The Father’s Will

Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.

Luke 22: 42

When I was young I had the idea (I am sure I must have heard sermons on this) that I would somehow have to annihilate my own will before I could properly pray to God for his. “You must have absolutely no will of your own in the matter,” someone had said. This sounded all right to me, and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to follow this advice. Finally I saw that no such thing was required. The struggle Jesus had in the Garden of Gethsemane showed me this. A conflict was taking place – not to annihilate his own will but to accept the will of the Father, which was other than his. It did not end with Jesus saying, “My will is now thine” but with, “Not my will but thine be done.” The act of praying, far from divesting us of human desires, enables us to lay them before God as very real and pressing and say to him, “not these, Lord. Yours.” (if we had gotten rid of them, there would be nothing to lay down.)

There is something terribly down-to-earth about this. They are my own requests I am supposed to “make known” to God. They are things I feel strongly about. They may be sinful. If they are making them known to God might make plain to me their true nature. But I start by making them known. I pray for what I want, as a child asks its father for whatever it wants. This is faith’s legitimate activity.

Sometimes a father’s answer to his child is no. If God, like a father, denies us what we want now, it is in order to give us some far better thing later on. The will of God, we can rest assured, is invariably a better thing, but having asked for what we wanted now provides the occasion for us to say, “Nevertheless not my will but thine be done.”

• Elisabeth Elliot, God’s Guidance as excerpted from the KJV Devotional Bible, Hendrickson Publishers, 2011 Edition.