Made to Rule

So, we all long for control. That is no surprise. But to consider that it is our destiny and design to rule and reign is something that I have not thought much about. Though I recognize that Christ came to rescue us from prisons of fear and insecurity that rob us of our freedom of choice, I’ve not really considered the idea that God wants us to have sovereignty. I’ve spent more time thinking of how I should defer to God’s rule—how I should surrender choice and control to God. And I should.

Yet Willard says that “The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling.” So, if our desire for control and sovereignty is part of our imago Dei—what makes us persons, then maybe it is not all bad. We desire to accomplish and create good things, to influence and impact.

And yet, our vision and will is distorted. In our fallenness, apart from harmony with God, our longings have gone awry. Like Chaucer’s knight, we dominate and demand from others—robbing them of their personal sovereignty. And we struggle against domination from others in order to try to maintain our own personhood.

There’s so much to who we are that we can’t appreciate because we’re perverts. We have distorted and perverted love and pleasure and power. And that is what makes redemption so beautiful. All is being restored. Christ has made it possible for us to reclaim our personhood—because he made union with God possible. Willard points out that “God equipped us for this task [of ruling] by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us.” We need him to enlarge our imagination of what can be done “acting in union with God himself.” We need him to redeem our rule.

And here is where surrender makes sense, “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases.” So, in a strange paradox, the more we surrender, the more freedom and control and sovereignty we have as we and God move in cooperative faithfulness to one another.

This all gets back to my disdain for goal-setting and self-improvement plans. Last year they were bad. This year they might be good. If redeemed. And I guess that’s the key I was looking for.

This seems so simple, like one of those things everybody else already gets, but it’s still sinking in for me. I’m going to have to sit with it, move it around the room a bit until I find a good place for it. And I’m only on page 28 of this book.