PART 5
In Matthew 6:10, Jesus is demonstrating a model of prayer to the disciples. In the last post, I carried on about what it can mean to pray for God’s coming Kingdom. In Jesus’s prayer, He follows his mention of the Kingdom by praying for the Father’s will to be done: “…your will be done / on earth as it is in heaven.”
To understand how important and distinct this part of the prayer is, we need to dissect it. We need to see how complex the topic of God’s will is.
I was recently listening to *Bill Craig’s Defenders podcast. In the particular segment, Dr. Craig was discussing God’s omnipotence versus our own free will. He presented an alleged problem: if God is all knowing and he knows everything that will happen in the future, does that mean that he foreordains everything he knows to happen in the future, thus eliminating our ability to freely make our decisions that will, in appropriate and logical sequence, cause and flesh out the future? What about God’s knowledge of hypothetical events? Does God know what would have happened if I had of done things differently?
Consider what God’s will has to do with any of it and watch how the questions get harder: If God wills for something to happen, will it happen without fail? What if God wills for me to do something particular but I freely make decisions that cause me to fail? Would that be me failing or God failing? You can see how quickly the snowball compounds. You can see how easy it is to get frustrated and cash out without any answers.
These are all questions that are beyond the scope of this post - and I hope that is obvious. But maybe it can be simplified for the rank-and-file Christians such as ourselves to a more practical question: how do I pray for God’s will to be done when it is such a complicated matter to understand?
First of all, I hope that the Christian reading this understands that God’s will is not something you will understand. Consider the example Jesus sets. In Gethsemane, Christ perspired blood as the weight of sin began to be placed on him, just hours away from the cross. Jesus prayed:
"Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Yet not my will but yours be done.”
Don’t forget that this is God praying. Jesus was fully God and fully man - but despite being fully God, he submits to the Father. If you see nothing else here, at least see the example Jesus sets. If God in the flesh believes that obedience is important, how much do we, as the mere creation, need to be reminded of the importance of obedience?
An ongoing in-house debate I’ve observed among Christians has been over the question does God whisper to the Christian’s heart? It’s common to hear somebody say “God is calling me to do this” or “God told me to do that” - but is has He really spoken to that person? This is a matter of special revelation versus general revelation. The first of which meaning God’s giving of a message directly to a person while the second meaning God’s giving of a message to many people. The debate lies with special revelation and the extent to which God uses it. I doubt many people are claiming that God is unable to use special revelation to communicate with people or that He never does. But the debate revolves around whether it is truly a common occurrence. And this could be a stumbling block to the new Christian who asks “how do I know what God is calling me to do?” This person might start looking at every gust of wind and heads-up penny as if it’s a sign from God - and perhaps, miss the most obvious movements of the Lord.
I encourage you to research this topic extensively and search Scripture regarding it - the point of this post isn’t to take a side on this topic. But it’s important to bring this debate up in order to say this: you don’t need a personalized message from God to know Him and His will.
And atheist friend once told me “I would totally change my mind on God if He wrote a message to me in the clouds or something. I just need a sign that He’s really there.” But this looks awfully childish when considered by the Christian whose reality is a desperate dependence on the Lord and studies the Bible because they know that God has already spoken. You don’t need a message in the clouds to hear from God - God has already spoken. I like how evangelist Tony Nolan once said:
“The Bible was inscribed over a period of 2000 years in times of war and in days of peace by kings, physicians, tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, singers and shepherds. The marvel is that a library so perfectly cohesive could have been produced by such a diverse crowd over a period of time which stagers the imagination. Jesus is its great subject, our good is designed, and the Glory of God is its end.”
So why pray for the Lord’s will to be done? He holds the entirety and eternity of creation in His hand and yet He would have us pray that His will be done? In writing this post, I got stuck at the preceding question for some time. At this point, it’s been several months since my last post - and this one will have been one of the most challenging. The more I wrote, the more questions I had to study. But I think the most satisfying answer can be summed up with an analogy C.S. Lewis provided in his long-beloved work, Mere Christianity:
“It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, "I'm not going to
go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.”
