"Your Will Be Done"

As we now finish the third petition of the Lord's Prayer, and as we break away from this third petition beginning with verse 11 next week, we'll see that the attention shifts from—I'm having some audio difficulties—the attention will shift from the Lord being the ground, the focus, the point of contact of the beginning of the Lord's Prayer to then the needs of the disciple being the content, being the focus of the Lord's Prayer.

I hope I don't have to project for 50 minutes, but I'll try. So when we understand the nature of the Lord's Prayer, again, as we've said even last week, we begin with this emphasis on God. God's glory.

God's kingdom. And as we'll see this morning, God's will being done. And that has to support, as it were, become the foundation of everything else that follows. And so we don't begin our prayers with daily bread or the things that we need.

We begin our prayers by addressing God and who He is. As we gathered on Thursday evening, it was very encouraging again to remind ourselves of helpful acronyms like ACTS and begin just with adoration before we confess and thanksgiving before we make our requests known to God.

And Jesus Himself is teaching us how to do this. In other words, if we began the Lord's Prayer with verse 11, we'll already have a skewed understanding about our relationship to God and to the world and our relationship to God and to our neighbor.

We have to allow who God is and what God is doing to become the very ground and foundation of all that our prayer lays hold of. And so I hope as we move on from the third petition this morning to the fourth petition that we won't soon forget what we've seen.

When you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they'll be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.

In this manner, therefore, pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So that's what we're looking at this morning. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

God's will relates very closely to God's kingdom and God's name being hallowed. You could put it this way. God's will is that His name would be hallowed. God's will is that His kingdom would arrive in its consummated fullness.

And so when we understand the nature of these first three petitions, we see how interrelated they are. God's glory, we could say, God's kingdom, God's will, these things must be held together. God's glory is God's reign.

It is God's kingdom. That is glorious. He's the glorious king within a kingdom of glory and that's His will that His kingdom would be glorious. Or if we begin with the kingdom, God's kingdom is glorious.

It accords with His perfect will or God's will being a glorious will that brings about His reign. These things all relate to one another. We cannot keep them isolated. And as with the kingdom as we saw last week, so also with God's will.

This is something already and not yet. We're going to use other terms that theologians use to help us understand that the tension of God's will, but there is something already about God's will and there is something not yet, just like the kingdom.

Kingdom is present. Jesus says, if I'm casting out demons by the finger of God, then surely the kingdom has come upon you. And so the kingdom is here, the kingdom is now, and also the kingdom is not yet.

If we don't have an exceeding righteousness over against the Pharisees, we will not enter the kingdom. There's something future oriented about the kingdom. God's will refers to His divine purposes for His people.

God's will also refers to His purpose, His redemptive purpose being accomplished throughout the world. So this is a prayer not only that His will will be realized in the lives of His people, it's much more than that, it's not less than that, but it's much more.

It's that the fullness of God's will will be accomplished and heaven and earth would be one. That's why Jesus says, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll unpack that a little bit. T .A. Carson, speaking on this passage, he says, the arrival will be the perfect accomplishment of God's will.

Not that the will is not present, not that the will is not being accomplished presently, but something is veiled about it. And of course there is resistance, there is treachery, there is rebellion against God's will, and yet in these mysterious twists that are veiled to us, God is even working through the evil that men do.

If we begin with God as King from Genesis, as we said last week, the kingdom of God is the storyline of Scripture. You can't get from the first few pages of Scripture without understanding that as a major theme.

It takes you from Genesis 1 and 3 all the way to Revelation 22. But we also understand something about the nature of how God, though His kingdom is at war, in conflict with a rival kingdom, is nevertheless still a king.

His will is still sovereign, so His will is always being accomplished, and yet how it's being accomplished is veiled. And you can't even leave the book of Genesis without that being taught. That's what we saw throughout the life of Joseph, isn't it?

Joseph, when he finally confronts his brothers who had effectively murdered him by throwing him in the pit, leaving him for dead, sending him away from his father's presence, his father's house, to an unknown fate.

And when there's that final climactic reconciliation and the brothers are mournful thinking, now it's our turn, now our brother will take vengeance on us, Joseph says, you meant it for evil, God meant it for good.

So you can't even leave the first book of the Bible without recognizing that God's will is being accomplished, not only in the lives of His people who seek to be obedient, but even the most disobedient, even Satan himself cannot but accomplish the Father's will in the world.

