Back in 1994 Disney released a movie called "Iron Will." It’s the story about a teenager named Will Stoneman who enters a marathon dog-sled race from Winnipeg, Canada to St. Paul Minnesota. Since Will’s father just died leaving the family in financial straights, Will enters the race to save his family. He gets the nickname "Iron Will" because he just won’t quit, as he battles the winter elements, 522 miles of difficult terrain, people who don’t believe he can finish the race, and fiercely competitive racers. "Iron Will" is a play on his name, because Will Stonemen demonstrates that he has an iron will by persevering and finishing the race.
Well I think "iron will" describes the way a lot of people think about God’s will. People imagine that God’s will is like iron, that its inflexible and unbending. So when a lot of people think about God’s will, they often think about it with resignation. It’s the well meaning friend saying, "I guess it was God’s will" to a grieving wife at her husband’s funeral after his battle with prostrate cancer. It’s the 24 year old college student gritting his teeth as he says, "It must be God’s will" when his fiancé breaks up with him. It’s the troubled married couple throwing up their hands in desperation and saying, "It must be God’s will" because they can’t see any way through their problems and issues. We figure if anyone has an iron will, it must be God.
But the Bible clearly teaches that God’s will is often frustrated. Not that God somehow lacks the power fulfill his will, but that God often chooses to work out his purposes in a way that respects the will of human beings. That’s why God didn’t snuff out Adam and Eve to start over after they rebelled against God. You see, although God is certainly powerful enough to overrule human freedom at any moment, God chooses not to, preferring instead to allow us to have a measure of freedom and at the same time working out his plans despite our stubborn resistance to his will. So although God’s ultimate plan is sure to come to pass, God’s will is often frustrated by people.
Last week we started a new series on the Lord’s Prayer called "Teach Us To Pray." We saw last week that Jesus taught his followers the Lord’s Prayer to give them a model--a kind of prayer template--for authentic communication with God. Today we come to the part of the prayer that deals with the will of God: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." We’re going to first look at what this part of the Lord’s Prayer means, and then we’re going to talk about three affirmations we make when we pray this part of the Lord’s Prayer.
1. What Does It Mean? (Matt 6:10)
In this part of the Lord’s prayer we’re going to move from adoration to affirmation. We could sum up the phrase "hallowed be your name" as adoration. But with the phrase, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done" we move into affirmation.
Now really, God’s kingdom and God’s will are talking about the same thing, though from two slightly different perspectives. We don’t use the word "kingdom" very much these days, and when we do, we’re usually talking about a place, like the kingdom of Nepal, the United Kingdom of England or the Magic Kingdom. In each these cases, a kingdom is a specific geographical place defined by its borders. So the way we use the word "kingdom" in English, every kingdom would have an address, because in English it primarily refers to a place. But the Greek word for "kingdom" in the Bible puts the emphasis on the rule or reign of the king rather on the place that king exercises that reign. In fact, some Bible translations translate the Greek phrase "kingdom of God" as the "reign of God" or the "rule of God" to bring out this idea.
Now Jesus talked a lot about God’s kingdom or God’s reign. His very first recorded sermon is described in the Bible as, "Repent, for God’s kingdom has come near" (Matt 4:17). He taught stories called parables designed to illustrate what God’s kingdom was like. The Bible calls the Christian message about Jesus’ death and resurrection "the gospel of the kingdom." Jesus believed and taught that through his life and death God’s reign had descended upon the earth, that somehow his death and resurrection opened the door of God’s kingdom to people. Yet he also taught that God’s kingdom wouldn’t come with power and authority until his second coming at the end of the age.
You might picture God’s kingdom this way. In Jesus’ first coming, he established God’s kingdom. He opened the doors to God’s kingdom, inviting people to come through those doors by trusting in his death and resurrection. He warned us that unless we’re born again by faith in him, we can’t come through these doors. So God’s kingdom reign is established in some way through Jesus first coming, as God’s future kingdom reign somehow invaded the present. Yet its only when Jesus comes again at the end of the age when God’s Kingdom reign will be consummated in power. Only then will God’s kingdom reign be established on earth as it is in heaven in the sense of abolishing evil and vindicating good. Only then will an ultimate sense of accountability be brought to all people, as every human being stands before the creator of the universe and gives an account. In between the first coming and the second coming of Jesus is the Church Age, the time in which we now live.
