March 15, 2026: Your Will be Done - Matthew 6:10.

As we are working our way week after week through the Lord's

Prayer, hopefully you're not becoming discouraged with the

pace. Every word, every phrase, every

line is pregnant with meaning and deserves our careful

attention as it has had by the church for thousands of years.

Since Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, I myself, in

prepping, have had to leave an atrocious amount of material

behind. If you can believe it, each line

has at least a library of books supporting it, defending it,

showing how important that it is.

So you're welcome, I'm going fast. 1st we look carefully at

the invocation. We say Our Father in Heaven.

What do we mean? There's a theology of adoption

that we are able to call God our Father and Father implies the

Son and the Holy Spirit. We talked about how prayer is a

family affair, a Trinitarian endeavour.

We also notice that it's our Father in heaven, not my Father

in heaven. We pray as a corporate body, a

great company of believers, the church.

This is our prayer that we pray together and with Father.

We think of intimacy and loving kindness, but it's also

reminding us that it's a heavenly Father who made

everything and everyone the omnipotent, the omniscient, the

God of glory that we're praying to.

And so we come into the invocation with both intimacy

and awe, assuming this posture of prayer ready then to present

our requests to God. And we notice too, that the the

order of these petitions is important.

And you'll notice that the first three are all about God.

We're not ready to pray for our knees until we've calibrated our

faith that we've made once again in prayer God, the highest good,

our greatest treasure. So we pray for the fame of His

name, that His glory would be known throughout the world.

Hallowed be your name. Can it be first place?

And we noticed that if we care about his name and he's a king

with a Kingdom, we have to care about His Kingdom too.

And so we pray about his authority.

We prayed about his authority spreading throughout the world.

And we noticed that though the devil has set up sort of a

imposter fake Kingdom, that Jesus the King came and dealt

him a nasty blow. And though, and throughout time,

his Kingdom is continuing to move its way through the bread.

And we are looking forward someday to King Jesus's return

where he will rule the nations. And we pray to that end.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. But of course, if we care about

his name and we care about his Kingdom, we have to care about

his agenda too. For his will has been rebelled

against. And we must care deeply that his

will will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This morning, I'm really only going to take your will be done.

And we'll wait till later to talk more about what this phrase

means on earth as it is in heaven.

But today we need to kind of carefully think about what God's

will is, because there's an awful lot of confusion swirling

around the notion of what is the will of God.

Friends, we need God's will to be done, but we also want to do

things our own way, for we too are complicit in the rebellion,

and inside our hearts is a big old no to God.

For some reason, we believe that if we submit to his will, he's

bound to make us miserable. I want to live life in my own

way. I want to be the captain of

captain of my soul. So we have this problem and we

need to pray His will be done as a prayer of our own

sanctification to be made holy, to really want His will to be

done even more than our own. But besides His will to be done

in our obedience and being holy, we also need guidance, don't we?

And this we're plagued by this, a need for knowing what God

wants me to do with my life. There are so many decisions to

make and none of the answers seems clear, writes Kevin

Deyoung in this lovely little book.

This gem called Just Do Something, A Liberating Approach

to Finding God's Will And then very long subtitle Are you

ready? Just Do Something.

A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will or How to Make a

Decision Without Dreams, Visions, fleeces, impressions,

open doors, random Bible verses, casting lots liver quivers or

riding in the sky, et cetera. One of the most practical books

I have ever read. I commend it to you.

He sets up the problem like this with stacking decisions that

give us stress. There are so many decisions to

make and none of the answers seem clear.

What should I do this summer? What should be my my major B.

What kind of career do I want? Do I want a career?

Should I get married? Who should I marry?

Do I want kids? How many kids?

Should I play sports or sing in the choir?

Ask Brighton Hill audition you Where should I go to college?

Should I even go to college? Should I go to grad school?

What job should I take? Should I stay in my current job?

Should I be a missionary? Should I become a pastor?

Should I volunteer here or there?

Should I leave home and test the waters elsewhere?

It doesn't get better as you get out of the education phase of

your life. What about buying a home?

Is now the time to buy a house? How should I spend my money?

Where should I give my money? Where should I go to church?

How should I serve my church? What should I be doing with the

rest of my life and where and with whom should I be doing it?

When should I retire? What should I do in retirement?