And so we understand there's language here that theologians have wrestled with. Scripture presents the will of God really in two distinct ways. There's always variations on this, but effectively we talk about the will that is veiled, the secret will, the will that says, you meant this for evil, God meant this for good.

And we call that His decretive will, His will of decree, that which He has decreed, that which He has ordained to pass, involving, as our Confession says, first and secondary causes, agency of voluntary and therefore responsible agents that nevertheless can never counteract but only accomplish what God has willed, what God has decreed.

Everything that happens is what He has decreed. God is in the heavens, He does whatever He pleases. What pleases Him is often veiled from our sight, and what pleases Him often we would imagine would be the very thing that would displease Him.

It doesn't please Him in terms of His holiness, it doesn't please Him in terms of His desire, but it pleases Him in terms of His ultimate purpose, which accords with His holiness, which accords with His goodness, which accords with His wisdom.

So for example, Isaiah 53 says of the Son of the Messiah, it pleased Him, that is, it pleased God to crush Him. Now we can't imagine the Father was taking any form of delight in the crucifixion of His Son.

Far from it. It pleased Him to crush Him in accord with His redemptive purpose. And so all of the prophecies, all of the ways that Jesus' death was prefigured, we recognize that though this grieved the Father, nevertheless He was pleased according to His perfect purpose, His redemptive purpose.

That's the decreed will. And then we also make a distinction between the will of decree, that which must come to pass, and His preceptive will, His will of precept. And that would be the will that is revealed to us.

He has shown us what is good. He has taught us His ways. We have His revealed word, and so His word is His precept. This is His desire. We can say this is what God desires of His people. It's what's in His word.

We can meet with one another, and we can exhort one another. Why? Because God has given us His will, that is, His preceptive will. He has told us how we ought to walk, how we ought to react, how we ought to behave.

And so we understand there's a difference between those secret aspects of God's will that are unveiled, or that are veiled, and then His unveiling of what He desires for His people. And so God reveals His will.

It's a rule for our actions, and yet even within that revealed will, there's a secret will that's being worked out in our lives and in the world around us. Jesus teaches His disciples to pray that God's will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Now what does that ultimately mean? Well, you ask the question, how is God's will done in heaven? How is God's will done in heaven? I think we could say it's certainly not done with any hesitancy. If the saints and the angels on high are surrounding the glorious splendor of the presence of God in a realm without the taint or the shadow of sin, without the veil or the canopy of the flesh in the world around us to deny that sight and presence of God, then certainly there's no reluctance.

Certainly there's nothing sullen. Certainly there's nothing pharisaical about the way God's will is accomplished in heaven. Certainly there's no one that's sort of like, you know, three trillion years on, hey Bill, how's it going today?

You know, it's okay. As I was reflecting with a brother a few nights ago, we think of heaven as the final end of redemption, as we haven't properly begun with creation, and we tend to think of that as simply a sort of ethereal state where we hold harps and dwell on clouds.

Well, it's just clouds. What's heaven like? Cloudy. A lot of clouds. Clouds and harps. Mostly clouds. That's not what Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. His desire is for the kingdom to be consummated.

That kingdom encompasses heaven and earth, such that God's will is done on earth, just like it's done in heaven. Heaven and earth, as it were, effectively becoming one. There's no longer this gap, this distance, and within that, God's will is performed, not reluctantly, not with a hint of sorrow, but effortlessly, instinctively, joyfully, without reserve, with fullness of gladness.

This is how God's will is performed in heaven. This is not how God's will is performed on the earth. Jesus says, pray for that day. Pray for that to be so. And of course, the reason it's not this way on earth, the reason there is this tension between heaven and earth, is because of the opposition of man, the rival kingdom, and the prince of the power of the air.

All the things we saw last week. Which is why Jesus goes from praying that the kingdom would come, to praying that God's will would be done on earth the way it's done in heaven. This is what the kingdom coming will accomplish.

No longer will man have a rebellious will against God, shaking his fist in a rage against the one who's enthroned above. No longer will the nations conspire and plot in vain against the one who sits on high and laughs and holds them in derision, but rather the nations themselves will stream to Zion, bringing glory to God as all the tribes and tongues of the earth share in the song of the redeemed.

And so while we're in this world with a rival kingdom, in the state of treasonous conflict, we recognize the kingdom is advancing and with it God's secret will is being worked out as his revealed will is being taught and heralded.

