowledge of him.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, the will is influenced by our thoughts, feelings, and bodily habits. When our will struggles and we cannot do the good we know and want to do, we must work indirectly at retraining our will in God’s grace. While it may be a struggle, it is very doable because we are working in sync with God’s powerful grace that trains us:

“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.”
Titus 2:11-12

We cooperate with God’s grace by indirectly influencing our will both by renewing our minds (our thoughts and feelings) and creating new bodily habits alongside our destructive habits. 

We renew our minds, first and foremost, by keeping God before our minds. We learn to redirect our mind back to God over and over throughout the day. Also, our increasing experience of God’s truth in Scripture and the wisdom of other Jesus-apprentices supplements our mental redirection and trains us to think well about God.

We create new bodily habits through the wise application of spiritual disciplines. These open our will and lives to God through our day and train us to do things we currently cannot do. Dallas Willard classifies spiritual disciplines into two categories that work in conjunction with each other — disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement. The disciplines of abstinence teach us to refrain from certain activities and break our dependency on them and their control over us. The disciplines of engagement teach us to involve ourselves positively and properly with God, others and creation.

As Fr Thomas wisely observed in his sermon, God heals us by giving himself to us. This is absolutely crucial. While we interact with him and cooperate with his healing through the renewing of our minds and practicing spiritual disciplines, he is the source of our healing and transformation. Eternal life, and its accompanying healing, is knowing and interacting with him.