9. The Will of God
I wonder if the disciples had as hard of a time as we do today figuring out what the will of God is. Jesus said that we should pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are all for that, if we only knew what it was.
We may have a broad sweeping outline of what God may want in the world, but the specifics may not agree with the general plan. We may believe that God wants all nations to come to a knowledge of Him, but we may not believe that this particular nation is meant to come to Him at this time. They may have another time when God will sovereignly work in that nation, but for now He may want them to go on blindly for a few more centuries.
We may believe that God sometimes heals people and that Jesus healed everyone who came to Him for healing, but we would consider it presumptuous today to say that in any particular case God would want to do so.
The problem here is that Jesus has just told us in this passage where He teaches us how to pray that often we will have to pray like a man going out in the middle of the night to get food from a friend. The one man is already in bed, and the other man would probably prefer to be in bed himself.
But Jesus said that this first man goes out to look for bread and he’s not going to go back home without it. Now if that were us, we would probably think, either while we are driving to that friend’s house and certainly after the friend tells you that you are nuts to bother him in the middle of the night, how ridiculous it is to expect someone, anyone, to get up in the middle of the night. How selfish, how thoughtless, how inconsiderate!
We see the part about praying that God’s will be done, and we think that there is this great gulf between what God wants and what we would want. We have become afraid to say beforehand that anything in particular is God’s will, and we are reluctant to press on in any matter for any particular outcome. We always allow that perhaps for some reason that we don’t know, God may choose to do other than what we might think is best.
The main reason for all this uncertainty, I believe, is the prayer that Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane
But we forget something. Jesus already knew what God’s will was. And, frankly, as a human, He was hoping that maybe there might be another way to do this. But if things were to go on as planned, that would be perfectly fine with Him.
But we have taken these words in the sense that we can never really know the will of God in a particular matter. We just make our requests and then leave it in the hands of God.
The problem with that is that we end up judging or deciding what God’s will was by how things turned out. And that is exactly what Jesus was telling us not to do. That man would not have gone out at midnight looking for bread, and he certainly would not have insisted that his friend get up and give it to him. And he certainly would not keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking.
He would have prayed once, twice. He may call all his friends to pray, but not that this should make any difference, because they would all pray for the same thing: whatever it is that God wants.
The intensity of the desire for a particular outcome might prompt us to beg and plead for a certain outcome, but ultimately we let go of our demands, because they might not be God’s will. And, of course, who are we to make demands of God anyway?
I don’t think Jesus would share our concern in this matter. We are God’s agents on earth to bring about His will, to bring His kingdom to humankind. How can we possibly do this, if we don’t even know what it is?
We act as if our desires are so different from what God would want. This didn’t even seem to have entered Jesus’ mind.
He did start the prayer out with: “Let Your kingdom come. Let Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” So, yes, that is to be our desire too, first and foremost. But what exactly do those prayer requests mean?
Years ago, there was much talk about this kingdom being a future kingdom that God would bring to earth. I think the common understanding of this now is of more and more people coming to God and becoming a part of His kingdom. I think there is also a little more to it than that.
Just a chapter earlier in Luke, Jesus is sending out His disciples on a mission to go before Him. Part of that mission included healing the sick. And when they did that, they were to tell the people that the Kingdom of God
The point here is that the Kingdom of God Kingdom of God
In one of Paul’s letters, he speaks of us having been delivered out of the authority of (the) darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of His love.[2] So the contrast is being either under the authority of darkness or in the Kingdom of God
The fact is that God gave us this huge book called the Bible to tell us all about Him and us, the world and how we are to fit in it. God has gone on record many, many times telling us what He would or is willing to do in certain circumstances. Our problem is that, because the Bible is an old book written a long time ago, we have had some questions about how much of anything written there applies directly to us today.
I think our real problem is that we have never really been taught how to pray. we know all the verses in that we have heard them all so many times before, but we have never really thought through what they really mean.