So many questions weighing us down.

We desperately want God to tell us the future and yet the young

rights we walk by faith and not by sight.

God's will is not some secret plan that he holds like this

that it's your job to guess at that.

We need to be so worried sick. If we guess wrong and ruin our

lives, how do we interpret adversity or suffering?

Are we supposed to think, oh man, I must have made a mistake

back then I ate cornflakes instead of Cheerios and I'm on

the wrong path? Super insightful, wise words

about the will of God. And so we come this day to the

second or the third petition rather, that God's will will be

done. We pray that his name will be

honored, His rule will be realized.

And now we're praying that His agenda, his will, will be obeyed

and realized in our lives. So powerful, so helpful.

But we need to talk a little bit more about what this means.

What does it mean? My friends, the Bible actually

talks about God's will in a variety of ways.

Insightful theologians and Bible commentary commentators and

pastors have kind of narrowed down to main ways of thinking

about it. His secret will, if you want,

and his revealed will. Now that they like to put a lot

of different names on this, sometimes the secret will is

called his will of decree, his revealed will, his will of

desire. So you'll see 2 main categories

labeled half a dozen different ways depending on whatever that

commentator wants to draw out. I'm following Wayne Grudem and

his vocabulary here, if you're interested in knowing that

theologian. His secret will.

So it seems like the Bible does tell us that God is sovereign

over all things, that nothing actually can happen apart from

his will. That's kind of mind blowing.

How can there be evil? How does he not become the

author of evil if he can say that all things happen according

to the will of his counsel? He remains holy.

He remains righteous. Somehow he is able to work even

evil into his plan to accomplish His ends, which are His glory

and our good. His secret will does not make

him the author of evil. It is inscrutable and is beyond

finding out. And the Bible talks about this

in different places. Let's look briefly at Daniel

Daniel 4:35

chapter 4, verse 35. All the inhabitants of the earth

are counted as nothing, and He does according to His will, a

court among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the

earth, and none can stay His hand or say to him, what have

you done? There is a secret will which is

beyond our understanding, which He has the sovereignty over

everything that happens. By the way, you should note that

there are not 2 wills in God. There is only one will in God.

But there are two different aspects or ways of thinking

about this one will, His secret will and His revealed will.

Regarding the secret will, again let's look at the story of

Joseph in Genesis briefly. Joseph was treated pretty poorly

by his brothers, but the end of the story works out to their

good in Genesis chapter 50, verse 20 of this amazing

Genesis 50:20

statement from Joseph about what happened in his life.

As for you, my brothers, you meant evil against me, but God

meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be

kept alive as they are today. There's a secret will and God

where he orders things according to His ends.

But there is also in Scripture reference to his revealed will,

the will that he sets out there expecting his creatures to obey.

He's given them some manner of freedom to obey or disobey, and

this is where evil comes from. And he puts out his revealed

will and asks us to obey it. Genesis 2929 says this kind of

look at there's a kind of a both end on the wills, the one will,

the secret and the revealed. The secret things belong to the

Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us

and to our children forever that we may do all the words of this

law very close tie there between the revealed will of God and

what the words of this law that are that he expects to be obeyed

in the world as a standard of his righteousness.

So that's kind of helpful. We get these sort of two aspects

of the of God's will, his secret will and his revealed will.

We kind of understand that his revealed will has to do with his

commands. We can also think about His

revealed will as events that happened in the past, as events

that happened in the past, because He has allowed these

things to happen. You say that was God's will

after it occurs. So then some practical biblical

counsel from God's Word about how we ought to pray this

prayer. How do we pray this prayer?

But before I get to my list, which I have 4 items to share

with you before I get to that, we have to remember what I've

been sharing with you every week.

That we don't only pray to the Father, we pray to the Father in

the name of the Son by the Holy Spirit.

And so when we think about this particular petition, Thy will be

done on earth as it is in heaven, we need to think about

Jesus for a second because it is only because of Jesus, his

person and his work, only because of what he has done for

us that we can pray. Your will be done.

When really all I really care about is Dan Blosser's will to

be done. It is a miracle of the gospel

that I'm able to pray. Thy will be done, and it comes

if you're listening and paying very close attention to your

Bible through Jesus, his own work.

Doesn't it sound so much like his prayer in Gethsemane before

the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension?

