Your Will Be Done


Sermon by David Strain on September 19, 2021 Matthew 6:9-15

Well do please take your copies of the Scriptures in hand or turn in one of our church Bibles to Matthew chapter 6; Matthew chapter 6. If you’re using a church Bible, you will find that on page 811. We are going to continue our series this morning looking at the teaching of Jesus in the gospels on the vital subject of prayer. For the last several weeks you will remember we have been working our way through that great model prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer, one phrase at a time, so that today we come to the third request, the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer – “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

And before we look at it in more detail, I do want to be sure you don’t miss the marvelous logic in the order and structure of Jesus’ teaching in this first part of His prayer. If the name of God is to be hallowed, the first petition, then His kingdom must come. That’s how His name will be hallowed – “Your kingdom come” is the second petition. But what can it mean for the kingdom to come? What does it look like? In what does the kingdom of God consist? Well, it consists in the glad-hearted submission of every creature to His perfect will. And so Jesus now teaches us to pray in this third petition, “Your will be done.”

And we are going to unpack the teaching of our Lord here under three headings. First, I want you to notice the standard this prayer requires. The standard this prayer requires. “Your will be done.” The will of God is the standard and the norm. Then secondly, the sphere that this prayer targets. The standard that is required, now the sphere that is being targeted. “Your will be done” – where? “On earth as it is in heaven.” And then thirdly I want to think with you about the Savior that this prayer proclaims. There is only one person in the whole Bible recorded as ever actually praying this prayer. He is the one who teaches it to us here in Matthew chapter 6. And having taught it to us, He models what its fulfillment looks like. Studying the life of the Lord Jesus Christ as He prayed, “Not My will but Your will be done,” helps us understand what we are asking when we pray these same words for ourselves. So the standard this prayer requires, the sphere this prayer targets, and the Savior this prayer proclaims.

Before we read the passage, let’s pause again and pray and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us all pray.

Holy Spirit, we pray now that You would come and perform Your searchlight ministry and spotlight the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the reading and preaching of Your Word that He may be made much of, indeed that we may all bend our knee to Him anew in true and wholehearted surrender and submission, resting upon the supplies of the strength You alone can give us to walk in faith and in new obedience. For we ask this all in Jesus’ name, amen.

Matthew chapter 6, beginning 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.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.

The Standard this Prayer Requires

Let’s think first of all about the standard that this prayer requires. The standard this prayer requires. Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your will be done.” So praying this prayer is an acknowledgement that the will of God takes precedence, the will of God stands over all others; the will of God is the norm and the pattern and the rule. But before we go any further, we need to ask what we mean by the will of God. And here it’s important to know that the Scriptures speak of the will of God in two distinct senses.

The Absolute Will of God

First, there is what is sometimes called the absolute will of God. This is His sovereign will, His secret will. It is the will of the divine decrees. “The heart of man plans his way,” Proverbs 16:9, “but the Lord establishes his steps.” Or Proverbs 19:21 similarly, “Many are the plans of the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.” We make our plans however we may, but if our plans do not align with His eternal purpose, all our scheming and plotting and preparation and labor notwithstanding, it will be His plan and not ours that will come to fruition.

There is no more perfect illustration of that principle than the cross of Jesus Christ. You remember the intention of the Jewish leaders and the Roman officials in the death of Jesus Christ. It was their design to put an end to Jesus and all this Messiah nonsense once and for all, wasn’t it? “We’ll kill Him! In fact, we will reserve the cruelest and most shameful death of which we are capable. We will crucify Him, and that surely will be the end of Jesus and His followers forever!” That was their plan. But listen to Peter in his great Pentecostal sermon in Acts chapter 2 verses 23 and 24. “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised Him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for Him to be held by it.” And verse 36 drives home the point – “Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Who killed Jesus? Well you did, Peter says, “by the hands of lawless men.” They, his hearers, are the guilty ones. And yet all their evil intentions notwithstanding, their plan served God’s intention for the everlasting welfare of all His people. After all, Jesus was delivered up, according to Peter, “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” The cross was God’s idea before ever it was the wicked scheme of evil men so that Jesus, “this Jesus whom you crucified, might be Lord and Christ.” Do you see the principle? “Many are the plans in the mind of a man but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.” The absolute will of God.