So we live in a time of tension between the establishment of God’s kingdom and the consummation of God’s kingdom. Some Bible scholars call this a tension between the "already" aspects of God’s reign and the "not yet" aspects" of God’s reign. Through Jesus, our sins are already forgiven, yet because of the "not yet" we still struggle with the power of sin in our lives, still falling and failing. Through Jesus, our salvation is already guaranteed and we’re promised complete healing and restoration when Christ comes again, but because of the "not yet" our bodies still get sick and we still struggle with doubts and fears. Already the powers of evil and darkness have been defeated by Jesus through his death and resurrection, yet because of the "not yet" there’s still evil and darkness in our world. So when we pray, "your kingdom come" we’re not asking for the "already" part, but we’re looking forward to the "not yet" part.
Now "God’s kingdom" and "God’s will" look at this same reality from two separate perspectives. Think of God’s kingdom as the big picture perspective, like a telescope looking at the galaxies. GOD’S KINGDOM IS GOD’S SAVING REIGN OVER ALL OF HIS CREATION. So the phrase God’s kingdom looks at the whole picture, the entire galaxies, from the perspective of Christ’s work being applied and God’s plan fulfilled.
Think of God’s will as looking at the same thing from a smaller perspective, like a microscope. GOD’S WILL IS GOD’S SAVING REIGN IN A SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCE OF LIFE. God’s will is God’s kingdom applied to a circumstance, like a relationship, an individual person, or a particular community.
So essentially the phrases "God’s kingdom" and "God’s will" refer to the same reality, though from slightly different angles.
Now as followers of Jesus, we’re called to live under God’s reign even though the kingdom hasn’t yet arrived on earth in power. We seek live our lives by the values of God’s reign, even though we still live in "occupied" territory. I’m told that in the country of Laos many years ago the kings of Laos and Vietnam reached an agreement on how to distinguish which residents were under the Laotian government and which residents were under the Vietnamese government. Those who ate short-grain rice, built their houses on stilts, and decorated their homes with Indian-style serpents were considered Laotian. Those who ate long-grain rice, built their homes on the ground and decorated their homes with Chinese style dragons were considered Vietnamese. Even though they lived in the same geographical area, their kingdom allegiance was determined by the values and culture they embraced. In a similar way, as followers of Jesus our ultimate allegiance is to God’s reign, as we seek to live by kingdom values in our world today. Even though we live as Americans and seek to be good responsible citizens of our nation, our ultimate loyalty is God’s reign as our King.
Now that we understand what it means to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done" let’s look at three affirmations we make whenever we pray these words.
2. Three Affirmations (Matt 26:39; 1 John 5:14-15; Rev 11:15)
We begin by thinking about the life of Jesus. We learned last week that the Lord’s Prayer emerged out of Jesus’ own prayer life. When I think about praying, "thy will be done," I think about Jesus’ experience in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his execution. Jesus went to this private place to pray and wait for his betrayer and his executioner to come, and as he waited, he spent an agonizing night in prayer. He asked his three closest friends to watch and pray with him, but they couldn’t stay awake, so Jesus found himself alone, a foretaste of the aloneness that awaited him. As Jesus prayed, according to Matthew 26:39, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."
What we find here is a conflict between Jesus’ human will and God the Father’s will. Jesus knows what lies ahead of him, the suffering, the pain, the isolation from his friends and from his God. You see, Jesus’ death isn’t merely the death of a martyr who’s dying for a cause. It’s not like Martin Luther King, Jr. who died for a cause. The death Jesus is about to die is a unique kind of death, a death where he dies as our substitute, taking upon himself all the consequences for all our failures. The "cup" he speaks of drinking from is the "cup of God’s wrath"--which is a common Old Testament phrase-because Jesus knows he’s about to experience judgment of God on the sinfulness of humanity in his death. Jesus knows he’s about to be forsaken by his friends and family, he’s about to undergo terrible physical suffering at the hands of professional Roman executioners, and he knows that he’s about to be totally alienated from his God as he experiences the full weight of God’s judgment against human sinfulness. So he cries out to the Father for another way, some other method to accomplish the same goal, some other way to offer forgiveness and restoration to the human race. Yet he concludes, "Not as I will, but as you will."
