Our will needs to unite with God’s will
By Fr. Roy Cimagala Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
WE need to train our will to always be united with the will of God. That is the proper condition of our will and of our whole life. Outside of that system, the only thing to happen is for us to fall into sin.
This was well illustrated in the readings of the Mass on the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. (cfr. Gen 8,1-15 / 2 Cor 4,13-5,1 / Mk 3,20-35) In the first reading, we see how our first parents, still in the state of original justice, managed to follow the will of the tempter rather than that of God. And so, they lost the many privileges they enjoyed at that time: immortality, impassibility, integrity, etc.
In the second reading, we are reminded that as long as we follow Christ, no negative and harmful things can affect us. “Though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day,” St. Paul said in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (4,16)
We really have to try to fathom the veracity of this divine wisdom articulated by St. Paul and lived by Christ himself and all the saints and the holy men and women down the ages who tried to follow Christ closely. In this regard, we really need to enter into the spiritual and supernatural level of God by responding actively to the faith, hope and charity that God himself gratuitously shares with us.
The gospel of the day reminds us of training ourselves to protect and defend ourselves from the enemies of God—our own weaknesses, the allurements of the world, and the most deceptive tricks of the devil.
Everyday, we have to find practical ways of how we can unite our will with God’s will. Our will should not just be floating around on its own, thinking that it is how it enjoys its freedom. We need to acknowledge that our will is a creation of God and is meant to be united to God’s will since we have been created in his image and likeness. We need to acknowledge the truth that our real freedom is when our will is united to the will of God.
This, definitely, is not an easy task to do, given the fact that it is precisely in our will where we choose whether we would like to be with God, or to be simply on our own. And given how we handle this issue, starting with our first parents all the way to the present, we always have the strong tendency to think that our will is simply our own.
We therefore have to be strongly wary of this danger and do everything we can to avoid it. I suppose it goes without saying that we need to be frequently reminded that our will needs to be anchored on the will of God. That’s how our will acquires its proper status.
We have to learn to live always by God’s will. This is a basic truth that we need to spread around more widely and abidingly, since it is steadily and even systematically forgotten and, nowadays, even contradicted in many instances.
The ideal condition for us is to be always aware that our will is united with God’s will, and closely and lovingly follows it. The moment we are not aware of it, we need to react immediately and fix the problem.