It is also what the early Methodists meant by their insistence that we must “bend the will,” regardless of cost, consideration, or consequence. For each of us, heaven or hell depends not on religious inclinations or sensations, but on whether we have set our faces toward the first and our backs against the second. There is no way to avoid the issue; and there is no middle ground, because our loves decide our choices; and our choices decide our destiny. “While what heaven loves I hate,/ Shut for me is heaven’s gate.”

All this seems strange in today’s atmosphere of “seeker-sensitive” religion, which is supposed to turn sinners into Christians without them ever suspecting it. After all, unregenerate men and women become touchy when they are exhorted to “flee the wrath to come,” take up their cross, and follow Jesus. Never mind that He Himself sounded these themes relentlessly, that the Bible asserts them emphatically, or that every great revival proclaims them vigorously. God loves sinners, we are told, and so must we; and, of course, this is as true as the blessed gospel.

With dark and twisted logic, however, we modern evangelicals have turned God’s love into an excuse for leaving sinners in the sins which He hates and for never confronting them with the holiness which He requires. So we make them perfectly at ease in cozy little “support groups,” where they affirm each other’s floundering “personal faith journeys” over hot coffee and gooey pastries. We entertain them with high-tech theatrical productions with computerized lights and sound effects and titillate them with hip-swaying “praise teams” who pound out rocking choruses which sound more appropriate to a bar or a dance floor than to a Christian church.

But then, of course, the church is no longer a sanctuary, but a hybrid community center, theater, coffee house, gymnasium, concert stage, and youth hang-out, often stripped of cross, communion table, pews, or hymnals, and sometimes even without the Bible itself. After all, well-heeled boomers and “seeking” generation-X’ers are fixated on “doing their own thing”—as are all sinners; and they resent the demands of traditional Christianity or the intrusion of its symbols. This, too, is why the large, old-fashioned pulpit has disappeared into the furnace room, for it represents the unrelenting authority of Holy Scripture, as well as the magisterial office of the pastor who preached it there.

But now he is not so much the prophetic voice of Law and Gospel as he is the upbeat “facilitator of body life,” who roves about the platform in open-necked shirt, jeans and sweater, caressing the microphone and pumping up his people with chatty little God-talks to pull them through another week. This is “celebration” worship, we are told; and there is much hugging, clapping, and hands waving in the air; much “groovin’ and movin’” to the music and tearful talk of “loving Jesus”; and much emphasis on the immediate impressions which the Holy Spirit is supposed to give. Everything is relaxed and reassuring, but never is the congregation told that without holiness they never shall see the Lord.

Now all this is fluff and fraud, and it would not last ten minutes in those places where believers are persecuted and where at the risk of bloody stakes and dungeon cells they must take a forthright stand for Jesus and His cross. Indeed, the only reason it flourishes here is because we are so affluent, worldly, and self-indulgent that we think we can afford a religion which costs us nothing. For in every case, the mark of authentic Christianity is an intense moral earnestness which never forgets God’s enablement nor God’s requirement that we choose now and choose always for what is right and against what is wrong.

To “bend the will” is to do exactly this—to exercise freely, fully, and forcibly the volitional faculty which God has made the executive agent of personality and elect “what heaven loves” as the basic direction of all life and purpose. In conjunction with such other constituents of our humanity as the memory, the conscience, and the judgment, the will marks us as distinctly different from the world of sticks and stones and of puppy dogs and bunny rabbits. For none of them ever decide whether to live in Omaha or Tokyo, attend a baseball game or an opera, or accept Christ’s offer of salvation or reject it.

We can do all of these, however; and even civil law rewards or imprisons us on the basis of our ability to make free and informed decisions. Indeed, this is the bedrock of civilized society; and this is also the bedrock of Christian faith. For the gospel is offered to thinking men and women who are free either to accept it or reject it. True, the human will unaided by grace is totally bound by sin. But the “free gift” of Romans 5 is to all our fallen race; and because of Christ’s atonement, our will is released from its paralysis and enabled by prevenient grace to choose heaven over hell.

So the battle against “the world, the flesh, and the devil” may be won, if persistently we will “bend the will” to do His will, and that without reservation or negotiation. This is basic to our conversion, for saving faith is impossible without volitional response to obey the gospel, just as it is impossible without intellectual response to believe the gospel. Only then can we fully rest upon Christ’s promise to receive those who come to Him. Surges of emotions may attend this moment, or they may not; but what is essential is that we have bent the knee to Jesus and that we have cast ourselves on Him forever.

But this is just the beginning, for we must also “bend the will” continually thereafter. Every day has its challenges and its choices; and every day we must forge another link in the strong and growing chain by which we voluntarily bind ourselves to Jesus. Every choice for right makes all the more likely that we shall make another; but the reverse is also true, for every evil choice strengthens the will in evil. “As a stream its channel grooves,/ And within its channel moves,/ So doth habit’s deepest tide/ Groove its bed and there abide.” This is another stanza of Joseph Cook’s old hymn, and it points to a basic fact—eternity is determined by our choices, for as C.S. Lewis reminds us, by our choices we are becoming what we shall be forever.

This is exactly why our spiritual ancestors joined their continual call to “bend the will” to their unrelenting emphasis on “habituated virtue.” They were “Methodists” precisely because they believed that there is an essential method to serving God. This meant for them—as it should mean for us—a chosen and deliberate pattern of prayer and practice, duty and discipline, rhythm and routine which hallowed and reinforced all life within a framework of careful and conscientious piety.

Nor was this merely a series of solitary acts, but a corporate system of mutual affirmation and accountability, vertical in its allegiance to God and horizontal in its submission to His church. For holy system, as they believed, produces holy people; and it is within this system that the Spirit enables us habitually to reject sin, habitually to cultivate holiness, and habitually to employ the means of grace through which we receive His favor. It is this system which we desperately need to recover, for the secret of spiritual success is not in sentimental feelings about Jesus, mystical impressions, or repeated trips to the public altar, but in the devout, practiced, and recurring “habits of the soul”—a soul which is centered lovingly and faithfully in Christ.

“But isn’t this all duty—grim, legalistic, and unloving?” someone asks; and even the question shows how different our brand of Christianity is from that of our founders. We have cast off the old restraints which they employed, all in pursuit of joy and freedom in our religion; but frankly we seem to find so little of either. In their determined purpose to do right simply because right is right, they seemed to find so much of both. But then they believed that for a Christian, the way of blessing is always the way of duty, that the way of duty always centers in determined choice, and that determined choice always is fixed in “what heaven loves.” And for those who choose what heaven loves—for those who firmly, freely, and finally “bend the will” in its direction—heaven not only awaits, but heaven is begun.