“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew 6:10 NASB1995
In this perfect disciple’s prayer, we greet our Father in Heaven and recognize the ultimate holiness of His Name. Now we recognize that His Kingdom will come and comes first and His will is our will. In Heaven, God’s will is instantly obeyed (except when Lucifer and his followers were cast out), but that will is often not followed on Earth, sometimes because of the influence of that same evil that was cast out. God’s Kingdom, through our Lord Jesus, is also not everywhere on Earth, so it is still “coming”. The Great Commission at the end of Matthew states the following:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:19-20 NASB1995
Every week in our intercessory prayers, we pray for the Unreached peoples, using the Joshua Project app as a reference. According to their website, there are 17,428 distinct ethnic or regional groups in the world and 7,415 of those groups are truly Unreached (translates into 3.34 billion people or 43% of the world’s population). So the Kingdom is still coming and Jesus wants believers to make disciples in every nation. Sadly, many of those nations that were firmly in His Kingdom are now slipping away due to the many secular influences on society.
And how do we do His will ahead of our own? We can be resentful or half-hearted or we can realize that Jesus, when facing the worst day, completely submitted His will to the Father without question. We are invited to bring His will and His kingdom to Earth. David Guzik from Enduring Word commentary has this to say:
iii. “He that taught us this prayer used it himself in the most unrestricted sense. When the bloody sweat stood on his face, and all the fear and trembling of a man in anguish were upon him, he did not dispute the decree of the Father, but bowed his head and cried. ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.’” (Spurgeon)
iv. A man can say, “Your will be done” in different ways and moods. He may say it with fatalism and resentment, “You will do your will, and there is nothing I can do about it anyway. Your will wins, but I don’t like it” or he may say it with a heart of perfect love and trust, “Do Your will, because I know it is the best. Change me where I don’t understand or accept Your will.”
v. One might rightly wonder why God wants us to pray that His will would be done, as if He were not able to accomplish it Himself. God is more than able to do His will without our prayer or cooperation; yet He invites the participation of our prayers, our heart, and our actions in seeing His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
My next Sermon on the Mount Lord’s Prayer devotional examines Matthew 6:11 - Give us our daily bread.
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash
Enduring Word commentaries from David Guzik are used with written permission.