Your Kingdom Come

After establishing ourselves as the ‘receiver’ and recognizing God as the only one that is holy, we allow our will to be removed from us as we settle into a position that most don’t think comes until at the end of a long struggle: total submission into His will.

You see, most people imagine that the ‘act’ of prayer is like a ‘play.’ We moan, we cry, we petition, and we ‘act’ out our part. Then, after a reasonable and noble amount of time of ‘kicking against the goads’ we finally stop resisting and melt into complete surrender. It sounds very noble. But the problem is that the nobility is ours. When we place ourselves in struggle of wills, we place ourselves in the position of a warrior. We are in a ‘battle’ and therefore we have power and honor, so we place ‘Your will be done’ at the end of our prayers. It’s the final part of the ‘battle.’

Jesus, however, goes straight to the heart of the matter. He calls for an immediate surrender of the will, and only then does the prayer follow. He does not allow us to be put in a position where we are honored for our struggle. He says surrender now – forgo the struggle, especially if you think by wrestling you are bringing some kind of honor upon yourself. Our nobility will be found in submission to Him, not in our struggle.

He is asking us to open up our hands as we pray. A clenched fist – how most of us seem to pray – is a position of fighting. An open palm, raised high to the Lord, is a position of surrender and submission. You can literally feel the difference in your body, in your posturing, in your frame of mind, when you close your fist or open your palms up to the Lord. You can’t fight someone with an open, uplifted palm; it is a position of surrender. He is asking us to open our hands before we offer our pleas and petitions.

When Christ was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the battle was won, in a sense, when He said, “Your will be done.” It is the key point, the turning point, of that prayer and of any prayer. All victory comes after it. Jesus stood up after praying, and then stood down His betrayer and those who had come to arrest Him. As Christ shows us here, complete victory can be won at the beginning of the prayer.

Your kingdom. Your will. Not mine. Not that of the church. Not that of the deacons or the congregation – even if it is by a 2/3 vote. Not the trends of the culture. Not the traditions of the past. It is certainly not based on how we feel at the moment. We are asking for His will - right now.

We have an interesting tendency in our churches. We hold meetings in which we open in prayer, asking for His guidance. Then we proceed to make all of our plans. Finally we close our meeting and ask Him to bless those plans. We, as individuals and as churches, need to surrender to His will throughout every moment of every meeting. Every prayer is to be a place of submission. And as we will see in the next phrase, it is about His Kingdom, not our own earthly place of ministry and personal agendas. His kingdom come, His will be done.