Or think with me for a moment about a passage we quoted last week, Ephesians 1:11, and ask, “How far does this principle extend? Is there anything exempted from the absolute will of God?” Ephesians 1:11 – “In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him” – and here’s the phrase – “who works all things according to the counsel of His will, the absolute will of God.” How far does it extend? It governs all things. All things fall under the purview and they fall out in strict and absolute conformity to the counsel of the divine will. Nothing is exempted. Nothing. There is no sphere of natural or spiritual life over which God’s sovereign will does not hold sway.

Now maybe you find this aspect of the Scriptural teaching hard to come to terms with, but actually far from unnerving us as Christians we need to see that the absolute sovereignty of God is a perfect pillow on which our weary heads may rest. You may remember that is precisely how the Lord Jesus used the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty. Matthew chapter 10 verse 29, He said to His disciples, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father. Not even the hairs on your head – all the hairs of your head are numbered,” He said. “Fear not, therefore, you are of much more value than many sparrows.” Think about it for a moment. You hear what Jesus is saying. Everything is covered within the purview of God’s secret decree, even the lifespan of a sparrow, so insignificant it may be, Jesus says. Every hair on your head is known and counted and recorded in God’s book, Jesus says.

And to be sure, if this God, this God were a stranger to you, if you were His enemy, if you were indifferent to Him, then I suppose the realization of the perfect and total Lordship of His sovereign will, I suppose that would indeed be grounds for discomfort and alarm. After all, you can’t escape from a God like this. Can you? You can’t thwart the design of a God like this. You can’t run from Him. He is in charge and He will hold you to account. But if you can come to this God with all the confidence and assurance and boldness of His own dear son or daughter, if you can call Him “Abba, Father”, well then do you see what security, what rest, what safety, what peace you can have? For you can say with joy, “My Father sits enthroned in the heavens as Lord over all.” My Father. Isn’t that exactly how Jesus is teaching us to pray here in the Lord’s Prayer? “Our Father, Your will be done.” The One whose will cannot be thwarted is Abba, Father to me. Abba, Father to you, believer in Jesus. He is our Father in heaven, and so as we pray this third petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we are to revel in the security of God’s unconquerable purpose for our good and His everlasting glory.

The Revealed Will of God

But there is another sense in which the Scriptures speak about the will of God. There is the absolute will of God, but there is also the revealed will of God. That is His moral will that has been disclosed for us only and exclusively in holy Scripture. Deuteronomy 29:29 famously makes this distinction clear for us, doesn’t it, between the secret, absolute decree of God and the revealed, moral will of God. Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but what has been revealed belongs to us and to our children that we may do all the words of this law.” Where have these things been revealed? In God’s Law. In God’s Word. Why have they been revealed? That we might do them. This is the revealed, moral will of God in holy Scripture.

Now Moses is saying very clearly to us that there are secret things concerning the plans and purposes of God that He has not made known and He will not make known to us. “His secret will, His absolute will, the contents of His eternal decree are none of your business,” Moses is saying in effect. If we are honest, don’t we struggle with that sometimes? I certainly do. We want to know the details, don’t we? We want let in on the plan. We want to know what’s coming around the next bend in the road, what lies just over the next hill. But God has not told you about that stuff for a reason. What He wants us to know He has revealed already in His holy Word. And Christian maturity rests content with that.

Instead, He wants us to adopt a posture of trust, of meekness, of childlike dependence that believes His Word and promises and keeps His commandments and leaves what we do not know to the perfect wisdom of the only one who does. That’s what we’re praying for when we cry, “Father, Your will be done.” We are saying, “We trust you. Give us grace to do what You command and to trust You with what we cannot see.” We are confessing in the words of the 131st psalm, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.” That is the posture that we are to adopt as we pray, “Our Father, Your will be done.” We are saying in humility, “We will not pry into Your secret purpose, but we plead with You for grace to conform our lives to Your revealed will.” We are little children and we don’t know very much at all, but we trust the One who does, and so we say, “Abba, Father, Your will be done.” The standard this prayer requires – it is the will of God.

