“YOUR WILL BE DONE”
One of the dilemmas Christians have debated for centuries is whether God accomplishes His will regardless if we pray or don’t pray. When we pray sincerely and persistently as Christ has taught us—can our will override God’s? When we don’t pray, does His will fail? The plain fact is none of us can comprehend precisely how prayer functions in the infinite mind and plan of God. What seems like a hopeless mystery to us is no problem to God. But that doesn’t mean theologians have not attempted to solve this dilemma.
Two basic doctrinal views have been offered to bring understanding to this question. One view emphasizes God’s sovereignty and in its extreme application holds that God will work according to His perfect will regardless of how people pray or even whether they pray. Thus prayer is nothing more than tuning in to God’s will. At the opposite extreme is the view that maintains God’s actions pertaining to us are determined largely by our prayers. Our persistent pleading will make God do for us what He wouldn’t otherwise do. Pastor and author James Montgomery Boice related the following humorous story about how this paradox confounds even our greatest spiritual leaders:
At one point in the course of their very influential ministries George Whitefield, the Calvinist evangelist, and John Wesley, the Arminian evangelist, were preaching together in the daytime and rooming together in the same boarding house each night. One evening after a particularly strenuous day the two of them returned to the boarding house exhausted and prepared for bed. When they were ready each knelt beside the bed to pray. Whitefield, the Calvinist, prayed like this, “Lord, we thank Thee for all those with whom we spoke today, and we rejoice that their lives and destinies are entirely in Thy hand. Honor our efforts according to Thy perfect will. Amen.” He rose from his knees and got into bed. Wesley, who had hardly gotten past the invocation of his prayer in this length of time, looked up from his side of the bed and said, “Mr. Whitefield, is this where your Calvinism leads you?” Then he put his head down and went on praying. Whitefield stayed in bed and went to sleep. About two hours later Whitefield woke up, and there was Wesley still on his knees beside the bed. So Whitefield got up and went around the bed to where Wesley was kneeling. When he got there he found Wesley asleep. He shook him by the shoulder and said to him, “Mr. Wesley, is this where your Arminianism leads you?”1
Like Whitefield and Wesley, we cannot begin to fathom the divine working that makes prayer effective. The Bible is unequivocal about God’s absolute sovereignty, yet within His sovereignty, He commands us to exercise our responsible wills in certain areas, including beseeching Him in prayer. If God did not act in response to prayer, Jesus’ teaching about prayer would be futile and meaningless and all commands to pray pointless. Our task is not to solve the dilemma of how God’s sovereignty works with human responsibility but to believe and act on what God commands us about prayer.
To pray for God’s will to be accomplished is the subject of our Lord’s third petition in His pattern for prayer. After asking for God’s name to be hallowed and His kingdom to come, Jesus said we are to pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). When we pray, we are to pray in accord with God’s will. His will is to become our will. We are also praying for His will to prevail all over the earth, just as it does in heaven.
David prayed with the attitude of the third petition when he said, “I delight to do Your will, O my God” (Ps. 40:8). That was Christ’s attitude as well: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me” (John 4:34; cf. Matt. 12:50; John 6:38).
Is God’s Will Inevitable?
Unfortunately many people, including believers, don’t have this same attitude toward the third petition of the Disciples’ Prayer.
Bitter Resentment
Some professed believers resent what they see as the imposition of God’s will—a divine dictator working out His sovereign, selfish will on His people. They pray out of a sense of compulsion, believing they cannot escape from the inevitable. Commentator William Barclay said:
A man may say, “Thy will be done,” in a tone of defeated resignation. He may say it, not because he wishes to say it, but because he has accepted the fact that he cannot possibly say anything else; he may say it because he has accepted the fact that God is too strong for him, and that it is useless to batter his head against the walls of the universe.2
Eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám had a similar perspective of God. In the Rubáiyát, a collection of his four-lined epigrams, he wrote:
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all—He knows—He knows! (vv. 69–70)
This Persian poet viewed God as a checker player with total power over the playing pieces, moving them at His whim and putting them in the closet when He was done. The poet also saw God as a polo player with a mallet and man as the ball that has absolutely no choice about how it is hit or where it goes. But such a perspective reflects a lack of knowledge about how God truly interacts with His people.
