In these weeks of summer at First Presbyterian Church we are coming to Christ with the request of the disciples on our lips – “Lord, teach us to pray.” We have been with Christ in the school of prayer, instructed by Him from Matthew’s gospel. Lately, we have been working our way, line by line, phrase by phrase, through The Lord’s Prayer, which you can find on page 811 in one of our church Bibles. Let me encourage you to take a Bible in hand and to turn there with me. Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 through 13. Matthew 6:9-13.
And today we’ve come to the second half of verse 10 and to the words of the third petition, the third request in The Lord’s Prayer – “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s such an important prayer to pray because it presses all the other petitions of this prayer so far home upon our hearts in a very practical and concrete way. Think about it. Hallowing God’s name sounds all well and good so long as it stays abstract. The coming of God’s kingdom, well that’s easy to pray for, provided we don’t have to do anything in service of that kingdom. But Jesus is teaching us here that you can’t hallow, honor, sanctify, praise the name of God without committing to a life ordered according to the perfect will of God. The kingdom only comes when sinners become subject to the rule of the King. And we begin, actually, to do the will of God in the details of our daily routines. And so this third petition ensures that The Lord’s Prayer can never be prayed in the abstract, as if it had nothing to do with us. No, it claims the subordination of our wills to God’s will, the surrender of our agendas to God’s agenda, the submission of our plans to God’s plan. And so the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer has bite, doesn’t it? It has teeth. It reminds us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, “When God calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Every day we need to learn to die to self and to say to God, in the words of our Savior, “Not my will but Your will be done.”
Now we are going to unpack the teaching of this third petition by asking four simple questions of it – What? When? Where? So what? What? When? Where? So What? What are we praying for here? We are praying, “Your will be done,” so we need to unpack what the Scriptures mean by the will of God. What? Then, Where? Where is Jesus teaching us to pray that God’s will should be done? “Your will be done,” He says, “on earth.” This is a prayer for this world, this life, for you and for me. What? When? Then thirdly, How? How are we to pray that His will might be done? “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The way that God’s will is to be done is the way it is performed and obeyed in heaven. Heaven is the standard and the template for the obedience to the will of God for which we pray here on earth, and nothing less will do. What? Where? How? And then, So what? What are the implications of praying this third petition of The Lord’s Prayer for our lives and for our prayers? And so those are our four questions – What? Where? How? So what? I hope you’ve got those down. Before we look at each of them in turn, let’s pray together and then we will read God’s holy Word. Let us all pray.
O Lord, we do make the cry of the disciples our own request of You now – O Lord, teach us to pray. Make us a praying church. Some of us here have said prayers many times, but perhaps we have never really prayed. Our hearts have been cold and flat and dead. We have been mouthing the words, going through the motions. But as we bow before You now with the Scriptures open, we ask that by the power of the Holy Spirit, You would bring us to the end of our own agendas, to the end of ourselves, to surrender our will to Your will, to bow in submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, perhaps for some of us for the very first time, and begin at last really to pray, to seek Your glory, Your kingdom, Your will being done on earth, in our own hearts, in our church, in our community, in the world, even as it is done in heaven. Would You do this now through this portion of Your holy Word? For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Matthew chapter 6 at the ninth verse. This is the Word of God:
“Pray then like this:
‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.
Let’s ask the “What?” question first of all. What are we praying for here in this third petition? We are praying that the will of God might be done. “Your will be done.” Now in the Bible, the will of God has two senses. First, it refers to the sovereign plan of God, sometimes called His secret will. This is His eternal decree, worked out infallibly in His providence throughout history, according to the inscrutable, unknowable design of His own perfect plan. Psalm 115 verse 3, “Our God is in the heavens. He does all that He pleases.” Not most of what He pleases, but all that He pleases. Ephesians 1:11 speaks of “the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.” His will determines the course of all things. Nothing is excluded from the scope of His eternal purpose. He works all things according to the counsel of His will. So the Scriptures tell us God is sovereign; His will is sovereign over what looks to us like chance. Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Casting lots, rolling the dice, tossing a coin, even this, the Bible says, falls out exactly and always, 100% of the time exactly as God decides it must. And God’s will is sovereign over ever human decision. Proverbs 16:9, “The heart of man plans his ways, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Proverbs 19:21, “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”
And God’s will is sovereign over even suffering and evil, turning it to the accomplishment of His own good purposes. You remember how in Genesis 50 verse 20, Joseph reflected to his brothers on the suffering that they had inflicted upon him all those years. And he declared to them, do you remember, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.” And above all, God’s will is sovereign in human salvation. In John 6:37, Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” And in verse 44 of the same chapter, He added, “No one comes to me except the Father who sent me draws him.” Or Ephesians 1:4-6, the apostle Paul tells us God “chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.” And we could go on, couldn’t we, piling up text upon text and profitably spend the rest of our time together this morning showing the ways in which God’s secret, sovereign will rules and reigns over everything – all His creatures and all their actions. Everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time, God’s will reigns. Creation, history, the great nations of the world, the smallest sparrow that falls to the ground, the apparent twists and turns of chance, the result of the roll of a dice, the grand issues of human salvation, the hard realities of present suffering, even the ugly fact of human sin – all of it, comprehended and superintended by the sovereign, eternal decree of God falling out exactly in accordance with His mysterious purposes and serving His perfect designs.
