The Will Is the King

Choose you this day whom ye will serve … but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. JOSHUA 24:15

There is a difficulty, Hannah Whitall Smith observed, that comes to many people soon after they have given themselves to God. The first glow fades. They go on saying that they belong to the Lord, but it all feels unreal. Their surrender seems a matter of words; they begin to fear that they are hypocrites, claiming what their hearts do not feel. She knew the difficulty from the inside. She had spent ten miserable years trying to feel her way to God, and she spent the rest of her life trying to spare others the same mistake. Her answer has two halves: the will, not the feelings, is the centre of the self; and the facts, not the feelings, are the ground of faith.

Not in the emotions

The mistake, she says in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, is to think that the life hid with Christ is lived in the feelings. “Now, the truth is, this life is not to be lived in emotions. It is to be lived in the will.” She cites Fénelon, the French archbishop whose writings her father had given her as a girl, to the effect that pure religion resides in the will. By the will she does not mean a passing wish but the deciding power in us — the part that chooses, and to which everything else must finally submit. It is, she says, the man himself, the I that we recognise as our real self behind all our moods.

Our emotions belong to us, and we enjoy and suffer them, but they are not the self. They rise and fall with health, weather and circumstance. If God is to possess us, He must possess the centre, and the centre is the will. As the will is, so is the man.

I have chosen the way of truth: thy judgments have I laid before me. PSALM 119:30

The mother in the nursery

Her illustration is domestic, as usual. “The will is like a wise mother in a nursery; the feelings are like a set of clamoring, crying children.” The mother decides on a course she knows to be right. The children howl and protest. She does not panic or give way; she calmly holds her course, soothing them where she can, and in time they settle. But if she once believed the children were in charge, the nursery would descend into chaos. And so, Hannah says, do many souls, because they let their feelings govern.

She tells of a young man, a slave to doubting, to whom nothing in religion ever felt real. He was told that he could not control his emotions but could control his will, and that he could put his will on the believing side by saying I will believe, I do believe, and leave his feelings to follow. For some days his feelings accused him of hypocrisy at every turn, and he answered each accusation by choosing again. Then the struggle ended, and he became, she says, one of the most direct and powerful Christians she knew.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. JOHN 7:17

Another woman had a besetting sin which, as she put it, she loved in her emotions and hated in her will. She knelt and told the Lord just that: with one part of me I love this, with my true self I hate it, and I put my will on Your side. She found herself delivered, not by an outward rule but by an inward power.

The great relief of this teaching is that it puts the Christian life within reach. Nobody can command his feelings, and a religion that required the right feelings would drive sensitive people to despair. But anyone can choose. The transaction with God, Hannah says, is as real when only the will acts as when every emotion agrees. It does not seem as real to us, but in God’s sight it is.

At the end of her chapter on the will she printed a letter from a Presbyterian minister, written years before, who had covenanted to walk by faith and not by feelings, and found that God kept him in steady victory whether his feelings were high or low. The line has helped many people since.

My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. PSALM 57:7

Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? ROMANS 6:16

A religion of trying to feel

The will needs something to stand on, and here the second half of her answer comes in. In The Unselfishness of God she describes the religion of her youth as nothing but a religion of trying to feel. She had been taught to look within for the light of God, and so she watched her emotions constantly, trying to work them up into what she supposed God required. Her question every day was not what God had said, but how she felt. She compared herself to a prisoner before a judge who spent all his energy examining his own feelings about the judge, instead of trying to learn what the judge felt about him.

The change came when she discovered that there were facts to be found out — that God had spoken, and that what He had said was true whether she felt it or not. “You may feel good or you may feel bad, but neither the good feeling nor the bad feeling affects the real thing.” If God loves you, she went on, it makes no difference to the fact whether you feel it; it only affects your comfort. And once she had learned that, she found that the very feelings she had failed to manufacture came of their own accord.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

She loved to tell how Luther, when the devil asked whether he felt himself a child of God, answered that he did not feel it at all, but knew it.

The map and the country

In The God of All Comfort she put the same point with a child’s joke. A boy who had been learning about Columbus told his father that he would not have gone to all that trouble; he would simply have looked on the map and found America. America was not real because it was on the map; it was on the map because it was real. So with the Bible. Things are not true because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible because they are true. When it says God loves us, it is describing a fact as solid as a coastline.

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. JOHN 20:29

Her time among the holiness camp meetings sharpened this. She went forward again and again seeking the overwhelming blessing others described, and it never came. “I am not naturally emotional,” she wrote. Her husband, of a warmer temperament, received the blessing in floods of joy. She came to see that the difference was not in God’s favour but in the two natures receiving the same truth, and she noticed that when trouble came, the emotional experiences of her friends often failed, and some were glad at last to stand on the ground of conviction they had once thought barren.

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. 1 JOHN 3:20

This is sound and freeing teaching, and it has rescued many. The Christian whose assurance depends on a glow will lose it every time the glow fades. The Christian who rests on what God has said can walk through a very dark valley and still know whose he is.

Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God. ISAIAH 50:10

Weather and ground

This is Hannah at her most useful, and it also shows her most characteristic weakness. She says that throughout the Bible the heart means the will rather than the emotions. That is only partly right. The heart in Scripture is the whole inner person — thinking, choosing, desiring and feeling — and God asks for all of it.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. MATTHEW 22:37

She once wrote that if she had her way, the whole subject of feelings in the religious life would be absolutely ignored. That is too much, and it is her own temperament speaking. A cheerful, steady nature can easily treat feelings as a nuisance to be stepped over; a person who has buried a child, or lives with depression, cannot simply ignore what he feels, and should not be made to think he ought to. Scripture does not ignore feelings. It gives them a voice, and the psalmist does not ignore his downcast soul; he speaks to it.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. PSALM 42:11

So the right lesson is not that feelings are unimportant, but that they are not the foundation and not the governor. They are weather; the facts are the ground. The weather is real, and a wise person dresses for it. But no one decides whether the ground is there by looking at the sky. The will hears the feelings, names them, brings them to God — and then chooses His way and stands on what He has said. Held like that, her counsel is a lifeline for anyone who has thought that unreal feelings meant an unreal faith.

We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. HEBREWS 4:15

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where have you mistaken a lack of feeling for a lack of faith or surrender?

2. Put your will on God’s side in one matter today, in words: I choose Thy will in this, whatever I feel.

3. Name a sin you love in your emotions and hate in your will, and tell God so honestly.

4. Pick one fact of the gospel you find hard to feel — that God loves you, that you are forgiven — and write out the Scripture that states it.

5. When a feeling protests this week, speak to it as the psalmist did, rather than obeying it or pretending it is not there.

6. Be gentle with a grieving or depressed friend; do not tell them to ignore what they feel. Remind them of what is true.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have lived by the weather of my feelings and wondered why my faith was so unsteady.

I give You the centre of myself, my will, and I choose You. I choose to believe, and I choose to obey.

Thank You that Your love is a fact, written down and sealed in Your Son, and that it does not rise and fall with my moods.

Let me neither despise my feelings nor obey them, but bring them honestly to You, and in Your time bring every one of them into harmony with Your good will. Amen.