Passive Resignation
Other believers, however, don’t resent God’s will. They view Him as their loving, caring Father who has only their best in mind. Yet they also are resigned to His will as the inevitable, unchangeable, and irresistible force in their lives, thus they think their prayers will not make a difference. They pray for His will to be done only because He has commanded them to do so. But that’s certainly not a prayer of faith; it’s more like a prayer of capitulation. Believers who pray that way accept God’s will with a defeatist attitude.
Too many believers have weak prayer lives because they don’t believe their prayers accomplish anything. They petition the Lord for something and then forget about it, acting as if they knew in advance that God wouldn’t be at all compelled to grant what they requested. Even in the early days of the church, when faith generally was strong and vital, prayer could be passive and unexpectant. When the apostle Peter was imprisoned in Jerusalem, a group of concerned believers met at the house of Mary, John Mark’s mother, to pray for his release (Acts 12:12). As they were doing so, an angel of the Lord miraculously delivered Peter from his chains (vv. 7–10). While the believers were still praying, Peter arrived at the house and knocked on the door. A servant girl named Rhoda answered the door, and upon recognizing Peter’s voice, she turned around and rushed to tell the others before letting Peter in (vv. 13–14). The others did not believe her, however, until they finally let Peter in. Then “they saw him and were amazed” (v. 16). They apparently had been praying for what they did not really believe would happen.
Prayer is not a vain duty to be performed for the sake of obedience only. That may seem like a good motive, but its effect is no different from the hypocritical Pharisees who prayed for show. We must pray in faith, believing that our prayers do make a difference to God. To guard against such passive and unspiritual resignation, Jesus told the disciples the parable of the importunate widow “to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1).
Is God’s Will Alive and Well on Earth?
Asking “Your will be done on earth” indicates that God’s will is not always done on earth. That is also true of some other elements of this prayer. We pray “Hallowed be Your name,” yet God’s name is infrequently hallowed here. We ask for His kingdom to come, yet there are many who reject His reign. Thus His will is not inevitable. In fact, lack of faithful prayer inhibits God’s will because in His wise and gracious plan, prayer is essential to the proper working of His will on earth.
The Impact of Sin
God is sovereign, but He is not independently deterministic. Too many believers look at God’s sovereignty in a fatalistic way, thinking that whatever will be will be. They view every tragedy as coming from God’s hand, whether it’s personal, such as a loved one’s death or illness, or universal, as in an earthquake or flood. But such an attitude destroys faithful prayer and faithful obedience. That is not a high view of God’s sovereignty but a destructive and unbiblical view of it.
The entire course of events, and circumstances, is ordained by God, and that includes allowing the cause of all life’s tragedies—sin. To see God as ultimately sovereign, we must agree that He meant for sin to happen. He planned for it—it could not have caught Him by surprise and spoiled His original program. Thus evil and all its consequences were included in God’s eternal decree before the foundation of the world.
Yet we cannot consider God as the author or originator of sin. The apostle John said, “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5; cf. James 1:13). God did not authorize sin; neither does He condone or approve of it. He could never be the cause or agent of sin. He only permits evil agents to do their deeds, then overrules the evil for His own wise and holy ends. Certainly it is not God’s will that people die, so He sent Christ to earth to destroy death. It is not His will that people go to hell, so He sent His Son to take the penalty of sin on Himself that men might escape hell. The apostle Peter said, “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). That sin exists on earth and causes such horrible consequences is not evidence of God’s desire to see sin abound but of His patience in allowing more opportunity for people to turn to Him for salvation. Thus we can determine that God’s purposes in permitting evil are always good.3
A tension will always exist between God’s sovereignty and man’s will; therefore, we should not try to resolve it by modifying what He says about either reality. God is sovereign, but He gives us choices. And it is in His sovereignty that He commands us to pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).