And so when we pray here, as our Lord instructs us to do, about the will of God, we are praying first about His secret, sovereign will that governs the vibration of every atom in the material universe, and orders the steps of every creature walking the plant, and directs the salvation of every sinner who passes from death to life in glad-hearted response to the Gospel invitation. We are praying about whatever God ordains might come to pass, that all His designs might be fulfilled. As painful as it sometimes is to do it, we are expressing our acquiescence, our concurrence, our whole-hearted submission to whatever is contained in the hidden book of God’s divine purposes. We just sang together, “What-er my God ordains is right, His holy will abideth. I will be still what’er He doth and follow where He guideth. He is my God, though dark my road; He holds me that I shall not fall, and so to Him I leave it all.” That’s the cry of this third petition of The Lord’s Prayer. “Your will be done.” Whatever it is, whatever it means for me, whatever it means for the world, I belong to You. The whole world belongs to You. Time and eternity are in Your hand. And so Father, have Your own way. Have Your own way with me. Have Your own way with history. Have Your own way with the world. Your will be done.
But we are not praying only about God’s secret decree, His hidden sovereign will, we are also praying about the will of God in another sense, about His revealed, moral will, which we can access exclusively in the holy Scriptures. It is providential that the Gideons would be with us today, promoting the proclamation of the Gospel through the distribution of the Scriptures. The Scriptures are how we know the revealed, moral will of God. Psalm 119 asks, “How shall a young man keep his ways pure?” and answers, “By guarding it according to Your Word.” The Word of God is the moral will of God for our lives. Or Romans 12:2, the apostle Paul urges Christians not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, so that by testing we may approve and discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” And so understand what he is saying. He wants our minds, the Christian mind to be renewed in such a way that it leads to cheerful obedience and practicing everything that is called for by the Word of God with the result that by testing, that is, through personal experience, we come to discern the goodness and the acceptability and the perfections of God’s will for our lives. Or Matthew 7:21, Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.” In other words, real Christians are concerned not just with words and appearances and going through the religious motions. It’s not enough to say, “Lord, Lord.” We must live under Christ’s lordship and do the Father’s will, that is, His moral will, His revealed will, His in-Scripturated will for the way that we live every day.
You might know the famous words of Deuteronomy 29:29 that teach us how we are to think about the relationship between these two wills of God – His sovereign will of decree governing all things and His revealed, moral will, directing us how we should live in the Scriptures. How do these two relate? Deuteronomy 29:29, do you remember it? “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but what has been revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” So this law that we are to do contains all the things that God has revealed for us. There are other things – things that God purposes, things that God will do – that He has not chosen to reveal. And frankly, they are none of our business. What will tomorrow hold? Not our business. Who are the elect? Not our business. When will Jesus return? It’s not our business. The secret things belong to the Lord our God. If it’s not in the Book, it’s not our business. He doesn’t owe us an explanation. We are not entitled to advanced notice of His plan. We can only know what God intends in His sovereign purposes with hindsight, and even then, we only ever understand His purposes very imperfectly.
How many times have you wondered to yourself, “What is God doing in this perplexing situation?” And perhaps years later as you look back, you see some of it, just a little bit of what He might have been doing and intending by it. Do you remember how the puritan, John Flavel once put it? He said, “The providence of God is like a Hebrew word. You can only read it backwards.” Right? The providence of God is like a Hebrew word. You can only read it afterwards, in reverse, backwards. And so to pray, “Your will be done,” is to pray in meekness for the hidden plan of God to be fulfilled, submitting to His will whatever it entails, and it is to pray for the grace to obey what God has told us plainly He wants us to be and to do in His Word, whatever His providence ordains for our lives.
I wonder if you are familiar with the golden owl treasure hunt. It was a treasure hunt based on a 1993 French book that contained eleven cryptic clues that would lead hunters to a buried bronze replica of a golden owl, which, once you got the replica you could exchange it and receive the actual prize itself – a gem-encrusted golden owl figurine. The hunt lasted thirty-one years with a global army of fanatical treasure hunters attempting to decipher all the clues. And then, on October 3 of last year, someone finally cracked the code and found the bronze statue and claimed the golden prize.