Lewis was speaking on a different topic - that of free will and its repercussions, both desirable and undesirable. But his analogy is beautiful. A person who is praying for the Lord’s will to be done is likely not praying for his own will to be carried out instead. That person is aligning his will with the Lord’s without knowing what challenges or hardships may come about by doing so. Would you rather God’s will be done instead of your own even if it means a difficult time for you? You may be humiliated, beaten, scorned, imprisoned, killed, or even literally crucified for your obedience to the Lord just as Christians living in nations where it is illegal to possess a Bible or proclaim Jesus’s name. What if the United States, abruptly or over time, becomes similarly hostile toward Christians? Such a day would be sobering. Like a crushed blossom that rewards its destroyer with its perfume, the true followers of Jesus would cling to Him dearly. The true Gospel would be preached; watered-down, feel-good sermons would likely not be worth martyrdom.
So when you pray for the Lord’s will to be done in your life, are you prepared release your perfume when crushed? Don’t confuse my challenge as a declaration of doom and gloom for every Christian. But the challenge remains. Jesus told us that whoever denies Him to man, He would deny before the Father. But what if you were imprisoned for professing Jesus’s name? Would you denounce Christ? Would you even pretend to denounce Him just to appease your oppressors?
How are you doing in your everyday obedience to the Lord? If you’re anything like me, you would probably claim that you would gladly be martyred for Christ’s sake - yet you aren’t faithful in the everyday, mundane, unseen things. How can we ever tame our rebellious nature when we’re put on the spot if we can’t do so in our most private and personal dealings? That’s a real problem and the answer is simple: prayer.
When I pray the way Jesus has instructed the disciples in Matthew 6:10, it isn’t prayer for God’s ability to carry out His will but for my ability to set my own aside. As always, I’m not claiming that this is an exhaustive analysis of everything Jesus exactly had in mind when He told the disciples how to pray. It’s more than this, but not less than this.
And thankfully, we have an example to look to in Jesus. He could have chosen not to die on the cross. He could have chosen not to even show up into our fallen world. But instead, He submitted to His Father’s will. He came and lived in the perfect obedience to God that we will never be able to replicate. He was beaten, flogged, and literally torn to shreds before being nailed to a cross (use your discretion regarding this link). On the cross, placed on Him was the full weight of the debt of every person who would accept Him as having done so. This debt, having been earned rightfully by every person for their rebellion against God whether they acknowledge it or not, was the same debt that Jesus freely and willfully accepted and paid. And in exchange, He allows us to enter into the right standing with God that He earned, as if that debt was never on us. He exchanges with us the weight we can never bear for the righteousness we can never earn. He died having been the propitiation for our sin. This is good news for you and me. It can be good news to anyone who will accept that He did so. This good news is called “the Gospel”. But there’s bad news too, for many people deny his offer to accept their debt. And they will instead be held accountable. There is coming a day that all will be judged by the Lord. Some will have had their debts paid in full. All others will owe much more than they can ever pay.
The same will that we pray to have carried out is the will Christ obeyed when He carried out the Gospel. I don’t know about you, but my will would never have been so clever or powerful. If you have trusted in Jesus and accepted His offer, I ask that you join me in an effort to refocus our prayer to be about what He wants to be done instead of what we want to be done. If you have not placed your trust in Christ, I implore you to ask Jesus to intervene for you just as He has offered to do.
*William Lane Craig is a Christian apologist and philosopher who has garnered a reputation for his success in debates with some of Christianity’s most vocal critics. As an extension of his ministry, he offers a compilation of free podcasts on the iTunes store called the “Defenders” series. But this “series” is more like an extensive survey that covers a wide variety of topics helpful for anyone who is serious about apologetics - or Scripture, for that matter.
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The Stuttering Christian
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The Stuttering Christian