Righteous Rebellion
In the first chapter we examined Jesus’ parable of the widow and the unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8). She certainly was not willing to accept her circumstances as they were, but persisted in pleading with the judge to deal with her problem. We need to possess that same perspective when praying for God’s will to be done on earth. Theologian David Wells said, “To come to an acceptance of life ‘as it is,’ to accept it on its own terms—which means acknowledging the inevitability of the way it works—is to surrender a Christian view of God.”4
A part of the right understanding of and attitude toward God’s will is what might be called a sense of righteous rebellion. To be dedicated to God’s will necessitates being opposed to Satan’s. To pray “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is to rebel against the notion that sin is normal and inevitable and therefore should be tolerated. When you are wholly committed to seeing God’s will done on earth, you will rebel against the world system of ungodliness. You will renounce all things that dishonor and reject Christ. And you will also confront the disobedience of believers. Impotence in prayer leads us, however unwillingly, to strike a truce with evil. When you accept what is, you abandon a Christian view of God and His plan for redemptive history.
Jesus knew in advance what would happen to Him, but He did not accept each situation as inevitable or irresistible. He preached and acted against sin. When His Father’s house was profaned, “He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers, and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, ‘Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business’” (John 2:15–16; cf. Matt. 21:12–13).
To pray for God’s will to be done on earth is to rebel against the idea, promulgated even among some evangelicals, that virtually every wicked, corrupt thing we do or is done to us is somehow God’s holy will and should be accepted from His hand with thanksgiving. But nothing wicked or sinful ever comes from the hand of God, only from the hand of Satan. When we pray for righteousness, we pray against wickedness.
At this point, I must add a word of caution lest you take this idea of rebellion against the evil in our world too far.
While we should react negatively against evil and entreat God to accomplish His will here, we should not attempt to carry out God’s will for Him. As we noted in chapter 5, it is not our responsibility, neither should it be our goal, to change the culture by trying to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Neither are we to rid our culture of its evil practices by using civil disobedience to rebel against it. Such rebellion is disobedience to God and His Word (Rom. 13:1–5; 1 Peter 2:13–17). Instead, let your rebellion be manifested in your prayers and those activities that are righteous and allowable under the law.
To pray for God’s will to be done is to pray for Satan’s will to be undone. It is to cry with David, “Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered, and let those who hate Him flee before Him” (Ps. 68:1). And we plead with the saints under God’s altar, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10).
I wish that was the perspective of every believer. What has happened to our passion for what is right? God loves heroic faith—He wants us to storm His throne.
Is God’s Will Your Will?
Unfortunately, our own will is often the problem in seeking His will. Because we live in a culture that prides itself on ease and comfort, we desire a piece of that big pie. As a result, we tend to perceive prayer as important only for making a difference in our circumstances rather than for the difference it can make in us and for God’s glory. Thus when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we wish right away, we lose the passion necessary to persevere in intercession.
If you want to have that passion in your prayers, you need to realize that the real benefit of prayer is not the changes God may make in your circumstances but the changes He will make in you and in your perception of them. When He draws you into conformity to His blessed person and will, your circumstances, no matter how insurmountable they may have appeared at first, will no longer be your priority. That’s because your attitude about them will be different.
When your prayers are rooted in your faith in God—when you believe He will hear and answer your prayers—you are praying with the right attitude and perspective. The greatest hindrance to prayer is not lack of technique, lack of biblical knowledge, or even lack of enthusiasm for the Lord’s work, but lack of faith. We simply do not pray with the expectation that our prayers will make a difference in our lives, in the church, or in the world.
The Specifics of His Will
To help you understand more about this critical issue, we need to examine three distinct aspects of God’s will as He reveals it to us in His Word.
God’s Comprehensive Will
This refers to God’s will of purpose—His vast, all-inclusive, tolerating will expressed in the unfolding of His sovereign plan in the entire universe, including heaven, hell, and earth. This aspect of God’s will allows sin to run its course and Satan to have his way for a season. But in His appointed time, sin’s course and Satan’s way will end exactly according to God’s plan and foreknowledge.
