Free Will: Understanding how God guides us and why

Spiritual Life Explained – Transcript

Part 2: Free Will

This is the second of four parts to this mini series on Living Spiritually and if you’ve not already done so it’ll be well worthwhile exploring Part 1 first.

Free Will can be thought of as that special gift a human has to be able to make a choice in any situation. Without Free Will we would be totally habitual and would respond to our environment in a robotic pre-determined way. So it would be prudent to consider where does choice come from and what is it based upon? How is it that in any situation there is at least two options?

Fundamentally you are always being guided by God to become closer to God. This guidance comes via your spirit, which you could think of in simplistic terms as “the receiver of God’s desire and intention for you to be good”.

Your spirit then presents you with guidance which is how, in almost all situations, be they seemingly important or trivial, you always know right from wrong, good from bad. The good choice is the one that will take you closer to God, and this is the one that came from your spirit. The other choice or choices take you in the opposite direction and come from your brain, your habits, and perhaps even ego or fear. This is the archetypal “head versus heart” situation, though the reality is a little more nuanced, but let’s keep it simple for now.

So given a choice between what God is guiding you to do and what your lower self is presenting as an alternative response, Free will is your ability to make the wrong decision. When you think about it, without Free Will then God would guide you, you would react to that guidance and you would evolve, becoming higher in vibration, virtue and goodness. But it would be almost robotic, a kind of unconscious automated reaction and thus of little real value. By having Free Will then the fact you have to consciously make a good choice, means that it has great value when you choose what is good.

This reveals that all that is good in who you are is because you have listened to God and chosen the choices your spirit presented. So those that listen to God become more good, even if they don’t consciously know about God. So when God perceives humanity, the people who are really good are the ones who are receptive to God’s guidance. Do you consider yourself a good person? Well have you ever contemplated how you became good?

Before we move on though its worth understanding that the more you make the right choices the easier it gets. In this way, when your lower self is well aligned with goodness and is spiritually mature, then often it presents the same choice as your spirit and so there’s no sense of choice, you already know what the right thing to do is and you just do it. But you got there by previously making the right choices and so you’ve grown through experience.

So what about those times when we’ve done wrong having made bad choices? Well, for free will to work, God doesn’t intervene, rather God totally respects your right to choose, make mistakes, and will remain neutral. This means that you could in theory turn so far away from God by ignoring God’s guidance that you become bad. God wont intervene but that does not mean you are alone. For those who are going the wrong way down the metaphoric path, there is still guidance and this leads onto the next topic: “Health & Healing”.

But before we go into that and explain why some people just can’t be healed, let us recap. We understand that we’ve always got a choice in any situation and that at least one choice is the right choice. “But” I hear you say, “It’s not that easy, what about if someone is imposing their will on us?” or, and this really happens, “there’s negative influences beyond our control?”.

Well God’s always there and there isn’t anyone, anything, or any force that can push God aside, so God is always there and the right choice, the truthful choice, is always there too. It’s our perception that makes it seem out of reach. And yes, sometimes making the right choice is really tough.

But your higher self is there, guiding you and it’s got the positive experience of every single life you’ve ever had up till now to draw upon. So if you need courage, fortitude, wisdom, strength, positivity or tolerance for example, you’ve got it! And if you use it, then you actually enrich your higher self. For example, if you show courage to do what is right, then your higher self grows in courage because you’ve demonstrated courage.

It’s a win win situation, you win and your higher self wins. So at the moment of choice, you’ve got the guidance from God to do what is right and you’ve got the resources and support of your higher self willing you on to do what is right too. We can still make the wrong choice for a number of reasons including habit, ego, and fear and so it would be nice if we got even more guidance when we’re going in the wrong direction. The good news is that you do and you’ve most likely already experienced it, which leads on to Part 3. Health & Healing.