The Sphere this Prayer Targets

Then secondly, notice with me the sphere this prayer targets. “Our Father, Your will be done” – where? “On earth as it is in heaven.” Do notice carefully the frank acknowledgment of reality that is being presupposed and assumed in this way of praying. Right now Jesus is saying, “Right now on earth the revealed will of God is not being done as it ought to be done.” It is being resisted and rejected and refused. It is not done on earth as it is in heaven. In fact, since Adam ate the forbidden fruit all those many years ago in the garden, human beings have not been saying, “Thy kingdom come.” What have we been saying? We’ve been saying, “My kingdom come and my will be done.” Hasn’t that been our heart instinct?

I wonder if you remember CHAZ. You remember CHAZ? It stands for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” – CHAZ. It was a precinct of downtown Seattle where there were riots and protesters and they drove the police out of that precinct and they set up a kind of commune beginning on June 8, 2020. And initially all went well at CHAZ. One protester, Grace Morgan from Portland, Oregon went there about a week after it had been established. “It was absolutely astonishing,” she said. “There was a food co-op as well as a full medics’ corner with actual doctors from around the city that had volunteered and had their own ambulance. There were classes and lectures and speakers and poetry and lots of live music and huge works of art. It was really beautiful.” But soon, the utopian ideal began to implode. There were four shootings in ten days. Allegations of sexual assault and mental health crises began to be reported within the zone. Eventually the project collapsed and the local police chief tweeted out, “Enough is enough!” and not long afterward the dream of a police-free society in the Pacific Northwest was finished.

Maybe you sympathize with the dreams of these protesters or maybe you shake your head at what you perceive to be the naivety of their whole enterprise, unsurprised really that things ended up the way that they did. But whatever you think about CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the truth is, the truth is, we have all busily been trying to erect our own little autonomous zones for a very long time. Haven’t we? Haven’t we? Haven’t we been saying to God not, “Thy will be done,” but “My will be done”? But Jesus is not a utopian dreamer, and when He teaches us to pray, He teaches us to pray about the real world, a world where human beings live in open rebellion against the will of God. But did you notice that He also points us not only to the sad failure of obedience on earth but to the endless happiness of conformity to the will of God in heaven? “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” You see, Jesus does not want us to grade ourselves on a curve. He doesn’t want us to grade ourselves on a curve, assessing ourselves only by comparison to others here on earth.

Philip Ryken tells the story of the principal of one of the colleges at the University of Oxford in England. He was addressing a meeting of the Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union and he shocked everyone there with an inadvertent slip of the tongue. He set about to lead the students in praying the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in England.” It was a slip of the tongue, a mental blip, nothing more, but my, wouldn’t things be easier if that were the prayer Jesus had taught us to pray? “Thy will be done on earth as it is in England, or Mississippi, or down the street or across the city or in that lovely church family I’ve just recently got to know.” After all, that is attainable, isn’t it? We can get there.

But that’s not the goal, is it? “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Father, we are praying for grace to obey Your will here more and more like the angels obey Your will in heaven” – perfectly. We are praying for grace to submit to Your plan here more and more like the glorified Church in heaven submits to Your plan without complaint or hesitation. We are praying not for proximate obedience, almost obedience, mere obedience. We are praying for total surrender, complete conformity, absolute adherence to the will of God. That is the heart-longing that Jesus wants to awaken within us as we pray, “Father, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” He is trying to make your heart ache for absolute likeness to Jesus Christ.

I wonder if you long to be like Jesus, or have you in fact actually been excusing mediocrity by grading yourself on a curve? Maybe you realize, maybe you don’t realize how like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable you’ve begun to sound – “God, I thank You that I am not like other men – extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Now do you see the lie at the heart of this Pharisee’s legalism? The lie says, “I am stricter than anyone else. I am better than everyone else. Therefore, God loves me.” And so it masquerades as strictness and exacting conformity to God’s Law, but the truth is, the Pharisee is grading himself on a curve. Isn’t he? He is not thinking about the way the will of God is obeyed in heaven, that is to say, perfectly. That is not his standard. He is thinking of how much better he does than that sinner over there. “I thank You that I am not like other men.” Have you been grading yourself on a curve, which is really just a mechanism to excuse your mediocrity, because, “Hey, at least I’m better than the other guy, right?” No, Jesus is teaching us to pray for that holiness “without which no one will see the Lord.” “Be holy as I am holy,” our God says. “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

So first, the standard this prayer requires. It is the will of God. Then the sphere this prayer targets. We pray for this unruly, rebellious world in which we live, our own hearts not accepted, and we ask for grace to live here in as close conformity to the way we will all live one day if we are followers of Jesus Christ in the life of the world to come.

The Savior this Prayer Proclaims

Now thirdly, I want you to think with me about the Savior that this prayer proclaims. As I said earlier, there is only one person in the whole Bible who ever prayed these words, at least who is ever recorded as having prayed these words. It’s the same person who taught the disciples to say them. You remember that in Gethsemane, on the night of His betrayal, Jesus withdrew from His disciples and in great agony of soul, as He contemplated the coming ordeal of the cross, He prayed, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” And then He came back to find His disciples sleeping and He confronted them. And Matthew says twice more He withdrew to pray and said, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, Your will be done.” Of course that was not a new posture for Jesus. Throughout His life our Lord understood Himself to be fulfilling the will of His Father in heaven. John 4:34, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.” John 6:38, “I have come down from heaven not to do My own will but the will of Him who sent Me.” John 15:10, “I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” “Although He was tempted in every way as we are,” Hebrews 4:15, “He was yet without sin.” He was the perfectly obedient One who never transgressed God’s Law or swayed ever, ever, not one step from the Father’s perfect will and plan.

And here in Gethsemane we see Him obeying still, don’t we, even obeying unto death as Philippians 2:8 puts it, “unto the death of the cross.” Here He is submitting to the absolute will of God that has decreed for Him the nightmare of Calvary. It was, as Isaiah 53:10 puts it so strikingly, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him. He has put Him to grieve because the Lord has laid upon Him the iniquities of us all.” And so here in the garden, as He looked down into the darkness and the suffering that waited for Him just a few hours from that moment, here, as everything in His human nature naturally recoils from the horror and the suffering that the cross would involve, even here, here in the abyss, Jesus bows before the purposes of God and says, “Abba, Father, Thy will be done.”

And as we close, there are at least three lessons to learn from Jesus’ perfect obedience to the will of God. You thought I was finished, didn’t you? Well here’s the other sermon! Another three points that I snuck in there at the end! We’re praying for three things in light of Jesus’ example. In light of hearing Jesus pray, “Your will be done,” here is what we are to pray as we pray the same words. First, we are to pray for the grace of salvation. Secondly, we are to pray for the grace of submission. And thirdly, we are to pray for the grace of sanctification.

We Are to Pray for the Grace of Salvation

First, we pray for the grace of salvation. I wonder if it would shock you if I were to say and to affirm that we are absolutely saved by works. We are absolutely saved by works. In fact, there is no other way to be saved except by works. You are saved by works alone! Just not your works! Right? Not your works. His work. His perfect obedience. Jesus’ blood and righteousness. And that alone provides the ground of our salvation. Not only is He the only person in Scripture to have prayed, “Thy will be done,” He is also the only person in the history of the world ever to have done it “on earth as it is in heaven.” And because He did, we who never can obey like that this side of eternity, we can have hope. We can look at our wretched hearts, so addicted still to self and sin, and as we pray, “Your will be done,” and strive and stumble and fail to obey, we still have hope because we are hidden beneath the obedience of Jesus Christ. All our imperfect, partial obedience is covered in the perfect righteousness of our Redeemer. When we pray in faith, “Father, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” part of what we are doing, do you see, is taking hold of that righteousness which is in heaven, seated at the Father’s right hand, we are taking hold of the perfect conformity to the will of God that marked the earthly life of Jesus Christ and we are putting it on like a garment, as it were, to hide the filthy rags of our shameful failures to obey the will of God on earth.