Isaiah wrote about God’s ultimate will, saying, “The LORD of hosts has sworn saying, ‘Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand.… This is the plan devised against the whole earth; and this is the hand that is stretched out against all the nations. For the LORD of hosts has planned, and who can frustrate it?’” (Isa. 14:24, 26–27). Whatever God purposes to do will come to pass, and no one can hinder that plan.
“We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). Although God does not will evil, He takes the things that happen in history and in our lives and puts them together for good. And of course His greatest plan is the salvation of His people: “We have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will” (Eph. 1:11). God’s great purpose is for a redeemed people, for a unified church, a body of saints for eternity.
How do we pray in accord with God’s comprehensive will? By joyously joining in affirming and awaiting the accomplishment of His divine plans. Although we know that someday Christ will complete His church out of this world to be with Him just as God planned, we are to pray in anticipation of that great hour and for God to hasten the coming of it.
God’s Compassionate Will
This aspect of God’s will refers to His heart’s desire, which is within the scope of His comprehensive will and completely consistent with it, although it is more specific and focused. Unlike God’s comprehensive will, however, His desires are not always fulfilled. In fact, our present age attests that Satan’s desires are realized more often than God’s.
Jesus desired Jerusalem’s salvation, and He prayed, preached, healed, and ministered to that end: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.… I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!” (Luke 13:34). But what was the typical response to Jesus? Few believed Him; most rejected Him; and some even crucified Him. That Jesus said “You are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life” (John 5:40) is a sad commentary on the choice of unbelief and the rejection of His offer of abundant life.
God, our Savior, “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). He does not wish for “any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Unfortunately, that desire is not fulfilled in the lives of the majority of people. Instead they reject Christ, and the most the Lord will do for them is weep (Jer. 13:17).
God’s Commanding Will
This aspect of His will relates directly to His children, because only they have the capacity to obey. God’s ardent desire is that we who are His children obey Him completely and immediately with willing hearts. About our obedience Paul wrote:
Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. (Rom. 6:16–18)
Since we are God’s servants, it is only natural that we obey His commanding will. As Peter said, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
When you pray “Your will be done,” you are praying for three things: the consummation of the world and the use of sin’s consequences for God’s eternal plan, the salvation of people who don’t know God, and the obedience of every believer to God’s commands.
When we studied the phrase “Your kingdom come,” we learned the kingdom comes to earth in three ways: through the conversion of unbelievers; by the commitment of believers to live according to righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; and at the second coming of Christ when He establishes His earthly rule. I see a parallel between those three elements and the three aspects of God’s will we just looked at. God’s comprehensive will embraces the ultimate end of man’s dominion on earth and the return of Christ to set up an eternal kingdom. His compassionate will embraces the conversion of unbelievers. And His commanding will demands commitment from His people.
Conforming to His Will
Our own pride is the major obstacle we must overcome before we can pray for God’s will to be done in our lives. Pride caused Satan to rebel against God, and pride causes unbelievers to reject God and believers to disobey Him. To accept and pray for God’s will in sincerity and faith, you must abandon your own will for the sake of God’s. The apostle Paul told us how to do that:
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:1–2)
Until you lay your life on God’s altar as a living sacrifice—until your will is dead—God’s will won’t be manifest in your life.
When we pray in faith and in conformity to God’s will, our prayer is a sanctifying grace that changes our lives dramatically. Thus prayer is a means of progressive sanctification. John Hannah, associate professor of historical theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, said, “The end of prayer is not so much tangible answers as a deepening life of dependency.… The call to prayer is a call primarily to love, submission, and obedience … the avenue of sweet, intimate, and intense fellowship of the soul with the infinite Creator.”5 That’s what being alone with God is all about. You’ll realize power and passion in it when you are completely dependent on God and live in obedience to His will.
Author Philip Keller, while visiting in Pakistan, read Jeremiah 18:2, which says, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” So he and a missionary went to a potter’s house in that city. In his book A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer, he wrote:
In sincerity and earnestness I asked the old master craftsman to show me every step in the creation of a masterpiece.… On his shelves were gleaming goblets, lovely vases, and exquisite bowls of breathtaking beauty.