The Bible tells us he had this same conversation with God three times, each time expressing his agony and yet each time concluding with a surrender to the will of the Father. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus in a very real sense prayed, "Father, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" even though the will of God came at great personal cost to himself.
From this event we find the first affirmation we make when we pray this part of the Lord’s Prayer. WHEN WE PRAY FOR GOD’S KINGDOM REIGN TO COME, WE ARE AFFIRMING OUR DESIRE TO FOLLOW JESUS’ EXAMPLE.
Now none of us will ever face the kind of situation Jesus faced. Jesus’ suffering and death was a once and for all action that forever threw open the doors of forgiveness and restoration with the Father. But even though Jesus’ suffering and death is a once for all, unrepeatable event, the pattern of life he demonstrated on this journey to the cross is lifted up in the Bible as an example for us as Christians.
A Christian, according to the Bible, as a follower of Jesus, someone who trusts in the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection and someone who follows Jesus in the journey of life. Jesus said that to follow him, we must take up our own cross, giving up our life for his sake, so we can find and experience real life. 1 John 2:6 tells us that whoever wants to be a Christian "must walk as Jesus walked." Part of Jesus’ journey to the cross was his cry, "Not as I will, but as you will."
When you and I pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done" we’re saying the same thing to God that Jesus said in the garden. We’re following Christ’s example by abandoning our own lives to the will of our Father. We’re saying, "My life is not my own. I belong to a heavenly Father who loves me."
I spoke recently to a friend of mine who’s married daughter has recently made some decisions he doesn’t understand. His daughter had been a doctoral student, but she and her husband quit school, sold all their possessions, took a vow of poverty, and began to live among the poor in Mexico City. She says this is what Christ has led them to do with their lives. My friend is struggling, because on the one hand he wants his daughter and her husband to love God and follow Jesus, yet the price she’s paying for that seems so radical, so countercultural.
Jesus may not lead you to take a vow of poverty and live among the poor, but he will lead us to live in a way that others around you won’t understand. Coworkers will struggle to understand why a Christian contractor doesn’t underbid just to get the job, so he can add on what he knows the job will really cost later. Friends will struggle to understand why we raise our kids the way we do, why we choose to invest as much of our money as possible into God’s kingdom rather than saving it for retirement or spending it on pleasure.
This is because as followers of Jesus our lives are not our own, but we pray like our master, "Not as I will, but as you will."
But this isn’t the only affirmation. Look at 1 John 5:14-15. The apostle John tells us that we have a certain kind of freedom or boldness in approaching God, and this confidence relates to our prayer life. We have whatever we want when we approach God, so long as our request is in harmony with God’s will. Remember we defined God’s will as God’s saving reign in a specific circumstance. That circumstance might be a job change, a relationship with another person, a sickness, whatever. When John says we know God hears us when we pray according to the will of God, he means we can know God gives us what we ask for. This word "hear" means "to respond positively," so John’s not implying that God doesn’t hear our prayers if we ask for things outside of the will of God, but he’s saying God responds positively to our requests only when those requests are aligned with God’s will. We can be absolutely sure we get what we want from God when we pray according to the will of God.
Now this teaching about prayer gives us our second affirmation. WHEN WE PRAY FOR GOD’S KINGDOM REIGN TO COME, WE ARE AFFIRMING OUR TRUST IN GOD TO ANSWER OUR REQUESTS APPROPRIATELY.
When we ask God for something, there are three possible answers God can give. God can say, "Yes" and grant the request, he can say, "no" and not grant the request, or he can say, "Not now" and hold back from granting the request until later. Every request we make of God is answered in one of these three ways, whether it’s a request for healing from cancer, a request for a job promotion, a request for escrow to close on a house, or a request for a friend to come to know Christ.
When we pray, "your kingdom come, your will be done" we’re saying, "God, I trust how you choose to answer all my request." We’re saying, "God, this is what I want, what I think I need for this situation, but I trust you and I believe you see this situation far more clearly than I do." We pray with the perspective of the Garth Brooks song, "Unanswered Prayers." Maybe you remember the song, about a guy who goes to his high school reunion and sees the woman he wanted to marry in high school. How he prayed for her to notice him, how he asked God over and over again for God to give him this woman. Yet he walks away from his reunion thanking God for not answering that prayer the way he wanted, thanking God instead for the wife he brought into his life.
