Have you ever stopped to think about why we make the choices we do? Theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries. The human will— that inner drive that pushes us toward decisions big and small— isn’t as “free” as we’d like to believe. In fact, it’s often chained up by forces we can’t shake on our own. Drawing from some thoughtful pieces in Tabletalk Magazine, let’s explore this idea of the will in bondage, how it got that way, and the glorious way God sets it free.
Picture the human as a ship caught in a storm. Without an anchor, it’s tossed around by waves of self-interest, desires, and habits that pull it off course. The Bible paints a clear picture: after the Fall in Genesis, humanity’s nature got twisted. We’re not just occasionally messing up; we’re enslaved to sin. Jesus Himself said it in John 8— anyone who sins is a slave to sin. It’s not about lacking options altogether; we can choose between coffee or tea, a job or a hobby. But when it comes to loving God perfectly or choosing righteousness over self, our will is stuck. Paul gets raw about this in Romans 7, describing that internal tug-of-war where we know what’s right but can’t pull it off. We’re curved inward, as one Reformer put it, always bending toward ourselves instead of God and others. This isn’t some abstract philosophy; it’s the reality behind everyday struggles like unchecked anger, envy, or chasing approval at all costs.
This concept didn’t pop up overnight. Early Christians pushed back against pagan ideas of fate or secret knowledge that locked people into destiny. They emphasized human responsibility— we’re not puppets of the stars. But things heated up in the fifth century with a guy named Pelagius, who argued the will is totally free to pick good or evil without much divine help. Augustine, digging deep into Scripture, said no way. Without God’s grace, we’re captives to sin and even Satan. The church mostly sided with Augustine, condemning Pelagius’s views, but debates lingered. In the Middle Ages, thinkers bounced between grace working with our efforts or grace doing the heavy lifting alone.
Fast-forward to the Reformation, and Martin Luther cranks it up. Responding to Erasmus, a humanist who wanted a softer take on free will, Luther wrote that apart from Christ, we’re helplessly fallen. The law in Scripture isn’t there to empower us; it’s a mirror showing our chains, convicting us so we run to Jesus. God’s sovereignty holds it all— He doesn’t cause evil, but He uses even broken things for His purposes. Election? It’s a mystery, but we cling to God’s promises for assurance, not our shaky choices.
Here’s where it gets hopeful: liberation. God doesn’t leave us shackled. Through the Holy Spirit, He performs a supernatural overhaul— regeneration, the new birth. It’s all His initiative. Jesus said in John 6, no one comes to Him unless the Father draws them. We’re dead in sin, as Ephesians 2 puts it, not just wounded. God makes us alive in Christ, granting faith and repentance as gifts. Suddenly, the will that was bound to rebellion now desires God. We’re free to trust Him, follow as disciples, and live out love. But it’s not a license to do whatever; it’s freedom to serve, bearing fruit like the Spirit’s gifts in Galatians 5. Believers hate their old sinful ways and walk in new life, all because of grace.
To illustrate, consider the story of Chuck Colson, the Nixon aide turned prison ministry founder. Colson was a power-hungry Watergate conspirator, his will locked in ambition and deceit. He later described feeling trapped, knowing right from wrong, but powerless to change amid the scandal. Then, through a friend’s witness and reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, God broke in. Colson wept in his car, surrendering to Christ. What he couldn’t will himself to do— true repentance— God enabled. From White House schemer to Prison Fellowship leader, his transformed life showed bondage shattered by grace. It’s a modern echo of Lazarus: Jesus calls, and the dead walk free.
Modern leaders echo this truth. John Piper, in a message on Luther’s work, nails the depths of our bondage: it’s not just guilt, but a love for self-glory’s darkness and hatred for light. He says, “If you see the risen Christ as more precious than anything in the world, you are a walking miracle.” It’s all God’s doing, turning our tastes toward Him. John MacArthur puts it bluntly: “I would define free will as this: every human being has the freedom to choose whatever sin he wants. That’s free will.” And R.C. Sproul’s ministry reminds us, “It’s not that God asks people to cooperate with Him in salvation; in and through Jesus Christ, He sovereignly bestows upon utterly lost sinners a new creation, a new birth, a resurrection from spiritual death.”
From Greek texts like Romans, words like *doulos* (slave) jump out— we’re either slaves to sin or to righteousness. This doctrine isn’t gloomy; it’s liberating. It shifts credit from us to God, killing pride and birthing gratitude. In a world obsessed with “my choice, my truth,” it calls us back to surrender. If your will feels bound today, cry out. The Liberator is near, ready to set you free for a life of joyful service. After all, true freedom isn’t doing what you want— it’s wanting what God does.
The Will in Bondage
The article “Free Will in Bondage” begins by affirming a hard truth: even when we long to do right, we often find ourselves doing what we do not want to do. Paul’s anguished language in Romans 7 captures this: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out … the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”
Human will, apart from Christ, is enslaved to sin. It may make choices, but deeper, corrupt desires often compel those choices. We are not “free” in the sense of being neutral; we are bound to a default orientation toward rebellion.
