How can it be that Colonel Vi in Vietnam, or Charles Dicken’s Ebenezer Scrooge, actually had the power to choose to pursue “goodness?” Just where did they get their permission to do such a crazy thing as choose? Just where did you get your opportunity and obligation to make personal choices? We usually go racing at break-neck speed down the road of everyday trauma, when suddenly we are confronted with non-avoidable alternatives. We can’t embrace all the alternatives at the same time. We must suddenly select the most highly desired and valued alternative – and get on down the road!
Well, strange as it may sound – choice making has something to do with intimacy, and worship, and friendship, -- and it comes at high risk and a high cost.
God created you with the function of the will, or volition: that amplitude allowing the choosing of a desired alternative. That feature was extraordinary and revolutionary. The Creator not only gave you the prerogative and leniency to choose what you wanted to eat for lunch, or when you wanted to cross the road, (like other animals) but, in fact, created you as a “free moral agent.”
You are the one who gets to choose to pursue goodness in your life – or not! God longed for fellowship, communication, expression, adoration, and worship. “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” That meant something spiritual – not just earthy. That meant something eternal.
God already knew that if there was not such a thing as “free moral agency” regarding the will, there could never be true, voluntary, and willing adoration, spiritual comradery, or worship.
Without free moral agency the created object would be nothing more than another pine tree with its noble spires reaching up toward the God that created it; or a cute little chicken that is required to take a drink of water, then lift its beak heavenward in order to swallow the water. God was seriously interested in creating more than robotic worshippers. He desired his highest creations to want to, on purpose, more than anything else, communicate with and worship him – and freely choose “goodness” -- or not.
God desired our love and worship too much to destroy it by demanding it. God is willing to repeatedly give us insights and understanding as he patiently woos us in his attempt to persuade us how much he loves us. He invites us to love, honor, and worship him only if we really choose to.
Let’s review, again, our working definition of “goodness”:
Humans have a unique capacity to attain, through invitation and development, excellence of character, and based on that character they can choose to become involved in initiating attitudes and actions of kindness, generosity, fairness, sympathy, personal responsibility, virtue, justice and wisdom through their conduct. The genuine initiating and promoting of those attitudes and actions is what we will refer to as “goodness”.
Madame Vi, in Vietnam, had somewhere along her journey in life, an unspeakable spiritual opportunity to wholeheartedly invite attitudes and actions of goodness into her personal life. She gratefully and enthusiastically pursued those opportunities and, not only was her life forever changed – but so were the thousands of lives around her changed for good – forever!
You have the wonderful privilege of inviting into your life the determination to pursue a more excellent way. You alone ultimately hold the common key to two very mysterious locks that control your personal character. The same key unlocks the power of invitation as well as the power of development. You are the one who must invite into your life excellence of character. And you must be the one who puts into motion the discipline to develop that excellence of character throughout your lifetime. And, it will be you, and you alone, that will insert the magic key that turns the tumblers of the locks of “goodness.”
Next Week: Goodness Produces Agents of Change