If It Is Your Will

A friend of mine berated me for praying, "if it is Your will." "You have to have faith," he told me. "That's just a cop out." Truthfully, I suppose we often use it that way. Like, "This prayer is really big and perhaps radical. I'm not sure I have enough faith for this" or "I'm not sure I am confident enough to know God's will here" or "I don't even know what I want to pray here." So we don't do the hard work -- the believing, the discovery, the examination.

That, however, is not always the case. The best place to go to find out is, of course, Scripture. And more than once Jesus prayed this way. Teaching His disciples how to pray, He included, "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matt 6:10) Clearly Jesus had sufficient faith, confidence in God, and the proper prayers. This wasn't a cop out. Most notably He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, "Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will." (Mark 14:36)

Cop out? No! Jesus was facing the ultimate sacrifice at this point and He knew it. He made His request known -- "remove this cup from Me" -- not out of a lack of faith or a lack of clarity, but out of a heart speaking to His "Abba," His Father. His final statement wasn't a cop out. It was an agreement, a submission, a surrender. "Yet not what I will, but what You will." If "Remove this cup from Me" was His heart speaking to His Father, so was "What You will." "Father, I want this, but more than that I want Your will."

The prayer for the will of God need not be a dodge, a cop out, a failure to pray properly. Jesus taught it. Jesus practiced it. And asking that God's will be done ought, actually, to be at the heart of all our prayers. "This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us." (1 John 5:14) If He is our first love, asking Him to do His will in all situations reminds us that we don't know how to pray (Rom 8:26). It puts His will at the forefront and ought to be our pleasure and our passion, a sweet surrender of our lesser desires.