Lent 23 day 8

 Will.   


Thy will be done.  We kind of think we know what that means because we have heard and said it so many times.  But we dont talk about our own wills very much.  And in thinking about this for todays blog I have realised that it is actually quite hard to sum up what someone's ' will' actually is.

It is partly about choice.  What I choose to do is what I will to do.  But it is also partly about what I wish to choose.  There's an element of determination involved too. I determine to wish to choose 😁 

Here's an existential question for you.   If God is eternal ( and He is of course) and lives outside time, then why does He need a will?  Surely everything that He wants to happen has already happened.  Eternally. Heaven, where His perfect will is executed perfectly, already is.  So why is God's will even a thing??  ( Im not sure if this is making any sense to you but its the rabbit hole my mind is going down as I think about this )  God has already made every decision there is to be made about what He wants and how it is to happen.  Before the foundation of the world Jesus was crucified to save a fallen world.  Before Adam was I AM had seen the end from the beginning.  His will has already been done on earth as it is in heaven so why does Jesus tell us to pray for that will, God's choices and determinations and decisions, to be done??

Help!

OK, so maybe the emphasis in the phrase ' thy will be done' needs to be on the ' thy' rather than on the ' will'.  Despite the fact that God is perfectly capable of having his own way without our help, the fact is that He chooses to partner with us at every opportunity.  Jesus came to adopt us into His family and in so doing He took the risk that we would be unruly children, refusing to do what we are told and pushing the boundaries. We usually want things to be easy, painless and gratifying.  God's ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.  He could have made things so much less stressful for us if He had just created us to think and behave like he does !   But we dont.  We need to learn how He thinks.  A child learns what a parent believes by listening and watching and modifying behaviour as it is corrected and shown.  Jesus says His sheep know His voice.  We dont have to learn how to hear Him, we know.  We just need to learn how to listen.  And then do what He says.  Like a child, when we understand that He loves us and that His will is always for our good then we learn to do what He tells us to do.  And His will is done on earth.

I think Ive always heard ' thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven' in capital letters.  I've heard world peace and perfection and ....well, heaven.  But thinking about it now I wonder if as well as all the big headline stuff included in God's will is not also a gazillion tiny things.  Kindness, smiling, helpfulness, generosity, hard work, integrity, compassion, service, talents, fun, restraint, discipline, rest.  The person of Jesus displays perfectly what God's will looks like in the life of a human being.  Whatever Jesus is, is what God wants.  So today Im aiming to be a bit more like Jesus - and the only way to do that is to invite more of His Spirit into my life and to pay attention to Him when He says ' this is the way, walk in it'.



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