(2) God’s will ever seeks our highest good. What else could any one expect, seeing that it is our Father’s will? How we who are parents plan and scheme and contrive in order to secure a happy and prosperous future for our children! In exactly the same way God plans and purposes for us. He is always thinking upon us for our good. His will, says the Apostle, is our sanctification. It is a good and perfect and acceptable will. The very discipline through which He sometimes calls upon us to pass is meant to build us up in patience and purity and faith. The boy in school is apt to regard his lessons as a hardship. He would prefer the field and the sunshine to the school-room and the desk. But in after years he will be thankful he did not get his own way in the days of his youth, for he will recognise then that the hours he spent over his Algebraic problems and his Latin declensions enriched his life by contributing to the culture of his mind. We are scholars in God’s schools. The discipline of the school is painful sometimes; but in later years we shall be thankful even for our sorrows and losses and bereavements, when we see how they have enriched our lives by contributing to the culture of our souls. Yes, it will be easier to embrace God’s will when we realise with the Apostle that all things work together for good to them that love God.
Thy will be done! Notice, God’s will is not simply to be endured or suffered—it is to be done. In our every-day speech we have unduly narrowed the scope and meaning of this petition. We talk about this petition as if it were a prayer that God would give us the grace of resignation. It is in times of bereavement that this phrase leaps to the lips of men. It is upon tombstones that it is inscribed by sorrowing relatives. Again do not let me be misunderstood. Suffering God’s will is embraced in the scope of this prayer. To many of us the hardest part of all is patient submission to the will of God. The man bereft of wealth, stripped of all his possessions, flung back again into the poverty from which by hard and persistent effort he had emerged, needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” The man who languishes upon a bed of sickness, who lies there helpless while perhaps wife and children look up to him for bread—he needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” Those who have parted with some loved one, who have seen father or mother, or husband or wife or child, hidden from them in the dark cold grave, and who come home again to miss the well-loved face and familiar voice—they need grace to say, while their hearts are aching and their eyes are full of tears, “Thy will be done.” Some of you know how hard it is. You find it impossible almost to say, as Job said, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Yes, it is hard to be submissive and resigned, and it is out of a broken heart the prayer often ascends, “Thy will be done.”
But this prayer is much more than a prayer for the grace of resignation and patient submission. The petition is not “Help us to suffer thy will,” but “Help us to do it.” This is not a prayer simply for the invalid and the mourner and the bereaved; it is a prayer also for those who are happy and well and strong. This is not a prayer simply for our times of trouble and our days of deep distress; it is a prayer for all times and every day. It is not every day, nor every month, nor even every year, that we are called upon to suffer God’s will, but not a day, not an hour passes, but we are called upon to do it. Do not narrow the scope of this prayer. You prayed this morning, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? What did you mean by it? I will tell you what you ought to have meant by it: “Help me, O God, to do what Thou wouldest have me do, to be what Thou wouldest have me.” That is what the prayer means. It means that we accept God’s plans and purposes as our own, and resolve to realise them. You can pray no nobler prayer than this, for in the doing of God’s will lies the secret of the perfect life. We look at the life of Jesus—so beautiful, so pure, so perfect—and we are lost in wonder and rapture. But the secret of that life is here: Jesus from the beginning to the close of life was intent on doing God’s will. He Himself let us into the secret. “I am come,” He said, “not to do My own will, but the will of the Father who sent Me.” “My meat and drink,” He said, on another occasion, “is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work.” When a boy of twelve He had come to the sublime decision that every moment of His life should be spent in doing His Father’s business. Do not commit the mistake of thinking that it was only in Gethsemane and the Judgement Hall and on Calvary that Christ was doing the will of God. He was doing it during those silent years at Nazareth. He was doing it when at school, He was doing it when He was in the carpenter’s shop, mending the tables and chairs and ploughs of the dwellers in Nazareth. He was doing it when He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom in Galilee. He was doing it when sharing in the festivities at Cana, and taking part in Matthew’s farewell dinner. He was doing it when healing the sick and comforting the lonely and lifting up the outcast. In fact, He was never doing anything else. Every day, every moment, Jesus was doing the Father’s will, and the result is the only perfect life the world has ever seen. And so, in our case, the doing of God’s will is not something confined to our times of darkness and sorrow; the doing of God’s will is a daily and hourly endeavour. God’s will is really done by us only when, to use the Apostle’s words, “whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we do all to the glory of God.” “Thy will be done on earth,” so runs the petition; the sphere in which God’s will is to be put into effect is this earth of ours—its business life, its public life, its social life, its family life. The employer is doing God’s will when He treats those in his employment justly and generously. The tradesman is doing God’s will when he buys and sells honestly. The shop assistant is doing God’s will by being diligent and courteous, and yet withal scrupulously straightforward and true. The artizan is doing God’s will when he respects his employer’s time, and does every bit of work as well as it can be done. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in the home are doing God’s will when they strive to make home happy by their self-forgetfulness and ready helpfulness. “Doing God’s will” means doing everything as we know God would have us do it, making God supreme over every detail of human life. It means buying and selling, keeping ledgers, serving at the counter, teaching at the desk, toiling in the fields, sitting in the council chamber, casting a vote, taking our pleasure, sharing in social joys, and doing all this for God. This is what we pray for when we say, “Thy will be done.”
Look at the qualifying words that follow: “as in heaven so on earth.” Heaven supplies the pattern for earth. I have just two words to say about the way in which God’s will is done in heaven—(1) It is done cheerfully. Saints and angels find their highest joy in doing God’s will. If earth is to be like heaven in this respect, we must obey God cheerfully. God wants no grudging service. Our obedience must be glad, willing, free. God’s will can not be done by us as it is done in heaven, until we can say sincerely, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God, yea, Thy law is within my heart.” (2) It is done by ALL. You will look in vain in the heavenly land for the disobedient and the refractory and the rebellious. