…
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…
I used to interpret this line in The Lord’s Prayer as a plea – ‘Please let your kingdom come, down here on earth, Lord, and let your will be done, here on earth, just as it is being done in heaven.’
But now I see it as less of an Ask and more of a Declaration – ‘Lord, because your kingdom (Jesus) has come…your Will, will be done -by us and through us – here on earth, just as it is being done in heaven.
Don’t we get it? God has equipped us to create a version of Heaven here on earth, with the power of the Holy Spirit that he has given each of his followers. We just don’t always choose to listen to God’s call on our heart for what he wants us to do.
Dear Lord everything that I am, was made by you. I am, in one sense, under your complete control; my body, my mind and soul, and my spirit. And yet you choose to give me free will. You choose to let me choose. So what do I do with that?
What will I do with that impossible-to-imagine freedom? I can do anything I want, we all can, and yet so many of us choose poorly. Some choose merely wastefully, some negatively, some choose horribly. And some of us choose just to float along. Thinking that by not choosing we can’t make any mistakes…
But maybe one of the biggest mistakes is choosing to choose nothing. Life is full of choices, and it’s not always easy to make a decision. I heard someone once say ‘the best decision is the right one, the next best decision is the wrong one, and the worst decision is to not decide.’ In other words, the biggest mistake is to waste the gift of free choice. To bumble along and flounder through life just getting by. When we were all meant for so much more.
Lord, Maybe the greatest choice we can make with our free will is to give it back to you. Lord, you gave us free will to choose anything we want. Maybe the greatest and the grandest thing to understand is that the very best thing we can choose with our free will is Your will. That we can kind of surrender our free will back to you and choose to do your will. We choose to surrender and trust and submit, and in obedience, do your will.
Let your will be done through us, Lord. …Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…
Help us recognize that we are put on this Earth as your hands and feet to do not our own will, but Yours. What on Earth can our tiny minds even conjure up that would be half as impactful as your will? The answer is nothing. There’s nothing in our own minds that is greater than what you have put in our paths to do. And all it takes is surrender. All it takes is the willingness to trust you and put everything we have in your hands. Thank you, Lord for the courage to surrender. Amen
So the whole “Thy will be done on Earth” thing is really, largely, up to us! God has provided a way for his will to be done on Earth, but we are his instruments. We get to have a say in whether it actually happens or not. I can think about it, talk about it, write about it, read about it, I can pray about it… but can I actually do it? It’s in the doing that I get caught up. Oh I think it’s all a great idea. Surrender to God? Sure, that’s a great plan! But the jumping in is the hard part.
But… it doesn’t always have to be that hard. Maybe I just need to try to model Jesus’ behavior in one area of my life. Just pray for help to change one small thing that I struggle with.
Is there something big you feel God is calling you to do? Or something small he is calling you to work on?
A very interesting man named Bob Goff wrote a book called Love Does, and in it he says something that I find really profound. He talks about reading the Bible and studying the Bible. And he acknowledges that it’s all very good and important stuff. But he goes on to say, once you get the idea of it all, you should just be going out and doing something about it. He says something like ‘Instead of learning all of it, just go out and do some of it!’ And I think that’s one mistake we sometimes make in the church. We do learn a lot about Jesus and the Bible and that’s awesome, but if we don’t follow up that learning with some doing how are we ever going to change the world?
