‘THY WILL BE DONE’

     ’Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.’—­MATT. vi. 10.

It makes all the difference whether the thought of the name, or that of the will, of God be the prominent one.  If men begin with the will, then their religion will be slavish, a dull, sullen resignation, or a painful, weary round of unwelcome duties and reluctant abstainings.  The will of an unknown God will be in their thoughts a dark and tyrannous necessity, a mysterious, inscrutable force, which rules by virtue of being stronger, and demands only obedience.  There is no more horrible conception of God than that which makes Him merely or mainly sovereign will.

But when we think first of God as desiring that His name should be known, and to that end mirroring Himself in all the great and beautiful, the ordered whole of creation, and energising through all the complexities of human affairs, and gathering the scattered syllables of His name into one full and articulate utterance in the Word of God, then our thoughts of His will become reverent and loving; we are sure that the will of the self-revealing God must be intelligible, we are sure that the will of the loving God must be good.  Then our obedience becomes different, and instead of being slavish is filial; instead of being reluctant submission to a mightier force, is glad conformity to the fountain of love and goodness; instead of being sullen resignation, is trustful reliance; instead of being painful execution of unwelcome duties, is spontaneous expression in acts which are easy of the indwelling love.  He who begins with ‘Thy will be done’ is a slave, and never really does the will at all; he who begins with ’Our Father, hallowed,’ is a son, and obeys from the heart.

This, then, is one reason for the order in which the clauses of the prayer follow each other, perhaps the chief reason.

Let us consider—­

I. Obedience is here set forth as the end of all divine revelation.

II.  As the issue in man of all religious thought and emotion.

III.  As the sum of all Christ’s and our desires for men.

IV.  As the bond which unites all creation into one.

I. Obedience to the will of God is the end of all divine revelation.

God’s name is made known before His will is proclaimed.  That order suggests as to God’s will—­

1.  That it is not mere naked omnipotent authority.

2.  That it is not inscrutable.

3.  That its scope and direction are to be determined by His name.  All these thoughts are included in this, that it is the will of a loving, good God, the will of a Father.

How that destroys all harsh, awful ideas such as those of a stony fate, or a cold necessity, or an omnipotent tyrant, or an inscrutable sovereign.

How Christianity has been affected by these ideas—­extreme Calvinism, for instance; but it is more profitable to think how the tendency to them lies in us all.