And in the end, is that not our only hope? Isn’t that our only hope? Our only comfort before the gaze and the glare of the omnipotent holiness of our sovereign God. Not that we attained to perfect obedience on earth as it is in heaven, but that despite our failures to do so, we should find our hiding place in the One who came to do the will of the One who sent Him, who kept His Father’s commandments, and who said at the last, “Not My will, but Your will be done.” He is our hiding place. Is He yours? Is He? Is His blood and righteousness your hiding place? Are you resting not on your obedience but on His or are you still boasting that you are not like other men, grading yourself on a curve, giving yourself a pass? Are you in Christ, robed with His righteousness alone? When we pray, “Your will be done,” do you see we are praying for the grace of salvation? We are praying to hide away in Jesus who alone has obeyed the will of the Father.

We Are to Pray for the Grace of Submission

Secondly, we are praying for the grace of submission, not just for the grace of salvation but for the grace of submission? We are praying for grace that like our Savior we too might submit to the absolute will of God, whatever it might bring to us. We are acquiescing in His sovereign plan and we are praying with Jesus, “Not my will but Yours be done.” We are praying, “Father, teach me to submit to Your purposes in the conviction that though I cannot always see how it can be so, even the hard and sore providences that You ordain will somehow work together for my good just as You have promised. Help me, Father, to believe that You are good amidst bad things and dark days. Teach me to kiss the hand that afflicts me and to sing in faith, ‘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, where’fore to Him I leave it all.’” Your will be done.

We Are to Pray for the Grace of Sanctification

The grace of salvation. The grace of submission. Then thirdly, we pray for the grace of sanctification. When we pray, “Your will be done,” aren’t we praying that God would give us a fresh supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ so that we might become more like Him, that our wills might mirror more and more His perfect and glad-hearted obedience to the will of His Father in heaven? “Father, give me grace to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that You are at work in me to will and to work for the Father’s good pleasure. Teach me, O Lord, Your revealed will in Scripture. Transform me, Father, by the renewal of my mind that by testing I might discern the will of God; Your good and acceptable and perfect will. Sanctify me in the truth; Your Word is truth. And so enable me more and more to do the will of my Father in heaven, making me in all things here on earth like my Savior who reigns at Your right hand.” That’s how we’re praying when we pray, “Abba, Father, Your will be done.”

Let me sum it up like this. When we pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are confessing and renewing our commitment to the simple proposition, “God knows best.” God knows best. In His absolute will working all things according to the counsel of His will. He knows best, so we can trust Him, even in the hard things. Even then we know He remains to us Abba Father. And He knows best in His revealed will, for what has been revealed belongs to us and to our children that we may obey all the words of this Law. But I wonder if you have actually been fighting with Him lately about who knows best. Have you? Praying, “Your will be done,” but actually wanting your own way? When you pray, “Father, Your will be done,” it’s really another way of saying, “Okay Lord, I surrender. All control of my life, all attempts to be in control at least, I yield the governance of my life, which was always a delusion, You always were in charge, but I yield the governance of my life to You, Father. You know best.”

Do you say that? Have you said that? If you haven’t today is the day to bend your knee before the Lord of heaven and earth and say, “You know best.” I suspect actually the truth is every one of us needs to do that today and we will again tomorrow, to say to Him who reigns, “Lord, You know best. Your will be done. Your will be done.”

So the standard this prayer requires, do you see it? It is the perfect will of God. The sphere this prayer targets, it is this dark rebellious world and our own unruly hearts. But there is a Savior this prayer proclaims. He is offered to us. He alone has perfectly obeyed. He is your hiding place, your refuge. You can hide in Him and God will accept you not for your goodness but for His. And then learn by His grace to submit to hard providences just as our Savior did and say, “Not my will but Yours be done,” and cling to God that He might help you in the grace of sanctification become more and more like Jesus. That’s what we’re praying when we pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Let us pray.

Father, we thank You for the Lord Jesus who is a perfect Savior to us, and we ask You now, by His grace, to teach us what it means to say, “Your will be done.” Bend our wills and make them indeed glad to be conformed to Your own, for we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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