And one day the distance between the secret will and the revealed will will be consummated and realized forever. In other words, my understanding is when that day comes there will no longer be a will of decree that is isolated and held apart from the will of precept.

It will all be open. It will all be infinite. We will finally comprehend all that God has done and we will understand all of his ways. There will be no secret will in order to accomplish his purpose of redemption.

When redemption is accomplished, the secret will is realized as the revealed will. What had remained veiled is now fully open to discovery. These are things that even now angels long to look into. And on that day when God's will is done on earth as it's done in heaven, there will be no potential place to say, oh but Lord, what's going to happen now and what are you doing with this and how is this meant to be?

We will rather understand perfectly the secret will as the revealed will. The revealed will as what had been the secret will. You see? The will of decree, the will of precept. But in the meantime, and where I want to go in the sermon this morning, it's not so much elaborating upon that day for what mind can truly fathom it, but rather focusing on the fact that right now on earth God's will is not done as it's being done in heaven.

And Jesus says pray, orient yourself to God's glory and God's kingdom in such a way that your heart cry is for God's will to be done in your life, in your place, in this world, in the same way it's being accomplished in heaven.

Without effort, without reserve, without hesitancy, with no sorrow or regret or remorse, with no taint of sin. Pray that you would accomplish God's will in this way. Now this is what disciples do. I've been focusing on what it means to be a true hearted disciple.

Here's a great working definition of a disciple. There's a lot more than this. Disciples are those who do the will of God. They don't resist the of God. They don't abandon the will of God. Though it be a cross to bear, disciples are those who do the will of God.

Let me give you an example. This is how Jesus, in one place at least, defines what it means to follow Him, what it means to belong to Him, what it means to be a part of His family. Do you remember at the very beginning of Mark's Gospel, Jesus' family seemed to reject and even question Him.

Maybe to save face in the community, they're sort of distancing Himself and they're seeking to reclaim Him. By the way, His mother and His brothers, according to the Gospel of Mark. They seek to reclaim Him and sort of keep Him in bounds.

Stop going to teach, you're causing a lot of controversy. And so some have come as He's teaching and He has a crowd around Him and they're saying, your mother and your brothers are looking for you, you know, stop talking so much, stop making a stir, just come back home and kind of, you know, stay behind walls.

Jesus, we read, looked around in a circle at everyone who sat about Him and He said, here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother. So all these followers have come and they're sitting at the at the feet of Jesus, receiving His message of the kingdom of God, receiving His teachings about repentance and faith and Jesus says, this is my family, these are my brothers and sisters, these are my mothers and fathers, speaking in an earthly sense, and who are they?

There are those who do the will of God. That's who belongs to me, Jesus says, that's who I belong to, those who do the will of God. And this is something that Jesus Himself bears out as an example for those that He belongs to and those that belong to Him.

Jesus is the model of the one who came fully to do God's will. What is Hebrews 10, quoting this psalm? It is written of me in the book of Scrolls, behold I have come to do your will. Jesus, teaching His disciples repeatedly how to accomplish the Father's good purpose, how to trust the Father, how to bear the cross faithfully, though His disciples constantly fail to understand the will of God being worked out in the Messiah's life, constantly misunderstand the nature of His kingdom, are very quick to abandon Him when it gets really hot in the furnace of affliction, and yet Jesus stays faithful to the will of God.

Even when he was a 12 year old boy and his parents couldn't find him and he was in the temple precinct, and they finally come and they see a group of men who have given their lives decade after decade to studying the Torah, and they're sitting there marveling, they're absolutely floored at the wisdom and knowledge of this young man who Luke says was growing in wisdom and stature and in favor with men and with God.

And when Mary chides her son, and you know what it's like if you've ever had a child in a large store and you lose sight of them, you can almost sympathize with poor Mary, that the panic she must have felt in the city of Jerusalem and a 12 year old that she couldn't find.

And when she chides him, Jesus is confused. And you remember what he says, don't you know I'm always about my father's business? He's 12 years old and he says, don't you know everything I do is about my father's will.

I'm always seeking to do the work of my father. Wherever I go I'm seeking to accomplish his purpose for me going. I have come to do his will. So you have the perfect model in the Lord Jesus of a life wholly devoted to the will of God.

And he says, those who follow me, those who are my brother and my sister and I'm not ashamed to be their Lord, these are they who do the will of God. And of course to do God's will we have to look to Jesus in this way.