He says three times in the Garden of Gethsemane.

If it's possible that this cup passed, Lord, but then he says,

but not my will, but yours be done.

Friends, believer, Christian, if you go by the name of Christ,

the only way that you can pray Thy will be done is because

Jesus did it first in the Garden of Gethsemane.

And that is how we pray in His agency, because He is the one

even praying in us. But it's not just Jesus as the

one praying Thy will be done, it's the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit's involved too, my friends, And it's a

miraculous empowerment by his agency that allows us to say

these hard words. Thy will be done.

Because when we say Thy will be done, we're praying that God

will start with us, that he will make us holy.

And he can only be made holy by the Spirit of holiness, the one

who is animating and breathing and causing.

So we pray in the name of Jesus, by the agency of the Holy

Spirit, the Spirit of sanctification, Thy will be

done. And we must also remember,

because we are American individualists, that we're not

just praying alone by ourselves, for ourselves.

God, you may, your will be done in Dan Blosser's life, I'm also

praying Thy will be done to our Father in a great company of

believers, the church. We pray together, Thy will be

done. So how do we pray it in Jesus

name, by the Holy Spirit as individuals and as the church.

But I want to give you some very practical things to think about

as we move forward wondering how we ought to pray this prayer.

And the first thing that I want to say is that we pray it by

warring. By warring.

And I'm not talking about guns and missiles here.

I'm talking about the spiritual warfare that comes from the

power of the praying Saints. This warring is against the

enemies of God, which are classically given to us in the

Bible, summarized by many of the catechisms that say that the our

great enemies, God's great enemies, are the world, the

flesh, and the devil. The world, the flesh and the

devil. If you are listening carefully

in our Scripture reading from first John, you have the world

in the flesh clearly in view. And in the greater context

there's even reference to overcoming Satan himself.

But we war against the world, the flesh and the devil when we

say thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Let's look at this text again from First John.

First John 215 believer do not love the world or the things in

the world. Now what does he mean?

What's the world? The world according to John in

this text is not referring to the beautiful things of God's

world, but the anti God system under the control of the devil

and the sinners that have followed him, enculturated and

systematic and institutionalized sin, and also the things in this

world that tempt us off of God that we make into idols do not

love the world nor the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in

him. That's harsh.

Keep reading for all that is in the world and the ESB has

desires here. Probably a better term would be

lust. It's a very negative desire here

in this text, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh

and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the

Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away

along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God

abides forever. We war, friends on our knees

against our lustful desires, the lust of the flesh, the lust of

the eyes, and the pride of life that so plague us every single

day we go. We war against the world and its

systems that combine to display Gentile power and oppress

everyone around them. And we war ultimately against

the devil himself as we pray Thy will be done.

But that also puts pressure on us, doesn't it?

Because it may mean that we're cherishing something.

We're cherishing some, some desire that we want to keep.

This is mine, Lord. You're going to have all the

rest, but not this thing. This is, this is mine.

Thy will be done means not only that we're warring, but that

we're giving things up. We're saying when we say thy

will be done, we're also saying not my will, but yours be done,

aren't we? That brings us to a second idea,

which is accepting, accepting God's will.

There are certain things that are going to happen to us that

we don't want to happen to us. You're going to get a diagnosis,

you're going to get a phone call.

There's going to be something in life that's going to happen.

And friend, if we cannot pray Thy will be done, we may

completely collapse and despair. So when we pray Thy will be

done, we are preparing our hearts to accept suffering in

some manner. Paul, when he was in his

missionary work, asked the Lord to take away something and God

said no. It's a very famous text, Second

2 Corinthians 12 · chapter mention

Corinthians chapter 12, beginning in verse 7.

He says this Paul. So to keep me from becoming

conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the

revelations, let me stop right there.

Paul's a great apostle. He's given glimpses of heaven.

He's given revelations from Jesus Christ himself.

And Paul saying, in order for me to not get the big head, does

that be a problem if you're supposed to be apostle Jesus

Christ, the most humble one? In order to keep me from getting

the the big head, I was given some tormenting suffering.

That's like a thorn stuck. A thorn was given me in the

flesh. He's even going to call it

Satanic. A messenger is Satan to harass

me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

There it is, a purpose statement.

Again. Three times I pleaded with the

Lord about this, that it should leave me.

Stop there for a second and think about the parallel.

Three times our Lord prayed, let the cup pass, and he said, not

my will, but yours be done. And now the apostle saying three

times I prayed, I prayed, I pleaded with the Lord about

this, that it should leave me. God, don't you know I'll be more

effective if I don't have this annoying suffering?

Clearly it must be your will to heal me from this.

Pleading 3 times says no, it's not God's will to take it from

take it from me. He wants me to be humble, He

wants me to be dependent. And he says, but he said to me,

my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in

weakness. We have to be able to accept

some things. You can come up with another

example. And Mary, the mother of our

Lord, the Angel comes to her and says, what seems like craziness,

Mary, and you're going to have a kid conceived by the Holy

Spirit, not by your betrothed. What?

That is not what I had on my plan for my life.

At the end of this Annunciation, she says, may it be unto me.

As you have said, she accepts this thing.

We not only accept suffering from the Lord, but we also

accept blessing from the Lord, things that we don't deserve

that just come into our life and filling things up.

I want don't want you to think that accepting is wholly

negative. It is often negative, but it's

also very positive sometimes. And ironically and

paradoxically, you'll even have people who are going through the

most suffering ever, but the the blessings that they are

receiving through walking with Jesus, experiencing the

sufficiency of his grace, so overwhelmed the suffering that

they have that they'll say weird things like I wouldn't have had

it another way. And you're like, what did you

just say? I probably wouldn't have had it

another way. Now we are very careful to not

make evil into good and we pray for healing and we pray.

We pray, we pray, but we also must notice that the accepting

what we cannot change, good or bad, as it comes to us, is a

very sanctifying influence on our life.

As we pray, not my will, but yours be done, or thy will be

done on earth as it is in heaven, we have to accept.

But the third thing to notice is that this is really a prayer for

about our own obedience. There's so much we need to obey

when it comes to the Lord's will for our lives.

And sadly, we can be so focused on major decisions that we're

not paying attention that when really we're supposed to be

praying my will be done is praying to obey the commands of

Scripture. And so here we need something

greater attentiveness to obeying God's Word.

CS Lewis, one of my favourites, You guys like him too.

I think some of you do. He talks about this particular

petition in his book on prayer Letters to Malcolm, Quote.

I took this petition at first exclusively as an act of

submission. I thought of God's will purely

as something that would come upon me, something of which I

should be the patient. Thy will be done.

But then he thinks about it again.

But a great deal of his will that has to be done is to be

done by God's creatures, including me.

That's the petition, then, is not merely that I may patiently

suffer God's will, but also that I may vigorously do it in the

long run. I am asked to be given the same

mind which was also in Christ. And when I take the petition

this way, I find the words have a more regular daily application

for me. For there isn't always, but we

don't always have reason to suspect there is some great

affliction looking in the near future.

But friends, there is always, there are always duties to be

done. Usually for me, neglected duties

that need to be caught up with. Thy will be done by me.

Now brings one back to brass tacks the obedience that comes

by praying Thy will be done. Did you know that there are over

1000 commands in Scripture? 1000 commands.

Now you can sum them up in really neat ways like love God

and love your neighbor. Convenient, but God thinks we

need more specificity than that and gives us 1000 commands.

Now. I don't know about you, but I

immediately get syllabus shock from something like 1000

commands. Says the pastor.

And you guys get syllabus shock. I hated the first day of school.

It was even worse in grad school.

You go to your first class, Here's the syllabus, and you

have to see written down in the syllabus all the things that are

going to get done in just a few short weeks.

You're totally overwhelmed. You go to the next class and

they do it against you, and you go to the next class and they do

it again to you. I'm like freaking out.

And so when pastors and theologians load me up with the

weight of this book and say 1000 commands and cheerfully act like

they can just easily obey it, then that's a little annoying.

It's burdensome. How can I obey?

Plus the fact that my flesh doesn't want to.

And now this is not a very happy experience.

This is even supposed to be 1000 commands.

We're supposed to obey, so I don't want to give you the

impression that you can just suck it up.

Oh, Christian, pull yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps

and do some tricks and tips and follow 1000 commands.

It's not like that. You need God to be working in

you to begin to obey, and we must work actively doing so.