Well the reality is that the prayer wasn’t unanswered, it was answered with a "no." There are no unanswered prayers for God’s children, but sometimes the answer is "no" or "not yet."
There are some promises in the Bible that seem to guarantee God will give us what we want if we just pray hard enough and with enough faith. For example, Jesus said, "Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours" (Mark 11:24). When we read those promises, we need to always remember this qualification from 1 John 5, that God will only grant the request if it is in accordance with his will. After all, Jesus asked God the Father for his suffering to be avoided and certainly he asked for that in faith, yet God didn’t grant that request because his suffering was necessary for God’s will to be fulfilled. Who’s going to suggest Jesus didn’t have enough faith to live by his own teaching?
Others have struggled with the issue of whether our requests to God really make a difference in what God does. After all, if God already has a plan what’s the point of me asking for God to heal someone, or provide financially for a need, or whatever. Hasn’t God already decided what he’s going to do, so what’s the point of me even asking? Some have even suggested that the only purpose of prayer is to align our will with God’s will, not to ask God to intervene.
Yet the Bible clearly teaches that our prayers do influence the outcome of events. I don’t understand exactly how God’s plan and our prayers fit together. Perhaps in eternity past when God decided upon his will, he in his foreknowledge he knew what we would ask him to do in that situation and took our request into consideration as he decided what he would do in that situation. Regardless of how we deal with this mystery, the fact remains when we pray for God’s kingdom reign, we are affirming that we trust God to answer appropriately, according to his will.
But there is one more affirmation we make when we pray this part of the Lord’s Prayer. Look at Revelation 11:15. Remember God’s kingdom reign is an already/not yet tension between the establishment of God’s kingdom through Jesus’ first coming and the culmination of God’s kingdom on earth at Jesus’ second coming. It’s to the "not yet" part of God’s kingdom reign that this part of Revelation looks forward to, that time when the governments of this world give way to the rule and reign of God and of Jesus. At that point, God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, God’s will will be done perfectly on earth as it already is in heaven.
So this is the third affirmation we make. WHEN WE PRAY FOR GOD’S KINGDOM REIGN TO COME, WE ARE AFFIRMING OUR CONFIDENCE IN THE FUTURE CULMINATION OF GOD’S PLAN.
At times, life seems like a random sequence of events that lack any overall plan or purpose. A drunk driver crosses the double yellow line and crashes into the car in front of us but not our car. Why the car in front of us, and not us? Was that random, an accident of chance?
Life seems like a maze at times, with unexpected twists and turns along the way that don’t make any sense. Why is life leading us in the opposite direction of where we think we need to go? Why does the door that would most seem to glorify God seem closed to us? In those times of doubt and uncertainty, to pray "your kingdom come, your will be done" we’re affirming that we’re confident that God’s plan will be completed. When we live in the tension between the "already" and the "not yet" we affirm our confidence that the culmination of God’s plan will answer our "not yet" questions.
All of us have questions we’d like to ask God when we get to heaven. I want to ask God why he allowed my friend Mark and his young son Johnny to die in a car accident several years ago. I want to know why God allows the suffering I see in the eyes of a parent who finds our her daughter has been violated. I want to know why God allows unjust governments to brutalize their own people.
I don’t know the answer to these questions; I’m not smart enough or wise enough to figure them out. But I do believe that one day God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, that the time will come when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah. So until then I pray, "Father your kingdom come, your will be done," affirming my confidence in the future culmination of God’s plan.
Conclusion
The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther once said that if most Christians really understood what they were saying whey they prayed this part of the Lord’s Prayer, they’d shudder with fear. I’m not sure they’d shudder with fear, but I am sure it would help us make sense out of our lives. When we pray for God’s kingdom reign, we’re making three affirmations: We’re affirming our desire to follow Jesus as his disciples, we’re affirming our trust in God to answer our requests appropriately, and we’re affirming our confidence in the future culmination of God’s kingdom plan.
I don’t think the will of God is best thought of as an iron will. I think it’s better thought of as a loving will, a heartfelt resolve of almighty God who seeks to express his love and grace to the human race and eradicate sin and evil. It’s a certain will, but not an unbending will. It’s a will that allows for the integrity of our own will, yet that isn’t in the final moment isn’t limited by our own will.