We realize we don't just look to him as an example as the writer of Hebrews says, we look unto Jesus as the author and perfecter of our faith. And so he not only exemplifies the way we accomplish God's will and what that requires, which we'll get into, but he also writes that out in our lives.

And by his Spirit he perfects it. In other words, he brings it about in our life. And so you ask the question, am I a follower of Jesus? To go with our theme, our pursuit this year, am I a true hearted disciple?

Well you can ask it in this way. Am I concerned to accomplish the will of God? Is my life marked by a sincere desire to follow his ways? Can I say with a full throat like the psalmist, I delight to do thy will, O Lord.

Or is most of my life pockmarked with a sort of melancholic refrain, help me to do your will, God. Not quite like the psalmist. Is your life gripped by a desire to serve yourself, which only restrains the will of God and the demands it puts upon you.

Ian Hamilton on these Sunday nights has done so well to point out the cost, counting the cost of being a disciple. Why? Because when you say I follow him, I belong to him, I confess him, there are demands placed upon your life.

And that means that these demands are about bringing the will of God to bear in and through your life. And if you seek to serve him, you will accomplish his will. But where you seek to serve yourself, you will restrain his will.

You will hinder his purposes. You read the Gospels and you see this borne out. Sometimes Jesus' disciples do more damage than the Pharisees and the scribes who are trying to capture Jesus. Sometimes it's the disciples who restrain Jesus' mission.

At least they would if they could redirect him. You remember Mark 8, the sort of triumphant revelation of Jesus as the Messiah. Finally, enough light has gotten into that pitch-black cave of Peter's awareness that Jesus is the Messiah.

Who do you say that I am? Jesus asked Peter. The Son of God. Blessed are you. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And if Peter ever felt like he had risen to the heights of acceptance and admiration, it must have been that moment and the very next words out of his mouth after Jesus reveals that the Son of God, the Messiah, must suffer and die and be buried for three days.

Jesus says, surely not, Lord. We're not going to let that happen to you. That's the one thing that cannot happen. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. When it comes to Jesus, never has the saying been more true, you're either with me or against me.

And Jesus recognizes that his disciples, in their calculus of how they ought to live their lives, would very quickly abandon the cross that he has to trust his Father is bringing about a good purpose.

And so we recognize that by the mercies of God, being a disciple means, as we've been exhorted from Romans 12, to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God. Jesus says, whoever does the will of God like that, that's my brother, that's my sister, they belong to me.

Whoever shirks the will of God, whoever seeks to serve themself and restrains and hinders God's revealed purpose for their life, there's no brother, no sister, no heir of me. So you ask the question, am I controlled by God's will?

Or am I controlled by my own will? By my self-will? Am I stirred by the will of God as it's revealed, as it's revealed perceptively in His Word, and as that veiled decree is revealed providentially in my life from blessings to trials and from trials to blessing?

That is, God's will being revealed before you. And you take his preceptive will and you apply it to that providence. How would you have me walk? How would you use this time of humility in my life to bear fruit so that many may understand your ways and bring glory to your name?

It's a life, in other words, that's in submission to God. That's all it means. To live a life where you're seeking to walk in the will of God is to live a life submitted to God. That dirty word, submission, the word that even Christians don't like to talk about much, which is in fact the crown jewel of the Son of God.

That when He came to earth, He was in perfect submission to the will of the Father. What is, in the world's eyes, shameful, the Son makes glorious. A life in submission to God. A life in submission to God that accords with what Jesus says about His disciples.

They must hate even their own lives, not just all their relations or all their worldly goods or all that their life could amount to, but yes, even their own lives if they would follow Him. You read of people that live in this very way.

We shouldn't romanticize them, but we also shouldn't deny the power of their testimony. I was reading of John and Betty Stamm who were involved with China Inland Mission back when the Revolutionary Party began to break through and begin to round up foreigners and all of a sudden for the first time the the offices of CIM and and others who were there by attachment were facing a very stark and unknown future.

What's going to happen to us? And of course the ships were at the dock ready to bring them to safe harbor and John and Betty Stamm, they had a three-month old girl, they were stationed in Jingdez, China.

The uprising came to their city, they wrote a letter and this was the letter they wrote. This was John Stamm writing, he says, my wife, my baby, myself are in the hands of communist bandits. We don't know if we'll be released.

We pray that Christ will be magnified in our bodies whether by life or by death. And they were never released, they were killed. They had counted the cost and they hated even their own lives and their desire, if you notice, their desire perfectly accords with the Lord's prayer, doesn't it?