Often, because we don’t have clarity about a distinction between God’s secret, sovereign will and His revealed, moral will, often we treat God like the authors of that treasure hunt book as if He were leaving cryptic clues for us to puzzle our way through in order to piece together His eternal purposes for our lives. We want God, don’t we, we want Him to tell us what to do about the job offer or the possibility of that big move to another town. We want Him to make it clear to us what to do with our children, how to deal with that difficult situation at work. We want Him to make it clear, and so instead of turning to the Bible for moral direction and wise counsel and then reasoning carefully as responsible, moral agents from Scriptural first principles, instead we start looking for clues. We think we can work out in advance what God intends for us and His sovereign designs by reading what we imagine are signs hidden in His providence.
But when Christians treat the will of God, discerning His will like a treasure hunt, it is not uncommon to find them soon twisted up into knots of spiritual insecurity and uncertainty. “Am I reading the clues correctly? How do I know if that’s what this providence or that happenstance really means? Is this a saying from the Lord? What if I’m misreading it?” It leads to spiritual paralysis. Or what might be worse, actually, I’ve seen others begin to assert dogmatically that they know for sure what the signs are and what the signs mean. They’ve accessed the mind of God and they’ve worked out with certainty His intentions for their lives or what is far more obnoxious, His intention for your life. Listen, forget the spiritual treasure hunt. Forget it. Stop trying to read the clues. Read the Bible! If it’s not in the Book, if God doesn’t limit your choices by clear, Scriptural prohibition or principle, and if none of the options before you involve you in sin were you to choose them, well then you are free, without any further attempt to penetrate into the hidden mystery of God’s eternal decree, you are free simply to choose what seems best in the light of common sense and Christian prudence in accordance with the general principles of God’s Word, which ought always to be obeyed.
To pray, “Your will be done,” means to pray for both the fulfillment of God’s sovereign purposes, asking for grace to acquiesce and submit to His hidden will, and to pray for grace to live our lives, no matter what His sovereign purpose may decree, in obedience to His revealed will and to be content with the path that the Scriptures set before our feet. Lay it down now as a foundational principle of your Christian life, that nothing can bind your conscience except the Book of God. There is no further word from the Lord except for the Book of God. Get your guidance from the holy Scriptures. So first, the “What?” question. What are we praying about here? We are praying about the secret, sovereign and revealed moral will of God.
Then secondly, and much more briefly, there’s the “Where?” question. You’ll notice the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer is explicit about where we are to seek the performance of God’s will. “Your will be done on earth.” So this is a cry for the purpose of God to be fulfilled all around us. It’s a refusal to sign a truce with the moral and spiritual status quo in our society. There is an aggressive missionary character to the third petition, isn’t there? “I can never be content, Father, while Your will is ignored and Your Word is dismissed by my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends. I want Your will to become their will. And not only do I want Your will to be done out there in the world, among those who presently do not know You, I want Your will to be done in me, in my own heart and life, because frankly, Father, I am prone to wander, Lord I feel it, and prone to leave the God I love. And so I rededicate myself as I pray, ‘Your will be done on earth,’ I rededicate myself to live according to Your revealed will. And more even than that, Father, now Your church continues on earth sinning, suffering, enduring, serving, preaching, evangelizing. In Your church on earth, O Lord, let Your will be done. Make Your church more and more compliant with Your revealed will. Reform the church. Revive the church.”
The answer to the “Where?” question is meant to stir up in us holy discontentment with ourselves, with the spiritual progress of the world, of the church, and the spiritual darkness that continues all around us in the world. I want Your will to be done, I want the church to be conformed to Your will, I want the unconverted to bend their knees to Your will, I want to obey Your will. Your will be done on earth.” The “What?” question. The “Where?” question.
Thirdly, the “How?” question. How is the will of God to be done on earth? What is the measure of the obedience required? What’s the standard according to which the will of God is to be performed? “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The obedience of the angels in heaven is the standard for our obedience on earth. The obedience of the church triumphant in heaven is the standard for the obedience of the church militant on earth. In heaven there is no temptation, there is no fallen human nature, there is no sin. In heaven, every moral agent delights in the perfect, complete performance of the will of God. Heaven is to be placed alongside earth as we assess the measure of our growth. The church gathered around the throne of God and of the Lamb in heavenly glory is to be compared to the church gathered at 1390 North State Street, Jackson, Mississippi as we assess how faithful in prosecuting the Lord’s purposes we have been thus far. The obedience of the ministering spirits around God’s throne, that is to be placed next to my obedience, your obedience at work, at home, at church. Until we attain heavenly obedience, we are not permitted to look at our own walk with the Lord and our prayers, our piety, our service, our ministry, our care for others, our best efforts in the service of Jesus Christ, we are not permitted to look at them and with a shrug of indifference at our manifest mediocrity say, “Good enough.” No, Father, heaven is the measure of the obedience to which You call me, and I will not rest, Your grace enabling me, until Your will is done in me and by me and through me as completely and perfectly as it is done in heaven.
