As You Will

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It’s winter and I’m hating every minute of it. All I want to do is eat and sleep. My brain might be frozen because I can’t seem to apply my mind to anything lately (which is why I’ve been so silent). I think it’s time we introduced human hibernation hey. But until God approves my suggestion, we’ll soldier on draped in coats and scarves.

I’ve been looking into a subject recently that has emphasised the issue of God’s will. Of course God’s will is something littered in Scripture but I’ve found the things Jesus has said and taught pertaining to God’s will to be so profound. The most famous is probably part of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples AKA The Lord’s Prayer.
“Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Matthew 6:10

It is given that God’s will is done in heaven, and this is linked to a word in the previous phrase; “kingdom”. Heaven is where God’s kingdom is established, where He reigns as King, where His authority is supreme. Everything in heaven is subjected to what He desires, what He commands and what He does. With the coming of God’s kingdom (which in this context is the realm in which God’s reign is experienced) comes the doing of God’s will on earth. God’s will can therefore never be done outside of God, outside of a relationship with Him which is what Jesus came to establish for all humanity. It makes sense that I cannot do what God wants when I don’t know who God is and how He works.

Of course knowing what God wills isn’t the end of it, the hard part is accepting what God wants. One of our greatest struggles with accepting God’s will for our lives is that we too have our own will. (Which is befitting seeing that we are made like God, but ours will forever co-exist within His because He remains the potter and we the clay). We have our own ideas of how our lives should play out, our own desires for things we want to achieve and acquire and the way in which we want to go about it. It becomes a difficult task to acknowledge that God has His own desires for my life, especially when those desires contrast mine.

 Jesus expresses this when he was overwhelmed with sorrow in Gethsemane.
“Going a little farther, 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.” Matthew 26:39
Jesus says ‘if it is possible’ not because there’s something impossible for God, but because Jesus knows that all that God does, He does within His will and plan. Some things we want are off the cards, not because God can’t do them, but because God wills differently. God’s will is intricately tied to His plan. God’s plan for Jesus was for him to save his people from their sins as his name explains (see Matthew 1:21). Jesus might have had his own ideas of how he would do this, more glorified and dignified ideas, but as God willed it, it was a gruesome death on a cross. Only death on a cross could reverse the curse of death over our lives.  Difficult as it was to accept, there was no way out of how God planned it, no matter how long and hard he prayed, because as Psalm 33:11 puts it, God’s plans stand firm forever.

The key to surrendering my will and embracing what God wills for me is understanding that what He wills is best. The latter part of Romans 12:2 states that God’s will is good, pleasing and perfect.
It is good because it originates from Him, the only one who is good and it reflects Him and His virtues in every way. God assures the children of Israel in the famous Jeremiah 29:11 that the plans He has for them are not to harm them, but instead to give them a future. God’s will is for our own good and advantage.
God’s will is pleasing, not only to Him, but also to us who fulfill it. Life was easy in Eden because man remained within God’s will. All the pain and trouble we see and experience today is the working of sin which came into the world as a result of Adam’s disobedience, him willfully going against God’s will. There is no pleasure in resisting God’s will, only strife.
Finally, God’s will has no flaw, it is perfect. It is well calculated, it has no mistake about it. This means when I live according to God’s will, I will live my life to the fullest, I will live my best life.

Understanding this about God’s will and plan for our lives helps us trust God better and therefore yield easily to what He calls from us. All this was wonderful to study, but I’m left with the hardest part of it, living it. May God grant both you and me strength to surrender our own and yield to His.

“Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell them, they would be too many to declare.” Psalm 40:5


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