Why Are We Praying For God’s Will If It Always Happens Anyway? Series

WHY PRAY THIS? This is a prayer because it isn’t happening much now.

- Matthew 6:10.

- So in this fourth part of the sermon, Jesus calls us to pray for God’s will to be done.

- But, wait, isn’t that already happening all the time? We hear people constantly speak that whatever happened was God’s will, so many presume that everything that happens is God’s will.

- That isn’t true - and that's a big reason why we are called to pray this prayer.

- We need to start with the difference between God’s perfect will and God’s permissive will. This is a little theological, but it’s essential.

- God’s perfect will is the exact thing that God wants to come to pass.

- God’s permissive will acknowledges the reality that God, as God, could stop anything from happening if He chose to. There are many times where He allows things to happen that He doesn’t want to have happen - times when evil is happening, for instance. God allowed it to happen but it wasn’t what He wanted to occur.

- This is necessary because of human free will. God has given us the freedom to choose against Him. With rare exceptions, He allows us to go down roads that are wrong, destructive to ourselves and others, and that reject His truth. He will not make us into robots. If we are going to obey Him, it has to be willingly.

- Therefore, God’s permissive will - the times when He doesn’t like what we are doing but allows us to anyway.

- Understanding that, we come back to this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer more ready to grasp it.

- Despite many people’s presumption that everything is God’s will, that simply isn’t true. Not only is some of what happens in the world not God’s will, but actually the majority of what happens is not God’s will. People regularly flout God’s will in a host of ways:

a. By sinning.

b. By living by the world’s priorities.

c. By sins of omission.

d. By putting self first.

e. By being ignorant of God’s truth and therefore not following it.

f. By having a religion that is a show only.

- That's only a partial list, but it makes the point.

- So what are we praying for here then?

- We acknowledge that God’s will is not being done the way that it should be all around us as well as in our lives. And so we come here to God to ask for basically two things (and these will sound familiar if you were here for last week’s sermon):

a. I pray that the world will do God’s will more.

b. I pray that I will do God’s will more.

- Now, similar to last week, we have more control over the second than the first. But we want both.

We are praying for the world to become the kind of world we want - one where God’s will is done with regularity.

- Again, thinking of last week, one way to think of these two phrases together is something like this:

a. “Your Kingdom come” is what we are hoping for long-term with God’s will being done.

b. “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is what we are hoping for here and now.

- I freely acknowledge that this is a very incomplete way to look at these two phrases, but I think it gets us in the ballpark.

- To more fully understand this, there are a few questions we need to answer.

IS IT UNKNOWABLE? God’s will is not intended to be a mystery.

- Some of you might be thinking, “That all sounds good but God’s will is nearly impossible to know.” It’s an inscrutable mystery.

- My response to that is: no, it isn’t.

- This, of course, is an essential point. If God’s will is functionally unknowable, then this prayer is mere wishful thinking. But it’s not.

- Allow me to give some proofs of this.

a. God has given us the Bible.

- This, I think, is the biggest one.

- The Bible is not an irrelevant book of ancient tales that has no bearing on our present lives. No, it is filled with God’s instruction on a whole host of issues and life situations.

- Why has God given us all that? Because He wants us to obey Him and pursue His will. God is eager to help us follow His will. He does not want to leave us clueless.

- Now, that doesn’t mean that we are necessarily going to like what God’s Word says that we should do. It may be exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do. It might require us to go in a direction we have no interest in walking. That may be and we may reject His instruction, but that is not the same thing as saying that God’s will can’t be discerned.