Thy Will Be Done

There are only two classes of people in the world: those who say, “My will be done,” and those who say, “Thy will be done.” There are those who are autonomous and those who are truly godly. Those who are autonomous will say, “I did it my way.” Those who are pious say, “I did it God’s way.”

Autonomous people are deceived by the devil, because there are no truly autonomous people in the world. Either you are a child of the devil or you are a redeemed child of God. Either you obey your father the devil, or you obey your Father in heaven. Either you have confidence in yourself, or you have faith in Jesus Christ. Either you trust in God, or you trust in gold.

According to the Scriptures, the vast majority of people are children of the devil. Jesus himself said, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). John writes, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). Paul says, “[God] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves” (Col. 1:13).

Who is your father? You can answer that question by answering a second one: Whose will are you doing? May God help us to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done [by us] on earth as it is in heaven.”

My Will Be Done

James starts by calling, “Come now!” (v. 13). That is an imperative. He calls his people to come and listen to him. He will speak to them the wisdom of God and tell them how they must live in this sinful world. He calls these people “believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (Jas. 2:1), but they were not living holy lives.

Sometimes Christians live like pagans. Though they profess Christ, they live as practical atheists. They lean onto their own understanding. The psalmist says, “In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God” (Ps. 10:4). But in Proverbs we read, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Prov. 3:5–6). As we trust in God, he will make our lives successful.

In James 4:13, James gives expression to the pride of Christians who are not walking in the way of God. He gives expression to the planning of professing Christian businessmen. James is reading their minds. They are saying, “We will go today or tomorrow. We will go into this specific city,” as they point to a map. “There we will work for a year. There we will trade, and we will make money.” These people are totally confident of the future.

Their idea is this: “With all the money we make, we will buy a large estate in Galilee and live like the rich man of Luke 16, without having to work. What a great retirement!” This is their goal: “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day” (Luke 16:19).

Jesus warned about serving money. He said, “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money [Mammon]” (Matt. 6:24). And Paul wrote, “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Tim. 6:6–10).

James also speaks about the arrogance of wealth: “But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business” (Jas. 1:10–11; see also James 5:1–6). The apostle John also warns us, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:15–17).

Today people come to America, legally or illegally, either to make a lot of money or to be taken care of by our government. But James is not rebuking people for planning or working or making money. Jesus himself worked as a carpenter and made money to support his family. He also paid the temple tax, and he paid for both himself and Peter with a four-drachma coin taken from the mouth of the first fish Peter caught at the direction of Jesus.

Jesus himself was supported by people who were financially well-off (Luke 8:1–4). And he said, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests. But the Son of man has no place to lay his head.” Jesus owned nothing. He was the Lord who created all and maintains all, but he owned nothing. Yet he was the happiest person who ever lived on the face of the earth.

It is true that we cannot live without money, and God will provide us with sufficient money when we work six days a week. James is rebuking the godless self-confidence of these merchants. Jesus said, “Without me, you can do nothing.” We need God most of all. He also said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you as well” (Matt. 6:33).

Pride blinds us to reality, especially the reality of God. So we read, “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building.” God was not in their thinking. “But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:28–29). Jesus himself asks, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26). Jesus warned, “Watch out against greed. A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15).

We have our plan, and God has his plan concerning us. We are not to do our plan. We are to seek God’s plan for us and do it and prosper. In Isaiah 56:12 we read about man’s plan: “‘Come,’ each one cries, ‘let me get wine! Let us drink our fill of beer! And tomorrow will be like today, or even far better’.” And look at what the bumper-crop farmer said: “I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry’” (Luke 12:18–19). But God had his plan, so he said to him, “‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20–21).

We may think that our way is God’s way, but it is not. We read, “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed” (Prov. 16:3). But we also read, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Prov. 16:25). In Genesis 3, Adam did not check with God before he ate of the fruit. He did not have God in his mind, and so he sinned. In Genesis 16, Abram listened to Sarai and brought great trouble on his family. Our plans without God will destroy us. The ancient peoples wanted to build a city, Babel. But God came down and destroyed it (Gen. 11).

True happiness is found, not in having a lot of money, but in God alone. The psalmist says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps. 73:25–26).