The “What?” question. The “Where?” question. The “How?” question. Now finally, consider with me the “So what?” question. What difference should this third petition make to us? What are its implications? Well first, the third petition requires that we confess. We confess that here on earth we do not and cannot do God’s will as we should. We are crying to God here precisely because we haven’t the strength to do His will as He requires. If we want to pray the third petition, start here, not with a fresh determination to give obedience another go, a better try next time. No, start with a frank, complete confession that you’ve never yet and never can, by any strength you possess by nature, do the will of God. “There is no one righteous, not even one.” “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.” “All we like sheep have gone astray, and turned every one to his own way.” Until we cry to God in the desperate acknowledgement of our own spiritual inability, we can’t seriously begin to pray, much less live the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer, “Your will be done.” Confess, that’s step one. Confess. Have you confessed your sin and your inability, your bankruptcy and incapacity to serve God as He requires that you must? Confess and cast yourself on His mercy.
But then step two, confess, now cling to Jesus Christ. He is, after all, the only one in all of human history who ever has done the will of God on earth as it is done in heaven. John 4:34, Jesus said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me.” John 6:38, “I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but to do the will of Him who sent Me.” Hebrews 10:7, applying Psalm 40:6-8 to Christ as an apt summary of His earthly mission, Hebrews 10:7 says, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God, as it is written of Me in the scroll of the book.” And at Gethsemane, on the night of His betrayal and arrest, as the long shadow of His coming ordeal began to overtake Him, knowing the agonies of the cross that were soon approaching, there Jesus prayed, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not My will but Your will be done.” His sinless humanity rightly shrank from the suffering that was to come, but being nevertheless sinless humanity, He brought His appropriate, natural recoil at the pain that faced Him into submission to what He knew was the will of the Lord for Him. He understood Isaiah 53:10. “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him.” He knew that God had ordained the cross for Him, and so in order that we might be pardoned, He went and He chose it, He chose it, to pay in full the penalty of our rebellion and our inability to obey the will of the Lord. This was the price of our deliverance – the hell of Calvary – and He chose it for our salvation.
If we are to pray, “Your will be done,” as Jesus prayed it, we must start by clinging to Him in whom alone there is forgiveness for all our failure to keep the will of God this side of heaven, our inability ever to do the will of the Lord as we ought. Only covered in His righteousness, hidden under the cloak of His obedience, pardoned by His blood, only then, only then can we be confident that new life has begun in us, new obedience is possible. Any attempt to do the will of the Lord that does not start by clinging to Christ means you are clinging to self and is inevitably doomed to failure. Confess. Cling to Christ.
And finally, step three, commit. Confess. Cling to Christ. Commit. Commit to a new life of obedience, God helping you. The revealed will of God is our only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God. All that He requires is right here in the Book, and that means, of course, that you need to know the Book. You need to know the Scriptures. A closed Bible is the best guarantee that the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer will never be answered in your life. A closed Bible is the best way to make sure the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer is never answered in your life. Do you know the Word? Do you love the Word? Take heed according to the Word. That’s how you keep your way pure. Get into the Word. The Bible is the revealed will of God. It is dangerous presumption to pray that God’s will would be done while we remain content with our ignorance of God’s revealed will in the Scriptures. And so we are called here to commit to the revealed will of God, to life according to His Word.
Are you ready for that? To commit to life God’s way, revealed in His Word? That is actually the joyful reflex of every believing heart that confesses their inability and clings to Jesus Christ. This is what the true believer wants to do. It is an evidence that you really are confessing and you really are clinging to Jesus Christ. Commit. Having it Your way. Make my will submit to Your will. Grant power to my will to obey Your will. Teach me to love Your Word and the life to which it calls me. In 1663, the puritan, Joseph Alleine, published a prayer that was then republished by John Wesley one hundred years later. And Wesley taught his followers to pray this prayer at the beginning of every new year as a way to express their renewed covenant with God, their commitment to life God’s way, in submission to God’s will, according to God’s Word. I think it expresses beautifully the heart of the third petition.
You’ll find if, if you take your bulletins, you’ll find it printed in the service guide or the morning service, right there at the top. You see Wesleyan Covenant Prayer? Everyone turn there please. As we conclude the message today, I want to ask you to join me by praying these words aloud together as our response to the Lord’s teaching in the third petition of The Lord’s Prayer. He calls us to confess, to cling to Him, and to commit to the Word of God. And let’s use these words to help us do exactly that now as we pray in union together.
Let us pray.I am no longer my own, but Yours. Put me to what You will, rank me with whom You will. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by You or laid aside for You, exalted for You or brought low for You. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, You are mine, and I am Yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it also be made in heaven. Amen.”