| The Golden Gate of Prayer |
Chapter 8 |
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But this is not a true conception of the will of God. No doubt sometimes it does involve suffering, but a thousand times oftener it leads us in paths of joy and gladness. Primarily the prayer, “Thy will be done,” has reference to doing, not to enduring. It is a prayer that we may learn to obey the commandments and do the things that God would have us do. It covers all the life of every day — in the shop and store and school, in the home and the social life, in drudgery and in care, in temptation and in sorrow. It is a prayer for doing, not suffering, God’s will. We ask, if we offer it sincerely, that our heart may be so changed that we shall learn to love the will of God, that we shall incline more and more to do it, and that it shall gain fuller and fuller sway over us, until it has become the great dominant force in all our life.
The words “on earth’ tell us that it is right here, in our common experiences, that we are to learn to do God’s will, and not merely when we get to heaven. We are “saved by hope,” but we are to enter upon the blessings of salvation in some measure in this world. We are not to wait till we have reached the celestial country before we begin to do God’s will; we should begin to do it the moment we accept Christ. Too many persons are content to make the doing of this blessed will a dream of what will be when they get into heaven, a happy life which is to be loved beyond the stars. We fall too easily into the feeling that in this world even the best attainments possible are only the merest beginnings of beauty of character and splendor of service, whose full realizations cannot be found until we are inside the gates of pearl. But this is not the gospel. It was not this that Jesus Christ taught his disciples. He came to bring heaven down to earth, to found the kingdom of God in this world. The burden of this prayer is that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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