A great man named Harry Ironside said a century ago:

Alas, how much is sacrificed for money! Christian fellowship, the joys of gathering at the table of the Lord, gospel work, and privileges of mutual edification and instruction in divine things—all are parted with often simply because the opportunity arises of adding a few paltry dollars to the monthly income and savings. Brethren with families even will leave a town or city where the spiritual support and fellowship of their brethren is found, and where there children have the privilege of the gospel meeting and the Sunday-school, simply because they see, or fancy they see, an opportunity to better their earthly circumstances. Alas, in many instances, they miss all they had hoped for, and lose spiritually what is never regained!”¹

People who do not seek God are ignorant of reality, for God is the ultimate reality. They are ignorant of their own frailty and their need of continuous dependence on God. Without God, no one can exist. Yet these self-confident merchants James speaks of made their plans without God. They knew nothing about what would happen the next day.

We cannot control anything, let alone the future. God alone is sovereign and does what he pleases. He controls the future. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, though we may confidently make plans, whether about tomorrow or for a year from now.

People are always making plans. The 239 people who boarded Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 had plans. They did not know what would happen, and they perished. About 302 people, mostly teenagers, died when the ferryboat capsized and sunk in South Korea. Forty-one people died in Oso, in Snohomish County, Washington, when the earth unexpectedly moved.² What about your confident plans without God!

We don’t even know the real truth about our lives. We are ephemeral, for a day. We are like the wildflower James spoke about (Jas. 1:10–11). We are like vapor, breath, mist that appears for a little while and then disappears. As fallen creatures, we are born to die. Some may live for a day and others for seventy or eighty years. But life is full of pain and suffering. Then we must die due to illnesses, accidents, plagues, wars, terrorism, and so on. Our epitaphs will show only two dates: birth and death.

What is man—proud, rich man? In Proverbs 27:1 we read, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” The psalmist says, “Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it” (Ps. 39:6). He also declares, “For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers” (Ps. 102:3). He also says, “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (Ps. 103:15–16). We also read, “[God] remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return” (Ps. 78:39). And Moses prayed, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

Belshazzar, the playboy king of Babylon, thought he could blaspheme the living God and still enjoy a long life. But God showed up and wrote on the wall about the destiny of this wicked man: “Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin.”³ He was killed that very night.

Nabal the fool mocked God’s chosen king, David. He was killed by God himself by a heart attack. He failed to have God in his thinking (1 Sam. 25).

Since the Fall, every man is a dying man. We come and go, in God’s appointed time, to our eternal home. Either we die in Christ and go to heaven, or we die in our sins and go to eternal misery, as rich man of Luke 16 did. He trusted in his wealth and ignored the Messiah, who was revealed in the Law and the Prophets. He was a fool.

I pray we will seek God’s plan, not ours. May we say with the hymnist:

There are many things about tomorrow I don’t seem to understand,

but I know who holds tomorrow, and I know he holds my hand.

Thy Will Be Done

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 103, asks, “What do we learn from the third petition in the Lord’s Prayer [i.e., ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’]?” The answer is, “We pray that God, by his grace, would make us able and willing to know, to obey, and to submit to his will in all things as the angels do in heaven.”

Instead of having this attitude, those who are godless, self-confident, and foolish presume about the future. This is not saying we should not make plans. There is nothing wrong with planning. God’s people ought to plan. But they ought to add to their plan the key qualifier “ean ho Kurios thelêsê,” “if the Lord wills,” that is, if our glorious Lord Jesus Christ wills, whose happy slaves we are (Jas. 1:1).

We are to know, love, and do God’s will all of our very short life. “If the Lord wills” is not a talisman, some magic phrase that we tack onto our plan and pretend that God will take care of us. No. It has to be God’s plan. We must pray, “O God, reveal to me your plan in reference to this issue.”

Jesus commanded us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. We are to pray, “Not my will but thine be done.” And God’s will is revealed in the book, the sacred Scriptures. We are to read it daily, and know, obey, and submit to God’s will in all of life. The light of the Scripture will guide our feet in this dark world. (PGM) So we read, “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (Isa. 30:21).

Parents are to teach the Scriptures to their children and live by the Scriptures before them. The children are to grow up to become godly and live in obedience to God’s will. Godly ministers are to preach and teach the holy word. All God’s people are to know God’s word, live by God’s word, and counsel one another by God’s word.

As God’s saints, we should ask the question: What does the Lord say about this matter? We are to say with Samuel, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” Jesus came to do the will of God, and the Bible tells us that he always did what was pleasing to the Father. In his Son, the Father was well-pleased. Do you know why? It is he of whom the psalm speaks: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart’” (Ps. 40:6–8; see also Heb. 10:5–7).

Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy will be done,” and he himself prayed that prayer as he faced the cross. He said, “Not my will but thine be done” (Luke 22:42). He acknowledged in John 17:4 that he had fully obeyed the Father, giving honor to him. And after his death on the cross, God the Father raised his Son from the dead and highly exalted him. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the Savior and Judge of all. He alone is Sovereign and has all authority.

