The rest of the story is that self-willing agreement just to be the first is just another self-determined objective. I've believed for some time now that there is no God in self-determined objectives.
Sidebar: I hope it is obvious that there is a mountain of difference between self-determined objectives and personal goals. Self-determined objectives as mentioned here relate to human relationships as per the Sermon. Personal goals are self-explanatory.
The joy living the Sermon brings, the "agree with your adversary quickly," "turn the other cheek," "resist not evil," cannot be found through self-willing any part of it. To happily live the Sermon, or any spiritual principle for that matter, we must realize, surrender to, a power greater than ourselves.
The hardest thing life is ever going to ask of us, according to me, quite simply is to change our mind.
We are taught that it takes great love and/or great suffering to ever realize, even partially, the love of God. The few stories I've read of the lives of some of the saints surely make that point. I'm reminded of Mother Teresa whose diaries and letters set out her great torment at her own lack of faith. I always figured she had extremely high standards for herself...but maybe that's our problem, too. The answer is not to lower our standards, it's to change our mind.
We must needs remember that God's good is by God's own standards. On its face, God's good rarely, if ever, comes to us looking like rainbows and roses. It may look to our reasoning mind like dog dung...to our reasoning mind, it may even smell like dung.
Thank you.
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