WHY DID GOD MAKE US WITH FREE WILLS?

Why Did God Make Us With Free Wills?

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

God made you because he wants you to be his friend forever. You can think of all kinds of things about yourself -- how unimportant you are or how little you are or how unlikable you are. But God your Creator made you because he wants to have your friendship. He wants you to live with him forever. That's why he made you. He wants to live with you forever, he wants to love you and he wants you to love him. The reason an awful lot of these things are happening in this world is that you can't have people loving each other who don't have free wills.

In other words, if God had made us all unable to do anything but love him, he would have had a pack of robots and there would be no love or no freshness or no life in what we call Heaven -- what is really going to be the expanse of the universe. There's a vast universe out there. You can see the incompleteness of this pitiful little world we have.

When you look out at the vastness of the universe, it's there for some reason. And of course, the reason is that God has the whole heaven out there that he is getting us ready for. Yet he wants a group of people who are free to love or free not to love. That way, there's a possibility of love. Brothers and sisters, I need to bring that before you again. Do you see that plainly?

If I get the machine gunners up here and the Irish gunmen at the backdoors and I say, "Okay, you're all going to love me, okay? If anyone decides otherwise, that's the end." There'll be no love in this room. There won't be because you will say, "Well, we have to love you. We can't do anything else. We don't have a choice." That's why God gave us free will. He said, "I made you to love me and I am putting you on this earth so that you can decide whether you're going to love me or not. That's why I have put you here. That's why I even gave strength to the same Roman soldiers that put nails in my Son's hands. I am a fanatic of free will. I'll go to any lengths for free will because it's only with free will that people can love."

And so that's why God made us. He watches you down through the years of your life -- you turn this way and that way -- you know how it goes. And he watches, watches, watches, trying gently to draw you into the love of him. He's hoping by the end of this life that you will begin to see that he is the only one really worth loving. He is the only true friend that you have and he is the only dear father you have.