Thy Will Be Done

"He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying,O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done." Matthew 26:42

When Christians pray, we often will end our prayers with, "thy will be done" or "your will be done." It is, basically, a way to say, "God, I want my will to be done, but if You have other plans for me, than Your will done." We do this because we see Jesus doing the same thing just before He was arrested, tortured and died on the cross. Although, Jesus is God, we see His humanity on display as He asked God the Father to remove the burden He was about to bear for the sins of mankind. Yet, at the end of His prayer, He conceded that if that was not possible, then He was okay with God's will being done through Him. We also see this same "pattern" laid out in the Lord's Prayer. Therefore, we believe that Jesus, as one author puts it, "modeled this prayer for us as a way of telling us that when we pray to God, we should ask Him to handle every situation in the way that He deems best." In discussing our relationship with God, this same author writes, "When we were young, we needed to obtain our parents' permission before we went somewhere or before we ate something, and so on. Our parents were in control, and they made decisions by their will concerning us, their children. They expected us to be obedient and ask their permission; and when they had given us their decision, they also expected us to obey." While I understand what he is saying, what I often notice is that when we are praying to God, it is not so much that we are asking His permission to do something, but conveying our desire for a specific outcome to a life event we have little or no control over. We pray for healing, for a new job, pray for friends, family, loved ones and even our country. We pray for the storm clouds to disburse or move away. We pray for storm clouds to form and to move our direction and produce rain. We even pray for positive outcomes for our favorite sports teams. The list is endless. If we get our desired outcome, we may thank God, but quickly move on to the next request. In the case of Jesus, we all know what became of His request; God did not "take the cup" away from Him and He went to His death on the cross. Thank God that He did.

However, there is something missed in all of this about God's will being done. When we pray to God that His will align with ours and our desired outcome, what do we think when we don't get our way? When circumstances don't work out like we prayed for, do we automatically say, "I guess it wasn't God's will"? When people don't recover from health issues, when relationships end, when the job or promotion falls through and so forth, we automatically believe that it was God's will that all this negative stuff happened. How do we know? Truth is, we don't. In fact, we don't even always know that when our will was done, that is was because God's will aligned with ours. It could have been that God just let things play out and we benefited. Do we ever think that may be the case when things don't work out our way? When Jesus asked God to not have to suffer and die on the cross, He already knew what God's will was. Prior to dying on the cross, Jesus told His disciples, "The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day (Luke 9:22)." Jesus knew God's will long before He prayed for God to change His mind. When we end our prayers with, "Thy will be done," it is almost as if we are just following a script because we usually don't know God's will in a given circumstance prior to praying for our will to be done. Now, I don't say all this to condemn or to get you to change your prayers. Again, my point in all of this is to caution us against the unintended consequences of simply copying how Jesus prayed. He knew God's will and wanted Him to change His mind. We don't often know God's will and, therefore, unintentionally give Him the "credit" or make Him "responsible" for what ends up happening. All this does is continue to reinforce a belief about God and His will for our lives that may not be true. Furthermore, this could end up creating all sorts of misconceptions about God that we will have to backtrack on and have to correct because they could hurt our witness and presentation of the Gospel.