Jesus framed this vividly: to live in sin is to be a slave. The only hope, He says, is to be bought, set free, and adopted as a child. The transition is radical: from slave to sin to slave to righteousness. (Romans 6:16–18).
This is not mere moral exhortation, but spiritual rescue: our will must be liberated from the tyranny of sin before it can truly obey God.
Martin Luther wrote two treatises that were catalysts for the Reformation and that need to be taken together: The Bondage of the Will and The Freedom of the Christian. But the best explanation of these concepts comes from the Bible, particularly from the words of Jesus Himself:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:34–36)
The common assumption is that sin is liberating, and we commonly construe freedom in terms of being able to indulge in sin. But sin is actually enslaving. Sin takes away our freedom. A drug addict is not free. Neither is a porn addict. Or a compulsive gambler. But even less dramatic sins enslave us. Someone with a bad temper is a slave to the passions of anger and resentment that blow up against other people. Mental adulterers are slaves to their lust. Thieves and coveters are slaves to their greed.
In his Lectures on Romans, Luther says that our underlying problem is the condition of incurvatus in se, being curved in on ourselves. He writes, “Scripture describes man as so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.”
Sometimes we might honestly want to do what is right. It would seem that our will is properly directed. Yet somehow willpower is not enough. We still sin, even against our will. This is the frustrating struggle that the Apostle Paul describes:
For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:18–25)
We cannot just choose to stop sinning. The will, however much it may yearn to break free, is in bondage to sin. But we have a deliverer in Christ our Lord. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
The Bondage of the Will: Historical Roots
The second article, “The Bondage of the Will,” takes us back to the classic debate between Augustine and Pelagius, and later Luther’s revival of the argument in the Reformation era. Augustine saw right: Pelagius imagined a will strong enough to choose God apart from deeper grace. But Augustine insisted that fallen human nature is so damaged that our wills, unaided, always choose sin, not righteousness. (Tabletalk)
Luther, in On the Bondage of the Will, further sharpened the contrast. He rejected the idea that unaided human will could cooperate meaningfully with divine grace. Instead, he argued that only God’s sovereign act can lift the captivity of the human will and enable faith. (Tabletalk)
These debates are not antiquarian: they strike at the heart of how we understand salvation, grace, and human responsibility.
Augustine saw that Pelagius’ idea of free will failed to engage seriously with the grim reality of human sinfulness and God’s glorious grace in Jesus Christ. Without Christ’s liberating grace, sinners were the tragic bondslaves of sin and Satan, not the splendid possessors of autonomous freedom that Pelagius made them. While Augustine conserved the earlier patristic belief in the voluntary nature of sin (we sin only because we will to sin), he married this to a far more wide-ranging and perceptive biblical account of the will’s radical fallenness (it is certain, apart from the grace of Christ, that we will always will to sin).
Although Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431, the church collectively could never quite make up its mind how far to embrace Augustine’s alternative vision. One option, favored in the Greek East, was synergism. That is, granted that the will is sick with sin and cannot heal itself, it can at least cry out to Christ the Physician to heal it. Synergists varied on whether this cry for salvation needed to be enabled by grace or was within the will’s native power. In the Latin West, most preferred some version of Augustine’s view of the sovereignty of grace but again varied on just how to articulate it. Did it require a belief in double predestination (election and reprobation)? Did it entail that Christ had died only for the elect? No monolithic answer was forthcoming. Still, the Western church was, by and large, convinced that Augustine was right in his affirmations about the will’s radical corruption and the absolute necessity of God’s transforming and liberating grace in Christ the Redeemer.
The purpose of the law is not to produce in sinners the delusion that they can obey the law in their own natural strength but to convict them of their inability to do so.
Throughout the next thousand years, in the medieval West, different controversies arose concerning Augustine’s legacy. Some wanted to loosen it in the direction of synergism; some wanted to tighten it into a strict system of double predestination and limited atonement; others preferred a “moderate” Augustinianism that would not push out into perceived extremes.
Luther also expounds the role of God’s law in the life of unregenerate humanity. The purpose of the law is not to produce in sinners the delusion that they can obey the law in their own natural strength but to convict them of their inability to do so, owing to their radically fallen nature. This conviction is then instrumental in God’s hand in driving sinners to Christ, to find in Him a life and power they lack in themselves.
