The following article is an excerpt from Walking with God by Michael Phillips.

The will is the deepest, strongest thing we possess as human beings. Our power of volition is our link with God himself. It is God’s creative fingerprint stamped within each one of us. Think what God did. He created beings that were both like him, and yet at the same time separate from him. So separate, in fact, as to be capable of choosing or not choosing to walk in relationship with him. The marvel of the thing continually overwhelms me, that God placed free will in the center of creation.

For having given it, God in a sense bound the hands of his own omnipotence to interfere with it. What each of us does with this priceless possession of volition—the power to choose—is the great drama of eternity.

Naturally, then, comes the question: What is the highest choice the will can make? It is this: To yield it. The highest is always to give. It is why the most far-reaching love involves sacrifice. To give most deeply always means giving oneself. “For God so loved the world that he gave…” To give, to yield, to give away, even to relinquish and give up…these are the ingredients of the highest forms of love we know. We return, then, to the will. Not just any “will,” an abstract will…but your will and my will.

What is the highest, the deepest, the ultimate thing we can each do with this gift we have been given. Yield it…abandon it…sacrifice it…and give it back to our Creator and Father who gave it to us in the first place. We know this is the highest because it is exactly this yielding we witness in the life of Jesus.

The will is the most individual element of our complex humanity. To give it back to the Creator, yielding it again into his hands, represents the perfect expression of human freedom. In such a self-willed abandonment of the right to self-rule we reach the crowning apex of human personhood. Having achieved adulthood, mature manhood and womanhood, to then give up our right to them, to lay them down for the greater privilege of becoming children again, is in the world’s eyes folly.

In the economy of God’s kingdom, it is the path to the Christlikeness that is our eternal destiny.

We now approach holy ground, the pinnacle of what human life can, should, and was intended to mean. In the faintly visible impressions of the Lord’s knees in Gethsemane our own childship is birthed. When Jesus entered the depths of Gethsemane, he carried one possession with him. That was the same free will that God had given to Adam’s race in Eden, the same free will you and I possess.

I maintain, perhaps controversially, that the climax of the gospel, the very apex of Jesus’ mission on earth, came in the garden’s deep silences with his prayer, “Not my will.” The implication of the Lord’s chosen childship—Not my will Father…what would you have me do?— is perhaps greater than we realize.

– Excerpted from pages 43-46 of Walking with God by Michael Phillips