The will is one of the gateways of the human soul, and, like any gate, opens and closes. It opens when we say yes and closes when we say no. The Bible describes a properly functioning will gate this way:
Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. –James 4:7, NKJV
Here, we see spiritual victory being ushered in through the gate of the will, as it opens to God and closes to the adversary. We must be yielded enough to submit totally to God (saying yes) and must be strong enough to resist the enemy (saying no). As elohim and gatekeepers (first of our own lives and then of all creation), we are responsible to say yes and no according to the will of the Father. Ruling and reigning requires both submission and dominion, being both under authority and in authority. In order to do this, the will gate must be functioning at full capacity, with Yeshua enthroned there as King of Kings.
Your YES has to do with obedience and absolute surrender to God. True surrender is born of trust in your heavenly Father. Out of that trust, you yield to Him as clay yields to the potter, and you become an unobstructed channel through which He can flow. If your trust was broken through neglect, abuse or trauma, your will gate may be occupied by fear, control or rebellion, and you might find it difficult to say yes. At some point, we all struggle to bring our wills under the government of God, but it becomes easier to do so when the will gate is intact and is no longer occupied by demonic entities. Jesus modeled the perfect YES when He yielded to the Father’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Father, if you are willing, take this cup of agony away from me. But no matter what, your will must be mine. –Luke 22:42, TPT
Your NO has to do with refusing to allow the adversary to usurp your God-given authority through intimidation or deception. The ability to say no allows you to proactively steward the life that has been entrusted to you, as you refuse to be controlled by your flesh, by others, by the demonic realm or by your circumstances. You can’t truly say yes to God without saying no to those things which oppose Him. If your will has been broken and your NO stolen through abuse or control, you may be saying yes when you should be saying no. Your will gate may be very damaged, or it may be occupied by a demonic spirit of fear or false submission. The adversary has lost his place in heaven and desires a kingdom upon the earth. Dominion over this earth was given to Adam, and satan used deception to usurp that authority. But where Adam failed, Jesus succeeded. And, as He resisted the devil, He modeled for us the perfect NO!
Next Satan took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him the nations of the world and all their glory. “I’ll give it all to you,” he said, “if you will only kneel and worship me.” “Get out of here, Satan,” Jesus told him. “The Scriptures say, ‘Worship only the Lord God. Obey only him.’” Then Satan went away, and angels came and cared for Jesus. –Matthew 4:8-11, TLB
Yeshua, whose YES to the Father was unwavering, had absolutely no problem saying NO to the adversary or to those who were in agreement with him — whether that happened to be the Pharisees… or one of His dearest friends!
Great sorrow awaits you religious scholars and Pharisees — frauds and imposters! You build memorials for the prophets your ancestors killed and decorate the monuments of the godly people your ancestors murdered. Then you boast, “If we had lived back then, we would never have permitted them to kill the prophets.” But your words and deeds testify that you are just like them and prove that you are indeed the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead and finish what your ancestors started! You are nothing but snakes in the grass, the offspring of poisonous vipers! How will you escape the judgment of hell if you refuse to turn in repentance?
–Matthew 23:29-33, TPT
But Yeshua turned and said to Peter, “Get out of my way, Satan! You are tempting me to sin. You aren’t thinking the way God thinks but the way humans think.” –Matthew 16:23, NOG
Now, those are some firm NO’s! In these examples, we see that Yeshua’s will gate was fully functioning, enabling Him to say YES and to say NO in perfect alignment with the Father’s heart. And remember, it is Him who is actually living His life through you, enabling you to do the same.
My husband, Sean, defines God’s justice as the honoring, guarding and protecting of the sovereignty of man’s free will. We are born sovereign, because God created us that way — in His image. Any injustice you see will inevitably involve the violation of someone’s free will, either by force or by deception. The fact that we were born in sin through the bloodline of Adam, by no choice of our own, paints a clear portrait of the adversary, who usurped Adam’s dominion through deception and who, at every opportunity, usurps the human will. The fact that we must proactively choose to receive the gift of redemption paints a beautiful portrait of our secure, loving God, who created and honors our free will.
This, then, is what happened. Sin made its entry into the world through one man, and through sin, death. The entail of sin and death passed on to the whole human race, and no one could break it for no one was himself free from sin… For if one man’s offence meant that men should be slaves to death all their lives, it is a far greater thing that through another man, Jesus Christ, men by their acceptance of his more than sufficient grace and righteousness, should live all their lives like kings! –Romans 5:12 & 17 JBP
We cannot earn what has been freely given to us in Christ; trying to do so is merely eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil once more. But it is also clear that we must proactively receive the free gift of Christ’s righteousness through the vehicle of faith. Faith is not a passive stance but is a proactive substance, whereby we remain firmly connected to God in a posture of receiving. Our part in the dance of the two camps is to receive by faith what has been freely poured out. We cannot earn it, but we must, with our wills, choose it. When our faith dances with the grace of God, we become recipients of His righteousness, His very DNA!
Our faith in Jesus transfers God’s righteousness to us and he now declares us flawless in his eyes… –Romans 5:1, TPT
For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. –II Peter 1:4, NASB
The word translated partakers is Strong’s #G2844, the Greek word koinonos. It means, “to participate as a partner, to partake of, to be a companion with.” Our free will is of the utmost importance to God, who IS love, because it is the vehicle through which we can choose to become partners with Him in His Divine, eternal, fully-alive nature!
This is an excerpt from my book, Miracles Are Normal: Co-Creating Through Oneness With God. You can purchase paperback or digital copies from my website here: Miracles Are Normal. And you can purchase from Amazon here: Miracles Are Normal on Amazon
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing issues with the human will that make it difficult to rule and reign. So…stay tuned!
Cheers!
Virginia