What is the Will of God?

They are just four words, but they bear an infinite weight of importance. They are one of the seven petitions expressed in the prayer that Jesus himself gave us, also known as The Lord’s Prayer. And Jesus himself is the example of perfect adherence to those very words. He honored the Father’s will with his whole heart, his whole mind, and his whole strength.

These four words reveal the one way, the perfect way, the clearest and most direct path that can lead us to the kingdom of God. Jesus calls it the narrow road. “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to eternal life, and only a few find it” (Mt. 7:13-14). That narrow road represents God’s will for us. It is the way back to him and his kingdom.

Those four words reveal the truth to us by way of contrast to the will of the world. The wide gate and the broad road represent the ‘wisdom’ of the world. They represent the fleeting, fickle, flawed, and more often than not, the false attractions of the world that appeal to our egos, our desires, our own wills. And when we follow our egocentric wills, our passions, we get caught up in chasing after all that glitters, all that appeals to the immediate gratification of our senses. These are the wide gates and the broad roads that Jesus refers to in the passage above from Matthew’s Gospel. Our egos perceive these things as the means to happiness, but in the end they, more often than not, lead to frustration, even to the darkness of despair. While they may sometimes result in temporary pleasures and momentary happiness, they never fulfill our deepest needs.

What is the will of God? To find the answer to this transcendent question, we need look no further than the Gospels. There we can see God’s will expressed without ambiguity in the life and words of Jesus. The will of God is expressed on every page of the scriptures. His will is to call us back to the original innocence he made us in, to bring us home to Paradise, to the Garden where we can once again walk with him in the undivided joy of his perfect peace. The scriptures not only tell us what God’s will is, but how to live it. For a couple of examples, see the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel in chapters 5-7, or Matthew 25: 34-45.

As we see in Genesis 1 and 2, the original sin was pride. That dark shadow of the sin of pride is repeated over and over again in scripture, from the story of Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel, and the story of the Tower of Babel, to the ultimate betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot. The only remedy for pride is humility. Humility is the virtue that empowers us to seek God’s will and to willingly follow his path back out of the darkness of sin and death. In those four words, Jesus is teaching us to pray for the gift of humility, the ability to know God’s will, and for the courage and commitment to live in accord with God’s will, to make it a habit in our daily lives.

To pray, “Thy will be done,” is to believe in God’s love and mercy. It is our humble submission to God’s perfect will that makes it possible for God’s kingdom to come to us individually at our own deaths, and ultimately, we earnestly pray, to the world.