If you don’t understand why our human wills are so desperately dangerous I implore you to read and meditate on the following insights from Charles Spurgeon: “We declare, upon Scriptural authority, that the human will is so desperately set on mischief, so depraved, and so inclined to everything that is evil, and so disinclined to everything that is good, that without the powerful, supernatural, irresistible influence of the Holy Spirit, no human will ever be constrained towards Christ.”1
While human will power can be helpful in overcoming habits like procrastination, and doing uncomfortable things, it is absolutely powerless to exercise truly altruistic behavior. As the Bible declares we have a heart issue, for we read in (Jeremiah 17:9): “The heart is deceitful above all things, desperately wicked; Who can know it?” In addition, (Ephesians 2:1) tells us that all of mankind is totally dead in their sin: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.” As a result without a supernatural move of the Holy Spirit we are incapable of finding our way back to God, and thus will always remain in bondage to sin and slaves to doing evil.
We can thus see why relying on human will power can be so deceptive and dangerous because it lulls one into thinking that they, on their own, can exercise godly behavior without a need of God. And that is why sheer will power must give way to divine intervention as the only remedy to break us out of our “dead in sin” state of being. When we realize that we are living in total depravity and hopelessly lost, only then can the Holy Spirit move to bring us to Christ and help us take on the new nature which is essential to allowing us to be transformed into truly doing good works.
As a Christian I have learned that human will power is incapable of doing the will of God. And only when we let Christ come into our hearts and let the Holy Spirit run our lives, are we able to do the will of God. And doing the will of God is the only will that can bring us meaning, peace, and joy. In the last analysis our human wills are in bondage to Satan and useless to carry out the will of God. It’s only when Jesus liberates us from our bondage to sin that our wills can align with the will of God and, then and only then, can we experience true joy as a child of God.