Transformative Faith: Understanding Over Willpower

Dallas writes our beliefs and feelings cannot be changed by choice. Read that again our beliefs and feelings cannot be changed by choice. We cannot just choose to have different beliefs and feelings, but we do have some liberty to take in different ideas and information and to think about things in different ways. [00:02:05]

We can choose to take in the word of God and when we do that beliefs and feelings will be steadily pulled in a godly direction. One of the worst mistakes that can be made in practical ministry is to think that people can choose to believe and feel differently. [00:02:28]

Following that we will mistakenly try to generate faith by going through the will, possibly trying to move the will by playing on emotion. Rather the will must be moved by insight into truth and reality. Such insight will evoke a motion appropriate to a new set of the will. [00:02:48]

This is the order of real inward change, to find something that I don't have to try to make myself believe in it is simply clear to me that this is true. Nancy and I recently just went to see the new Top Gun movie, and Tom Cruise had been in the original. [00:03:17]

Dallas goes on to talk about how his father had been a two-pack a day smoker up until he was in his 70s and then in the veterans hospital when he went for health care one day he saw a man smoking with the aid of a special machine that enabled him to smoke. [00:04:28]

Dallas says he saw the folly of smoking and he believed it he never smoked another cigarette. That is what belief does, though merely professed belief does not. There's a difference between what I actually believe and what I profess to believe. [00:04:50]

Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so. Say that again, belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so, and that is how the commands of Jesus finally come to us as we grow we see them to be reality. [00:05:10]

I cannot force myself to believe that what Jesus said is true, but over time I can come to see it, and when my body is prepared to respond as though it really is more blessed to give than to receive, then I have come to the fullness of faith. [00:05:34]

C.S. Lewis tells how one day he got into the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle to travel a short distance. When he got in he was an unbeliever still, though much had happened was happening inside him when he got out, Lewis writes about this in his book. [00:06:04]

He did not make this change he discovered it after it happened, and then he could confess it, and it held him he did not hold it, and true belief at the deepest level is that way we cannot will ourselves into it. [00:06:25]

So we do not in general control our beliefs or those of others, we never choose to believe and we must not try to get ourselves or others to choose to believe, that is God's work. So if you find yourself today unable to generate a feeling of certainty don't try to do that by will. [00:06:37]

Respecting the priority of the mind in spiritual formation means that we seek to understand these things and to help others understand them. We can choose to turn our minds towards these truths, belief will come as God's gift within the hidden depths of our life. [00:10:20]