Loving God, bless and protect the life of this dear reader; in Christ Jesus I pray, amen.
Friends, yesterday found me traveling to Dallas on an early morning flight and I did not return home until 10 p.m., thus my not writing ConCafe. I appreciate your understanding.
We look now to those words that follow in Jesus' Prayer, "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10b KJV).
This prayer of Jesus is a prayer of relationship. And as is true of any relationship, trust is essential. To pray these words about God's will is to say, God, You know best and Your guidance for my life is what I need. C. S. Lewis wrote that "heaven is full of those who have prayed, 'Thy will be done,' and hell is full of those who have prayed, 'My will be done.'" Jesus knew that in Heaven, God's will is always done. As God so wishes, so it gets done. On earth we always have a choice to choose to follow God or ourselves or even the bidding of others. Jesus desired the perfectness of Heaven to come to the earth, more importantly into the lives and hearts of those who desire to follow Him. To teach this as a model of prayer is to realize that Jesus knew the reality of Heaven as well as the reality of earth, and given the choice to choose between the two, Jesus chose Heaven. And so should we. The other day as we awaited a lunch order, the young woman preparing it was listening to her friend ask her about a tale of onions. She asked the woman attending to us a question and she didn't know the answer and then asked us. "Is it true that if you're cutting onions and you cry, that you're a jealous person?" I told her I hadn't heard that about onions, but I did know that jealousy was the result of insecurity. "Trust should be the basis of your relationship." She went on to say that she was in her third marriage and she didn't know if she should trust her present husband because husbands one and two had not been faithful. I told her to leave husbands one and two where they were and to begin to trust this new one otherwise soon we'd be hearing about husband number four. God's perfect will is to desire the best for us.
Are all things the will of God? No. Sometimes the consequences of our actions lead us to places and results God did not desire for us. As an example, a noted preacher lost his son to drunk driving. One of his parishioners said, "It was God's will," thinking that would comfort the pastor. The pastor replied, "No ma'am, it was not God's will for my son to go and get drunk nor was it God's will to drive while drunk. The accident was the result of my son's actions and decisions." To seek God's will means a prayerful, trust relationship that asks God, "What would You have me do? How would you have me live?"
PRAYER: Loving God, I desire Your will for my life. I am tempted to go this way and that, but I desire Your way. Help me trust as I pray, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and ever." Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord!
Eradio Valverde