Then, crooking a bony finger toward me, he led the way to a small, dark, closed shed at the back of his shop. When he opened its rickety door, a repulsive, overpowering stench of decaying matter engulfed me. For a moment I stepped back from the edge of the gaping dark pit in the floor of the shed. “This is where the work begins!” he said, kneeling down beside the black, nauseating hole. With his long, thin arm, he reached down into the darkness. His slim, skilled fingers felt around amid the lumpy clay, searching for a fragment of material exactly suited to his task.
“I add special kinds of grass to the mud,” he remarked. “As it rots and decays, its organic content increases the colloidal quality of the clay. Then it sticks together better.” Finally his knowing hands brought up a lump of dark mud from the horrible pit where the clay had been tramped and mixed for hours by his hard, bony feet.
With tremendous impact the first verses from Psalm 40 came to my heart. In a new and suddenly illuminating way I saw what the psalmist meant when he wrote long ago, “I waited patiently for the LORD, and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay.” As carefully as the potter selected his clay, so God used special care in choosing me.…
The great slab of granite, carved from the rough rock of the high Hindu Kush mountains behind his home, whirled quietly. It was operated by a very crude, treadle-like device that was moved by his feet, very much like our antique sewing machines.
As the stone gathered momentum, I was taken in memory to Jeremiah 18:3. “Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels.”
But what stood out most before my mind at this point was the fact that beside the potter’s stool, on either side of him, stood two basins of water. Not once did he touch the clay, now spinning swiftly at the center of the wheel, without first dipping his hands in the water. As he began to apply his delicate fingers and smooth palms to the mound of mud, it was always through the medium of the moisture of his hands. And it was fascinating to see how swiftly but surely the clay responded to the pressure applied to it through those moistened hands. Silently, smoothly, the form of a graceful goblet began to take shape beneath those hands. The water was the medium through which the master craftsman’s will and wishes were being transmitted to the clay. His will actually was being done in earth.
For me this was a most moving demonstration of the simple, yet mysterious truth that my Father’s will and wishes are expressed and transmitted to me through the water of His own Word.…
Suddenly, as I watched, to my utter astonishment, I saw the stone stop. Why? I looked closely. The potter removed a small particle of grit from the goblet.… Then just as suddenly the stone stopped again. He removed another hard object.…
Suddenly he stopped the stone again. He pointed disconsolately to a deep, ragged gouge that cut and scarred the goblet’s side. It was ruined beyond repair! In dismay he crushed it down beneath his hands.…
“And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter” (Jer. 18:4). Seldom had any lesson come home to me with such tremendous clarity and force. Why was this rare and beautiful masterpiece ruined in the master’s hands? Because he had run into resistance. It was like a thunderclap of truth bursting about me!
Why is my Father’s will—His intention to turn out truly beautiful people—brought to nought again and again? Why, despite His best efforts and endless patience with human beings, do they end up a disaster? Simply because they resist His will.
The sobering, searching, searing question I had to ask myself in the humble surroundings of that simple potter’s shed was this: Am I going to be a piece of fine china or just a finger bowl? Is my life going to be a gorgeous goblet fit to hold the fine wine of God’s very life from which others can drink and be refreshed? Or am I going to be just a crude finger bowl in which passersby will dabble their fingers briefly then pass on and forget about it? It was one of the most solemn moments in all of my spiritual experiences.
“Father, Thy will be done in earth [in clay], in me, as it is done in heaven.”6
Notes
1 James Montgomery Boice, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972), 183–84.
2 William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 1:212
3 For a more detailed treatment of this topic, please see my book The Vanishing Conscience (Dallas: Word, 1994), 105–24.
4 David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling against the Status Quo,” Christianity Today, November 2, 1979, 33.
5 John Hannah, “Prayer and the Sovereignty of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra, October–December 1979, 353.
6 Philip Keller, A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer (Chicago: Moody, 1985), 92–97.