The good news is I wanted to show you this text from Hebrews

13 as we think about obeying the Lord, to just bask briefly in

the resources that we have to obey His word.

Naomi, the God of peace, OK, not some angry, crazy person who's

about to ZAP you, the God of peace that you've experienced in

the gospel, this loving Father who brought again from the dead

our Lord Jesus. Oh, that God of peace, the one

that can raise the dead. He can probably help me obey,

can't he? The one who raised the dead.

He's not only willing, he's able.

Brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd

of the sheep. Beautiful, beautiful, tender

metaphor. By the blood of the eternal

covenant, His promises that will never fail.

Equip you with what? With everything good.

Why, that you may do His will, that you may obey Him, working

in us that which is pleasing in His sight.

Again, all by yourself try on yourself, trying real hard.

No, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.

Amen. Christian, we pray Thy will be

done and then we are equipped by the Good Shepherd Himself with

everything that we need to obey him, to please him, to follow

his will. It's good news.

Not only are we going to be warring and accepting and

obeying, we also do need discerning.

And this is kind of where we started off, all these big tough

questions of life and we want to know A or B, Does God want me to

buy this car, that car? Does he want me to go to this

college or that college? Should I date this girl or that

gal? I don't know what?

Would you just give me a sign, please?

And this is where the Young's advice in this book cuts through

all the confusing noise and frankly, blasphemous thoughts

concerning how to discern the will of God in our life.

Bunch of noise out there, friends.

I've been working with college students especially for over a

decade and there's just a lot of noise in the system.

How do I discern God's will? What if I made a mistake first

thing that comes up? That's hard.

Oh I just, I chose wrong. Seeking fleeces, putting out

tests, worrying a lot about really neutral decisions that

probably the Lord doesn't actually care about that much.

If it really is a non moral category, you can pick

cornflakes or Cheerios. He doesn't care.

You know what he does care about?

He cares about your Christ likeness.

And over and over again, Dejung says he cares more about your

virtue, your fruit of the Spirit, than he does about where

you live or what kind of car, what kind of house, or what your

major is. All of these things are

important to God. He cares.

But when we're talking about God's will, the categories in

Scripture are mostly about obeying His commands.

And the Bible just frankly doesn't tell you what major

you're supposed to pick. There's freedom, so we pray Thy

will be done, and we understand that there's a lot of freedom

within God's will, but we're also acting, asking Him for some

guidance, and we're asking for Him to attend our choices, to

give us the wisdom from Holy Scripture to be able to weigh

things out. He's never going to tell you

ahead of time what exactly what it's going to be.

We walk by faith, not by sight, but you can load up with

biblical wisdom. You can seek wise counsel.

You can make wise choices. You're going to fail sometimes.

And the Lord's going to redeem it all in order to enhance His

glory and to enhance your good as well.

And that is good news. Paul himself talks about his

plans and Scripture. He talks about wanting to go

over here but being prevented, wanting to go over here.

And it worked out, being called by this other guy to come over

to Macedonia. He's always discerning.

And this is the apostle Paul. Look what he says in Romans.

One For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the

gospel of his Son, that without ceasing, I mention you always in

my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will I may now at last

succeed in coming to you. He doesn't know.

He hopes. In the meantime, he's praying

and he puts it in God's hands and if it works out that it must

have been God's will, if it doesn't, then it wasn't.

And that's OK. That's OK.

We ourselves, as we make our plans and exercise Godly's

discernment and seek counsel, we make our decisions and we are

supposed to say not literally every time, but at least to have

it in our hearts. If the Lord wills, we will do

this, or go there or do that, and so we pray Thy will be done

on earth as in heaven as it is in heaven, asking for godly

discernment according to His word in the community of faith.

So to conclude, the devil is leading a rebellion against the

will of God and has fallen sinners.

We're part of it, but thanks be to God, our Lord Jesus came to

do the Father's will, praying thy will be done.

And so he invites us to join him by faith and pray your will be

done no matter what we're facing.

This is good news, my friend. We've been concluding by praying

out loud the Lord's Prayer together as a community of

faith. When we get to the part about

deaths or trespasses or sins, we'll pray trespasses.

So would you join me in prayer? If you don't know, it's OK, You

can just listen. Let's pray together.

Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy

Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our

trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.

Amen.