As we saw in the previous chapter the Kingdom is a thing built by God and not by men. Only God can bring His Kingdom in, and He does it by building men into it. And we may well think, "If that is true, what is there for us to do? Where is there room for human endeavour? Are we to sit back and do nothing, except pray perhaps, and just let God get on with it?"
The answer of course is "No." The Kingdom of God is indeed established by nothing but the action of God and the power of God; but in that action God involves men who do His will. And that is why the next petition in the Lord's Prayer is "Thy will be done: as on earth, so in heaven." You cannot pray that prayer unless you include yourself in it. The man who prays, "Thy Kingdom come" is a Kingdom man, and a Kingdom man is a man who does the King's bidding.
The thrust toward personal commitment has been building with every phrase of the prayer so far. It began with the hallowing of God's Name, a prayer concerned with God's inner being. But what He is in the mystery of His hidden holiness is not a thing that remains for ever hidden; He comes out into the open. He reveals Himself: He "makes known His Name," as the Bible expresses it. And He reveals Himself by the kind of Kingdom He establishes. So the first petition, concerned with His inner being, moves on to the second, concerned with His activity which reveals Him. Then the third petition moves into the real world of daily life.
So these three petitions cluster, like concentric rings, round a centre point. The centre point is our Father in Heaven, and the prayer moves out in ever-widening circles from His inner being to the actual world in which we live.
When we pray this prayer we are praying for a mighty, universal unity: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Heaven and earth are to be united in one grand concord. God's purpose for His entire creation, as Paul reminds us, is "to unite all things in Christ: things in heaven and things on earth." (Eph. 1:10) Unity is a thing we have been committed to pray and strive for ever since the Lord's Prayer was given to us.
God's will can only be done on earth as men and women are reconciled to Him.
We live in a world where many wills are in conflict with God's, and the supreme task to which God and Christ are committed in this world, therefore, is reconciliation. It was to reconcile men to God that Jesus Christ came forth from the bosom of the Father into this rough, tough world. That is what He meant when He said He had come into the world to do His Father's will.
The means by which He did it was the blood of His Cross.
"God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself ... and now He has entrusted the ministry of reconciliation to us" ... to His Kingdom folk. (II Cor. 5:19)
In the person of Christ Jesus, God was pleased fully to dwell, so in the person of Christ Jesus the will of God was done on earth. God's active rule was at last established in a human life. And how did that rule of God manifest itself? By "reconciling to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His Cross." The Kingdom way of doing God's will is the Way of the Cross. That is the way of life to which the men of the Kingdom are called and committed.
What it means to pray "Thy will be done" is spelled out for us in Paul's letter to the Colossians. (2:15-23) Those who pray this prayer declare their willingness thereby to suffer. To use Paul's phrase in Col. 1:24, they "rejoice to complete in their own human flesh the full tale of Christ's afflictions, still to be endured." (N.E.B.)
Paul does not mean by this that there is something incomplete or inadequate about the sufferings of Christ through which He accomplished our reconciliation with God. Far from it. The work of Christ at the Cross for us men and our salvation is a finished work, and we can add nothing to it. But when that work of Christ is wrought in our hearts, the result is that His own life is begotten in us. That life is a life of obedience to the Father, and it follows therefore that our method of dealing with hostility must be the same method which Christ followed when He rendered that obedience. (G. B. Caird, 'Principalities and Powers' [Oxford] p.1 00) It is nonsense to call yourself a King's man, and not do the King's business the King's way in the King's spirit. As men and women in Christ, therefore, we shall be ready, in the strength of His given life abiding in us, to confront hostile men the same way He confronted them: and that means a readiness to absorb all the hurt their hostility can do to us, and neutralise it with forgiving love.
That is what Jesus did at the Cross. "Now you take up my Cross," He says to us.
If the life of Christ is indeed our life, it will of necessity be a life of suffering, for as we have seen already, it is by way of suffering that love wins its victories. "The powers of evil have been defeated by the obedience of Christ: they are constantly being defeated wherever Christians face them in the panoply of God; but the final triumph comes only when the divine love has absorbed the whole momentum of evil, drawn its last sting, neutralised its full effects. This final triumph is to be ... reproduced in the sons of God." In the power of the crucified and risen Lord conveyed to us it is to be so reproduced, for as we are told in Eph. 3:10, it is "through the church (you and me) that the wisdom of God (the wisdom of the Cross) is to be made known to the principalities and powers."