We can say the Lord’s Prayer by heart, but thinking that God really expects us to pray this thing everyday eludes us. We just haven’t thought of it in that way. And praying everyday for deliverance from evil? That would require a little bit of abstract thinking, because that particular verse doesn’t come right out and say that. You have to link that verse back with one a few verses earlier.
We have all struggled with issues of unanswered prayer or times when we expected the answer to manifest itself immediately. We read of all these miracles in the Bible, and they all seemed to happen right away. If we are not healed the moment we prayed for it, we think that healing must not have been God’s will.
But then why is this man banging on his friend’s door in the middle of the night? And why does he have to keep on doing it after he has already woken the man up? And why does Jesus use this illustration immediately after He gives us this sample prayer? Aren’t we just supposed to pray the prayer and go about our business, expecting God to do what it is He wants to do anyway?
The fact is that many times the answers to our prayers are not forthcoming, and we have to persist in our requests or our belief until they are. And the presumption of what Jesus is saying here is that we either know what the will of God is or at least that our requests are legitimate ones in the first place.
The very examples Jesus gave us here show that God gives us the things we asked for. Even “evil” parents give won’t give their children a serpent if they ask for a fish, or a scorpion if they ask for an egg.
But we will say that instead of a fish, God may give us a chicken. And instead of an egg, He may give us tofu. Jesus’ examples showed that the parents would not give bad things instead of good, but we believe that God’s ideas of good can and often are very different from our own.
What happens is that we have lost all sense of what good things are. Even the worst tragedies can have some good thing come out of it, even though we have to look hard and long to find it. But we are so convinced that these bad things can indeed be God’s will that we accept even the littlest good thing that we can find as evidence that that evil thing was God’s answer to our prayer.
Now we have all known cases where people have prayed hard and long for things that never happened. I have seen that many times. I must admit that in many of those times the people praying had no idea what God’s will was. Most often these cases have been in the areas of healing or the conversion of loved ones.
I bring up healing again, because that seems to be a defining experience in people’s lives. How they see God act in those cases affects how they see and expect Him to act in every other case. I must defer you again to my other book for any questions about that. It’s just too big of a topic to deal with here.
But again, we have to be taught how to pray. It’s not that God has set up these rules; and if you don’t follow the rules, He just won’t bother to answer the prayer, at least the way you want it.
But the rules merely describe how things are. Everything in life has rules, whether it’s toasting bread or driving your car. The important thing to remember is that rules are not usually arbitrary ones. They just tell you how the thing works. And prayer is the same way. If we don’t understand how it works, we will get different results from what we wanted. And if won’t be because God didn’t want to answer your prayer the way you wanted.
That’s why the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.
So we are praying for God’s will to be done on earth. Do we know everything about what God would want? No, but not in the way we commonly think. We act as if there is no pattern to what God wants in the world. And the reason is that we don’t see any pattern to the things that happen in the world or to our prayers. Some people get well, and some people die. Some people get saved, and some people don’t. Some people are miraculously delivered from evil, while others get it head-on. And these are all people that we have been praying for.
The question, of course, is whether the reasons have to do with us, God, or some other reason. I suspect that the reason is more that we have never really been taught how to pray. We like to think that it doesn’t make a difference, that God will do what He wants anyway.
This prayer of the Lord shows us that that is not the case. First, we have to be taught how to pray. Secondly, He tells us in broad outline what God’s will is. And, thirdly, He tells us that we may have to keep after it until we get it.
I don’t want to be too simplistic here. After all, I had to write a much larger book just on healing, because it is so hard for so many people to believe that God really wants us well. But the fact that Jesus wants us to be bold and persistent in our prayers shows us that He does not want us to keep wondering if God might really want to bless us. It shows us that our concerns are generally needless, and we err more on the side of caution than on the side of faith.
If you are not bold in your prayers, I think we can safely say that we are missing something very basic in our understanding of God and prayer. This is one of the reasons that Jesus had to teach us how to pray.
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