We don't know what the will of God is. Pray that we'll have the faith to accomplish God's will. It's why we're here in Jingdez province to begin with. Pray that God's will would be done. We're a part of his kingdom advancing and if the cost of that kingdom advancing and his sovereign unfolding providence in our lives means even our death, pray that his name would be hallowed.

We want him to be magnified whether we live or we die. That's a living illustration of Matthew 6, 8, 9, and 10 right there. That is a life in submission to the will of God and God's not calling all of us to be John and Betty Stamm's, but if you're following Jesus, he is calling you to be submitted to his will, to take what he's unfolding in your life by his providence, that is his decree being worked out in your life and in the world around you, and to take his will of precept, in other words, his word, all that he has revealed to you and to apply that so that you're walking by faith and not by sight, walking in submission to the God that you seek to serve, the God that you know and love.

That's what it means to be a Christian, a life in submission to God, a life bent toward his will, not toward my own. So it is with every true servant of Christ. Jesus says if you put your hand to the plow and you look back, you're not worthy.

He recognized that there's a cost, but he doesn't say you're not serious, which is maybe the initial reaction. If you put your hand to the plow and you look back, you have hesitancy, you play the part of Lot's wife, he doesn't say, well, you're just not serious.

Come back when you're serious. No, he says you're not worthy of the kingdom to play so fast and loose, to treat so cheaply the will of the redeeming God. You're not worthy, Jesus says, if you're not willing to submit your life and everything that you are, everything that you have, so that you're not turned back or you're not easily discouraged or you don't slide out of the narrow way.

You don't hark into the ears of unconverted people as sages, as those who will bear wisdom, but rather you act like Nehemiah, I can't come down, I'm doing a great work, I've got no time for you. I'm about my father's will, I'm about my father's kingdom, I'm about hallowing my father's name.

That's what it means to be a Christian. In other words, Jesus is only interested in disciples, not who initially take up the cross, that's important, but those who taking up the cross will never cast it away.

The Christian life begins in many different ways, and for many people in this room, the Christian life has many fits and starts, but it hardly matters how the Christian life begins. What matters is how the Christian life ends.

It does not matter how the race begins. If there was a false start, if there was a stumble, if there was a misunderstanding, if there was a penalty and you were being shoved off the side, none of that really matters.

All that matters is how the race ends. Jesus is looking for His disciples to grow in the grace and knowledge of Him in such a way that His will is being accomplished in their life. As His providence and sovereignty is unfolding before them, they're applying His will, they're walking by His Word, they're abiding in Him.

This is what it means to advance His kingdom and hallow His name. This is what we pray for when we pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. You think of Jesus again, not just at age 12, but at the very end of His earthly ministry, how He was perfectly submitted to the Father's will.

As He says in John 8 that we saw some weeks ago, I always do the things that please Him. I always do what pleases my Father, and that's evident in John 10. He speaks of His death as a cup. Are you able to drink the cup that I'm about to drink?

And then when we actually come to Gethsemane and we see Him sweating blood, He's now holding that cup in His hands as it were, about to drink it to the dregs. And Jesus, in a very helpful moment for His disciples, shows us that He was in fact human.

He wasn't doing things in some supernatural, mythical way. He walked in our place as one of us, as a man, the God-man. And we see perhaps the veil of His divinity giving way to the reality of His humanity.

When holding that cup, He's trembling, sweating blood, and saying, please take this away from me. That's His prayer. Don't want to do this if there's any other way. If there's any other way. You're the God who can do all things.

You made everything there is, palm trees and crab apples and the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America. You made everything that is out of nothing. Nothing is too hard for you to do. You can accomplish anything you seek to do.

So if there's any way I don't have to drink this cup, take it from me. He's lived His whole life in perfect submission. And now He's come to the thing that He has bent Himself toward, tilting His face toward Jerusalem.

And He's on the Mount of Olives overlooking the place where He's about to be slaughtered. And He's about to descend, not just into the city as it were, but He's about to descend into the very depths of the grave, into the depths of hell as it were.

And the weight of that is causing His capillaries to burst. And He's sweating blood and trembling. He says, if there is any other way, take this from me, Father. But as He teaches us to pray here in Matthew 6 .10, He doesn't close His prayer with that.

He closes His prayer saying, nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will. When Jesus is teaching His disciples to pray, your will be done. It's not something He fails to accomplish in His own life, even when He's at pains, even when He's suffering, even when He's begging His Father for an alternative.