We are to do things if they are the Lord’s will. When Paul left Ephesus, he promised, “I will come back if it is God’s will” (Acts 18:21). In Romans 1:10 he says, “And I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.” Peter speaks similarly: “It is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil” (1 Pet. 3:17).

We are tempted daily to do the will of the devil. But as God’s people, we submit to God by doing his will. As we resist the devil, he shall flee from us, for our Lord Jesus Christ is the victor who defeated the devil once for all by his death and resurrection.

Every unbeliever can only do the will of the devil. But God has made his people able to do God’s will (posse non peccare, “possible not to sin”). We are born of God, and the Holy Sprit dwells in us and guides us. He is our strength, so that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength.

So we will live, if the Lord wills. We will work, if the Lord wills. We shall do many things in the will of God. That is why we must listen carefully to the counsel of our parents, teachers, and godly pastors. We must pray, plan, study, get a job, get married to a godly spouse, and raise godly children. We must worship, witness, and love God’s holy people, and grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ through his word.

The purpose of our very brief lives is to know God in Jesus Christ and serve him by making him known to the world. We are the light of the world and the salt of the earth. In his article “Ye Are the Salt of the Earth,” J. Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Seminary, reminds us of our God-given role.⁴ The purpose of the Christian life is to do good works (i.e., to obey God) to God’s glory.

Paul says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). He also writes, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). He exhorts, “Redeem the time. Make the most of every opportunity because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16, author’s wording). He also exhorts, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28). He tells the Corinthians, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58). We must obey God. Paul also says, “If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me” (Phil. 1:22), that is, for God.

We have to do the will of God. Good works. Paul writes, “But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God” (1 Tim. 5:4). He says, “Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord. Greet my dear friend Persis, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord” (Rom. 16:12). God does not like lazy people. So Paul admonishes, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8).

An idle man is wicked. He is violating the fourth commandment. Such a person should be put out of the church. Paul writes, “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you” (2Thess. 3:6-8). And this is what Jesus did to the lazy man who received one talent: “Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’ His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! . . . Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’” (Matt. 25:24–26a, 30).

If you want to know the will of God, come as an obedient child of God in prayer. He will answer your prayer and guide you in the way you should go for his glory and for your eternal happiness.

God’s people are rich toward God and rich in good works. The wicked boast in their achievements and in themselves. But we know from the Scriptures what is good. Then we do what is good, thus fulfilling God’s purpose for our lives. We do not boast in ourselves or in our achievements. All our achievements are fruits of God’s grace. We boast in God, and we boast in our weaknesses. Paul writes, “Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’” (1 Cor. 1:31). He also says, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10).

Application

Let us, then, consider the following points of application:

1. Have you committed your life to Jesus Christ to do his will all of life?
2. If you have done so, then you have nothing to worry about. Jesus has given you eternal life. For Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
3. All people will either die in Christ and go to heaven, or die in their sins and go to eternal misery.
4. We are just a mist, a wild flower that appears for a little while and then disappears. We must receive eternal life from Christ and live forever in service to God, like the angels do in heaven.
5. We must know what is good and do what is good, such as, “Children, obey your parents”; “Repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”; “Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her”; “Husbands, provide for your families.” Study God’s word, pray, and worship God privately, in the family, and in the church with God’s saints.
6. Follow the admonition of Jesus: “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (John 13:17).
7. Business is a spiritual activity. It is not a sin. Lydia, Aquila, and Priscilla were businesspeople.
8. Making a profit in business is righteous, not sinful.
9. If you work six days a week, you shall not lack money.
10. Live a debt-free life to God’s glory.
11. Christians should give to God, give to the needy, and save for their own retirement. All these activities godly.
12. Do what is right, not what you like.
13. What is right is the will of Christ.
14. There is blessing for covenant keeping.
15. There is curse for covenant breaking.
16. We don’t need to pray whether we should get up in the morning, get dressed, brush our teeth, go to school, go to work, or pay our bills. We don’t have to pray about these things. They are the right things to do. Don’t waste time praying about such things.

May God help us to seek and find God’s and do it for his glory!

¹ Harry A. Ironside, Notes on the Minor Prophets (Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux, 1966), 329–330.

² These tragedies occurred March 14, 2014; April 16, 2014; and March 22, 2014, respectively.

³ “This is what these words mean: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians” (Dan. 5:26–28).

⁴ http://www.metropolitantabernacle.org/Matthew-5-13-J-Gresham-Machen-on-Separation