The men of the Kingdom are to be conformed, not to this world, but to the life of the world to come, where the King Who is worshipped there is a "Lamb as it had been slain"; and that means that we are not to pay back anyone evil for the evil they do to us, that we are not to have revenge on those who harm us, that we are not ourselves to be overcome by the spirit of evil that animates those who hate us, but to overcome that evil with good. If our enemy hungers, we are to feed him; if he thirsts, we are to give him drink; we are to heap coals of fire upon his head - which means we are to burden him with kindness till he burns with shame., for the phrase refers to the practice of sending a guest home with coals from your own fire so he did not have to light a new one there: he would carry them in a suitable vessel on his head. The will of God is wholly summed up in the two commandments of love, remember. This is the way God gives us a part in the setting up and the establishment of His kingdom. This is how He acts in us and through us to bring it in.
For Jesus Himself to pray the prayer "Thy will, not mine be done" cost Him His life. If we pray it, meaning it, it will cost us ours; for two reasons:
1. Because we are sent out into a world where God's will is not done, a world full of wills that are hostile to His. To carry God's will into such a world will provoke it to hostility. "If the world hates you, you know that first it hated me," said Jesus, "before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But I chose you out of the world; therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know the Father Who sent me. So you have sorrow now; but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no-one will take your joy from you." (John 15:18-21)
God gives us the victory in Christ: that victory He gives us is the victory of the Cross - no other.
2. Because we take into the world also a heart of our own in which God's will is not fully done; and if the strife in our own hearts is to be turned to peace, if the chaos of conflicting desires in us is to be fashioned into order, our own will must die where it conflicts with God's. The kingdom must come in our own hearts.
Our final point is that if certain conditions are observed, our conformity to the will of God is not the grim, stern business we might imagine it to be, but a joyous thing.
The prayer "Thy will, not mine be done" may perhaps strikes us as a prayer we can only pray through gritted teeth. The bending of our wills to God's will surely require a huge and heroic effort, born of a massive achievement in self-denial. Everything in us will have to be hauled round, surely, under duress. But in the Bible, it is not spoken of in that way at all, any more than it is thought that God exercises His own will that way.
1. When the Bible speaks of God exercising His will, it does not speak of Him doing it tight-lipped. It speaks of Him rather as "fulfilling His good pleasure." "Let it be Thy good pleasure to do good in Zion," the psalmist prays. (Psalm 51:18) When King Cyrus of Persia is raised up by God to restore Israel to its own land (though Cyrus himself is unaware that God is behind it), Isaiah hears God say of him, "He shall fulfil all my pleasure." (Isa. 44:28) Later on, you read, "I am God and there is no other. From ancient times I reveal what is to be: I say, 'My purpose shall take effect, and I will accomplish all that I please'." When in Isaiah 53 God speaks of His suffering Servant (anticipating the work of Christ), He describes the path of suffering He must tread by saying, "The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand."
2. When Jesus comes to do the will of God, it is not a burden to Him. The very opposite, in fact. "It is my meat and drink," He says, "to do the will of Him Who sent me." And "I do always those things that please my Father." Like the psalmist, he says with joy, "I delight to do Thy will, O God." The will of God was something that enjoyed, not only His entire consent, but also His whole desire.
3. And when the New Testament goes on to speak of the Christian fulfilling the will of God, it speaks in the same way.
"God is at work in you, both to will and to do His good pleasure." (Phil 2:13) "May God equip you thoroughly to do His will, bringing to birth and maturity in you everything that is pleasing to Him." In Rom. 12:1 we are exhorted not to let the world around us squeeze us into its own mould, but to let God remould our minds from within, so that we may discover for ourselves that the will of God for us is good. At every point, whether it speaks of God or of Christ or of the Christian, the Bible speaks of God's will being done with very great desire. Longing, joy, delight are all there to reinforce the intent. It is not as though we must set our face in the direction of God's will against the pull of every other instinct in us to draw back from it; rather, our whole being is drawn together into a working harmony of all its parts, and launched exuberantly forward.
Now the key to this happy state of things lies in the first two petitions of the Lord's Prayer. When a man loves God's Name and embraces His Kingdom, then the performance of God's will becomes his delight. The Kingdom is represented by Jesus as a treasure, so that the sacrifice a man must make to enter it does not seem like a sacrifice at all. "In his joy," says Jesus, "he goes and sells up everything he has and buys that field." (Matt. 13:44) When God's Name and God's Kingdom have captured the heart, the doing of His will is a lover's delight.
That is the point of the phrase "as it is in heaven." In heaven God's will is done with alacrity. As Psalm 103:19 tells you: "The Lord has established His throne in the heavens, and His kingdom rules over all. Bless the Lord, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His word, hearkening to the voice of His word. Bless the Lord, all His hosts, his ministers that do His will."
The obedience of the heavenly hosts is spontaneous and instantaneous, because it is their delight.
When we pray this prayer, we pray, "So may it be with us."
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