Jesus teaches His the disciples an intriguing prayer in Matthew 6:10:
“Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Embedded within the instruction is the notion that God’s will may not be happening on earth now and, therefore, we need to pray that it does happen. The reasoning goes like this: if God’s will were being done then Jesus would not tell His disciples to pray for God’s will to be done. Does this mean God is not a sovereign over everything that occurs? Is God contingent or dependent on us doing certain things (through prayer) to make what He wants come to be? If God is not contingent or depending on our prayers then what does He mean when he tells us to pray for God’s will to be done? Where is the balance in the application to my life of this passage and the other passages in the Bible that teach about the sovereign rule of God? There are some who resolve this tension by inserting the word, “let.” “Let your Kingdom come, let Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” While I appreciate the effort to clarify I do not think that adding this word resolves the tension. “Let” may dull the tension, but the interplay between God’s will happening now with what God wills to happen ultimately still seems to be, at best, muddy and, at worst, in conflict.
In seeking to get a handle on the tension felt between God’s will being done due to His sovereign decree and God’s will yet to be done as referenced by Jesus in this teaching, I sited a story written by John Piper called prayer and predestination that outlines a conversation between the characters “prayerful” and “prayerless”. I think the story is helpful to frame the interplay surrounding praying for God’s will to be done.
I say “Yes” and “No.”
Just depends on what you mean by will…..
If the person praying means let Your sovereign will come to pass, that would be slightly redundant since it IS going to occur-regardless.
If the person praying means let Your will of salvation be done (1 Tim 2:3-4), or Your will of sanctification be done (1 Thess 4:3), or Your will of being filled with the Spirit be done (Eph 5:17-21), or Your will of submission be done (1 Peter 2:13-15), or Your will of suffering be done (2 Tim 3:12), or Your will of thankfulness be done (1 Thess 5:18) then those are the things that may or may not come to pass as fully as God has commanded they do in His Scriptures due to the sin nature that still resides in us. These are the things that we are to pray for in humble submission to Him-and these are the prayers that God delights to answer with affirmatives!
I disagree somewhat, Pat. I don’t think your “ifs” are necessary (while they are true) to qualify this prayer. Let me explain…
We often use the word “confess” when talking about admitting sins to God (that he already knows) and speaking of what we believe. Confess comes from a Latin root that means “to admit, to speak,” with “con” meaning “together with, the same as.” So confessing anything to God means agreeing with him about it–for instance, confessing a sin means to admit to God that you now see (or wish to see) that sin in the same way as he does.
Much of the purpose of prayer, as far as I know, is to teach us to think God’s thoughts after him and to agree with his desires. So I understand the prayer “let/may your will be done” to simply be our agreeing with the sovereign way in which God has decided to run the world. Just because it would have happened that way whether we prayed that or not does not make our prayer redundant. When Mary prays, “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38), it is not because her assent is required–she is simply expressing her wish that God’s incontrovertible will be done in her life–essentially, that her desire lines up with God’s. This is a necessary prayer for the follower of Christ, not a redundant one.
As a side note, I think this is the way with much prayer. Some prayers God has ordained that his purposes would be accomplished through. Most prayers are more for us than him–to teach us to open to his Spirit and to align our desires with his own.