If God in Christ is the sole author of salvation, why does He not save everyone? This, Luther argues, is the holy mystery of divine election. We should not presume to understand this but should focus instead on what God has revealed—His promises, the freeness of salvation, the assurance that all who believe will be accepted and protected. To focus on unrevealed mysteries will awaken confusion and despair. But to know from God’s illuminating Word that God in Christ sovereignly saves all who desire salvation is to enjoy peace and assurance. Election is a comfort to the storm-tossed struggling believer:
As to myself, I openly confess, that I should not wish “Free-will” to be granted me, even if it could be so, nor anything else to be left in my own hands, whereby I might endeavor something towards my own salvation. And that, not merely because in so many opposing dangers, and so many assaulting devils, I could not stand and hold it fast (in which state no man could be saved, seeing that one devil is stronger than all men); but because, even though there were no dangers, no conflicts, no devils, I should be compelled to labor under a continual uncertainty, and to beat the air only. . . .
But now, since God has put my salvation out of the way of my will, and has taken it under His own, and has promised to save me, not according to my working or manner of life, but according to His own grace and mercy, I rest fully assured and persuaded that He is faithful, and will not lie, and moreover great and powerful, so that no devils, no adversities can destroy Him, or pluck me out of His hand. “No one (saith He) shall pluck them out of My hand, because My Father which gave them Me is greater than all” (John 10.27–28).
The Liberation of the Will
The third article, “The Liberation of the Will,” shows us the flip side: not only are our wills bound, but Christ liberates them. Before conversion, we can’t truly choose Christ because our nature is dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1–3). Only God, sovereignly and graciously, makes us alive, turning our wills toward Himself.
Paul’s “golden chain” in Romans 8:29–30 teaches us that God foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and glorified us—salvation is not grounded in human will, but in God’s mercy.
Once liberated, our freedom is not the freedom to sin, but the power to live in love and obedience. Paul warns: don’t misuse freedom to indulge the flesh, but serve one another in love (Galatians 5:13).
The article goes on to point ahead: in glory, we will not be able to sin. That is our ultimate freedom—not a limitation, but the perfection of freedom: a will so conformed to God that evil has no appeal.
Because of the difficulties that the notion of free will presents, the deeper questions surrounding the matter often default to philosophical categories. “What is free will?” “Is it compatible with God’s sovereignty?” along with a host of related questions. The presuppositions of American politics also color how people understand human willing. Since we have the freedom to choose to elect those who rule over us, many mistakenly assume that the same is true when it comes to matters of salvation. A famous Christian tract reflects this confidence in the human will, claiming: “God has voted for you; the devil has voted against you. Your vote decides” whether you’ll spend eternity in heaven or hell.
But neither philosophical debate nor democratic presuppositions offer us much help in answering the questions raised by the biblical teaching to the effect that after Adam’s fall into sin, the human will is in bondage to our sinful nature and we cannot come to Christ unless and until God “frees” our will, so to speak, enabling us to trust in Jesus Christ.
This raises the question, “How then do those who are born in sin and with wills enslaved to the sinful nature come to faith in Jesus Christ?” Coaxing will not work; neither do enticements or incentives typical of evangelists—“God wants you healthy, happy, and prosperous.” But we cannot do what we cannot do. If the Scriptures are clear that the human nature (including our wills) is in bondage to our sinful desires, they are equally clear that only a sovereign and supernatural act of God can free our wills so that we are now willing and able to choose to come to faith in Christ.
The Bible is clear that God must act on us while we are dead in sin, choosing us, sovereignly giving us the new birth (regeneration), thereby freeing our wills from the bondage of our sinful nature. God draws us to Jesus through the gospel (Rom. 10:17) and changes our nature from a bad tree that produces only rotten fruit into a good tree that bears the fruit of faith and repentance. God must liberate our wills from our bondage to sin so that the promise of Jesus is realized: “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
Paul, too, addresses the matter in Romans 8:28–30, where he lays out the order in which the liberation of our wills takes place:
For those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
In the so-called golden chain of salvation, Paul explains that God chooses us and continues the process through calling us to faith, then justifying us, and then bringing us to final glorification. Paul clarifies in Romans 9:16 that our salvation “depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”
A Modern Voice: R. C. Sproul
R. C. Sproul, the late Reformed theologian, often spoke on this subject. In a Renewing Your Mind podcast titled “Bondage of the Will,” he emphasized that we are inevitably enslaved to sin unless God intervenes. The human condition is such that we cannot change the heart through mere willpower. Only a sovereign God can break the chains of sin. (Apple Podcasts)
He would often say: “The will, fallen, is captive—yet God graciously sets it free, then commands it to obey.” That captures the biblical paradox: divine sovereignty does not override responsibility; rather, it grounds it.
Why This Matters Today
Why wrestle with these doctrines? Because they touch how we pray, live, and trust.
- If I think my will can save me, I will boast, pride myself, and chase self-improvement above Christ.
- If I see that only God can liberate me, I worship, plead, and rest in Christ’s finished work.
- I learn humility: my faith, my obedience, even my desire to obey are gifts.
- And I gain assurance: if salvation depends on me alone, I fear falling. But if it begins and ends in God’s grace, my hope is secure.