He submits Himself and says, may your will be done through my life, through my death, through my suffering on this earth, just like your will is done in heaven. Jesus is a model of submitting to God's will.

And He teaches His disciples that our focus in life cannot become our focus in prayer. Life is not about getting what you want. You have toddlers and that's a lesson they have to learn, right? You see them, you know, kicking puddles and looking sorrowful.

I really wanted this. And you always say as a good parent, well, life's not about getting what you want. Well, prayer is not about getting what you want either. What is Jesus teaching us in the Lord's prayer?

The frame of your prayer is about what God wants, not what you want. Now hopefully you're growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ to such a degree that what you want is what God wants, which is why James can really harp on that fact.

You ask and you'll receive, as long as you're not asking amiss. The problem is we often ask amiss because we think amiss and we're living amiss. We're living for ourselves, seeking to accomplish our will, rather than seeking what God would want and trying to align our will with God's will.

So prayer, like life, is not about accomplishing our will, obtaining our desire. It's about accomplishing God's will, obtaining what He desires. And that means that you face providences and trials and bearings of the cross that are very difficult and painful.

And that's why Jesus himself teaches us to pray this and shows us by his life how he'll go to the very depths and he's the author and perfecter of those who will follow after him. And so that even when his followers are in anguish or in terror or in the depths of depression, they can be taught by his spirit to pray not my will but your will be done.

You put it this way, all of us have a will for our lives. I've talked with some of you, I know some of you have a six month plan or a two-year plan or this or that hope, but even those I don't know as well, we all have a will for our lives, don't we?

You all have something you're hoping will come about, something you're seeking to obtain, some will that you're hoping to accomplish. You have a will for your life. It would be odd if you didn't, you know, but think this is good and I think this is even good in a godly way and this is what I really want.

All of us have a will. If we think of will as a plan, everyone has a plan for their life. Our plan often involves success. Our will for our lives is successful, right? Does anyone ever plan to be unsuccessful?

Our plan is ease. Does anyone ever plan to make things more difficult than they have to be? We're like squirrels. I've heard you catch a squirrel by putting a trap on a stick leaned against a tree because they'll always take the laziest path to the tree.

They can climb trees perfectly, but if they can go at an angle rather than upright, they'll do that and that's like us. We often get snared by the evil one because we're always looking for the path of ease and sometimes the path of ease is the wrong path.

As we sang, my God ordains what errors right and that was one of the lyrics. You set me on the proper path. The proper path often doesn't look very proper, does it? It looks pretty narrow and thorny. It doesn't look like Bypass Meadow.

So we have a plan for our lives. We often plan for our lives to go in a successful direction, in an easy direction. God has a plan for our lives too. God is ultimately concerned with our happiness, with our joy.

Not so much in this life, though He intends to give us many glimmers and sparks of joy, but He's willing to allow us to suffer in this vapor of life in order to accomplish and give as an inheritance a joy that can never be depleted, a joy that can never be taken away.

And in order to accomplish that, God's plan for our lives will often mean we're not successful, not in the ways we'd want to be, and it's not easy, not in the ways we want things to be, which is to say God's plan is usually different than our plan.

God's will for your life is very often different than your will for your life because your will for your life doesn't package into it the desire for humility to train your obedience or suffering to train your patience, but that is God's desire for your life, you see.

My plan for my life rarely factors in the need for suffering that I might be more patient or humility that I might be more obedient, but I am assured by what God has revealed that is His purpose for my life.

Thomas Watson, and he does a marvelous treatment on this. I'm only just using a sentence, but he's well worth reading, and he says, all of God's providences are to make you a doer of His will. Whatever He's allowed, however painful, however miserable, however hurtful, eyes of faith help you to look at that and say, you have allowed this to be.

You have allowed this to wound me. You have allowed this to be my anguish, the reason I soak my pillow with tears, the reason I'm losing sleep, the reason I feel isolated and alienated and alone. You've allowed all of this so that I would accomplish your will.

So we often go to prayer and we're saying, get me out of here. I have a plan. Get me out of here so I can get on with my plan, and God's saying, I have a plan too. That's why I brought you here, so that I can accomplish my plan, my will for your life.

As Watson says, every providence of God is to make you a doer of His will. Watson puts it this way. He says, the Creator makes use of every season to bring about a harvest, right? We know that. It's springtime now.