Finding Hope: Battle of the Wills

I want to talk about the battle for wills. My wife and I raised three daughters. If you raise children there are times when you will find conflict – battling who’s in charge; battling who’s will it will be.

I can remember with the girls, as we raised them, that one of the things we’d often come to is they wanted to do something and I wasn’t gonna let them do it. And they would say, “Dad, why can’t we do this?” And my response was, “Because I’m your father.” That wasn’t necessarily the most satisfying response that they ever heard, but it is true. God put me in a place, He put my wife and I in a place, that we are responsible for raising these girls. As they got older we loosened things up to allow them to do different things. But the battle for the will and who’s in charge is always gonna be there.

But you know, the same thing is true as we think about our Heavenly Father. Isn’t it? When Jesus’ disciples asked Him, “Lord how should we pray?” Jesus responded to them to pray this way: “Our Father in heaven hallowed be thy name. Your kingdom come…” And then He says this: “Your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.”

As children of our Heavenly Father, don’t we face the same battle that we as earthly parents face? I want things to be based upon what I want, “Lord. I want to be the one in charge. I want it to be my will.” And yet, when Jesus teaches us to pray it’s a submission of our wills to His will. “Your will be done Father, on earth as it is in heaven.”

There should be a way that I respond to God that surrenders my will to His will. It sounds easy but it’s not. We all battle within us the desire – the human nature, the sin nature – to have things our way. We like to be the ones who make the call. That’s why praying the Lord’s prayer, as maybe many of us do in the churches that we attend or we do it on our own on a daily basis, is important.

The words are familiar. You can say that prayer in a very short period of time. But to say the prayer and to have it actually take affect in my life and in your life is a lifelong process. I want to surrender my will to His will. Because I want to believe, and I do believe, that His ways are above my ways. But His ways are for my best. So, the next time you pray the Lord’s prayer and you say those words, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, my prayer is that you’ll surrender your will to Him.

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