Prayer & The Will Of God - Matthew 6:10b Series

That is the will of desire – God does not want us to commit sexual sin, but it happens.

Lamentations 3:33 he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men.

That is the will of desire – God does not enjoy bringing affliction into your life, but He does it anyway when it is what is best for you.

Isaiah 46:10 My will will stand, and I will do all that I have planned.

That is the will of decision. All that God has decided to do He will do and nothing can stop it.

Acts 2:23 This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God's will

God decided to hand Jesus over to be crucified.

Acts 4:28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.

That is the will of decision.

Ephesians 1:11 [He] works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will

That is the will of decision – God’s perfect plan cannot be derailed.

Hermeneutics – words and context

Whenever you read the Bible it is crucial that you not just look up the definitions of words, but that you think carefully about how a particular word is used in a particular context. This is a very important principle for understanding your Bible. The same word is not always used in the same way. And if you take a word in one text and import that into another context you will end up with all kinds of error. This is a very common problem among teachers in Bible studies. They need some material for their study and so they become concordance crazies. They look up a word in the concordance and assume it means the same thing in every verse where it appears. When people do that they end up forcing their own ideas onto the text. In one place it says a day is like one thousand years, so they rip that out of context and force it into Genesis 1 and say each of the days of creation was one thousand years (or a billion). They do not say Jesus was in the tomb for three thousand years, or that in Noah’s flood it rained for forty thousand years and forty nights. Just because a word or phrase is used one way in one context does not mean it is used that same way in every context.

And if you do not understand that principle you will never understand what Scripture teaches about the will of God. For example, in Matthew 12 a Christian is anyone who does the will of the Father.

Matthew 12:50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

But we just read in Acts 4 that the wicked men who crucified Jesus were doing the will of the Father.

Acts 4:28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.

If you try to mesh those two verses together you come to the conclusion that the people who crucified Jesus must have been saved because they were doing the Father’s will. But that would be a serious error, because the word “will” is used in different ways in those two texts. Jesus was saying “Anyone who does what the Father desires is My brother or sister,” and the Acts passage is saying, “Those wicked men did what the Father had decided would happen.” Always remember – meaning does not come from the dictionary. Meaning does not come from the words. Meaning comes from the author – whatever he meant to communicate is the only thing his words mean.