When we say that everybody is just as holy as he determines to be, it may at first sound a little extravagant, and most religious persons may think it incorrect. And yet such is exactly the case: everybody on earth is just as holy as he has determined to be.

This involves a great many things about the will; not merely one spasmodic act, or a few hundred acts, but it includes a supreme choice of the will, and also many thousands of minor volitions. And it involves a great deal as to the depth of the will, its magnitude, the intelligence under which it is acted, and the degree of perseverance, and the minutia of its acts; and then that marvelous quality, essence, or flavor of the will which we call the “spirit” of an action. Hence, the expression must be understood on a vast scale. Nevertheless it is true—spiritually true, philosophically true, experimentally true—that every angel and man is just as holy as he determines to be; no more, and no less. Let us look at this a little in detail.

1. There are two great departments to the will—choice and execution; or, the elective and persevering acts. Both these forms of the will are involved in holiness. The soul must choose to be holy, or it never can be. The very angels were once on probation and had to choose obedient; and all their accumulated sanctity through thousands of years has been conditioned on their supreme choice of perfect obedience to God. The very first choices in repentance, to turn from sin, is choice of holiness. And after conversion, under added light and newly discovered needs, the soul again chooses holiness, with a depth and completeness of choice it never had the capacity for until it was born of God. But all choices of the will are fruitful only according to the amount of perseverance accompanying them, which is the will’s executive side. It is sublime for a creature to deliberately choose God choose to be good, and humble, and pure, and loving—greater than the creation of the physical world; but it is sublimer still to patiently persist in that choice through ten thousand difficulties day after day and year after year, through ever changing vicissitudes, over seemingly insurmountable hindrances, both in ourselves and in our environment, to keep reinforcing that choice, and pushing it to the front of every other choice, until the perseverance of the choice becomes a supernatural despotism of the soul- this is what tells.

Perseverance is the grandest quality possible for a created being to have. Just look at it. Every choice, every possibility that the soul may have would amount to nothing without it. Perseverance in the creature corresponds exactly with the attribute of immutability in God; for what is divine immutability but the everlasting continuance of God in sameness of being, so that His immutability is His perseverance? Again: perseverance in the creature corresponds with the uniformity of natural law in creation.

Suppose the laws of nature should suddenly cease, or change, everything would be thrown into confusion the air might drown us, water burn us, and sunlight freeze us. The uniformity of natural law is but the beautiful ceaseless outflow of God’s unchanging wisdom. And perseverance in the choice of holiness, on the part of the creature, is the lovely mirror of God’s immutability and nature’s uniformity. Thus a holy will must first choose holiness, and then persevere in the choice; and the latter requires a great deal more strength than the former, for a great many choose but fail to persevere.

2. A spiritual will not only chooses holiness, but is constantly repeating that deep interior determination from a higher standpoint, and with a wider vision as to its import; with an added depth of solemnity, and an increasing affection and sweetness in the choice.

Because the soul is invisible, and all its actions spiritual, and because we are not able to measure it by physical proportions, or exact intellectual data, it is difficult for us to understand many things about our interior lives. For instance: a quiet, thoughtful decision which we make today may be a hundred times stronger and broader than it was possible for us to make ten or twenty years ago. Our spiritual nature grows in quality, in intensity, in intelligence, in moral weight, in stretch of fervor, for which there are no outward measurements; and an act that we perform today may have in it a magnitude of meaning, a moral worth to God and ourselves, a hundred or a thousand times beyond what the same action would have had a few years ago. Hence the growth of the will, in conformity to God, involves this multiplied increase of holy determination.

3. The character of a holy will involves not only the choice to be holy in general, but the multiplying of that choice as it runs out in all the details of life.

We must not only choose to be saved, to receive Jesus and the Holy Spirit but, whether we know it or not, we shall each of us choose the particular type of piety that specially characterizes our lives. There is a dominant trait in every one’s religious character some one thought around which religious life will crystalize. With some, it is duty; with others, work; with others, knowledge; with others, love; with others, suffering; with others, faith. And each of these types are blended with other types, in endless variety and degrees. While there is always something in each Christian’s heredity, or education, or habits, or environment which predisposes him to a particular type of religious life yet, as he grows in grace, and becomes positively spiritual in his whole life, there comes out more and more the element of His will in choosing a special form of spiritual life, and also in choosing the degree of fervor and devotion that shall mark his life. And as he grows into fellowship with Jesus, this exercise of spiritual determination becomes more beautiful and more multiplied, as well as more persistent.

He chooses the various graces of the Spirit with deliberateness and firmness; he chooses in detail the various perfections of Jesus; he chooses to receive the Holy Spirit as a Divine Person; he chooses to cultivate special fellowship with God, until his whole will becomes spiritualized. How long it takes us to learn the vast stretch of that command, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” that is, with all thine affections; and then, with all thine intellect; and lastly, with all thy will. Just as the Holy Ghost is the Executive of the Godhead, and the last Person in the Trinity; so the flooding of our wills with grace is the last and highest form of religious life. And yet, as the third Person of the Trinity must produce conviction at the beginning of a religious life; so the will, in its choosing capacity, must act in the very first stages of a religious life; yet, taking the Christian life as a whole, the will, in its upper ranges of spirituality, is about the last part of our nature that graduates in the school of Christ, for the will never reaches its highest perfection until it chooses to be turned into love, and persistently unites itself to all the fullness of God.

4. God looks at the secret determination of our wills, and deals with us according to the attitude of those wills toward Himself.

Just as all God’s character is embodied in the expression of His will; so God looks at everything in us as it is expressed through our deliberate choices and perseverance. Personality is the crown of all existence, and personality is clothed in the will. The Holy Spirit responds to our deliberate choices. We may feel utterly weak, and poor, and wretched, but if from the depths of our being we intelligently and deliberately choose God, then God responds to that choice and honors it. There is something in the boundless majesty of God which leads Him to put more honor on the first pious choice of a little child than He does on all the instinctive actions of all the animal creation; and every time that choice is repeated, and expanded, and intensified in a long life, it calls forth a fresh recognition of honor and approval.

It is with the will that we touch God, as it is by His will that He sanctifies us. Every time we choose that which pleases God, it is like the blossoming of another flower in the spiritual world; and every time we persevere in a God-like choice it is like the ripening of the fruit of that flower.

It is by the Christ-like habits of the will that we become one with God, and see that our mission is revealed in the words: “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.”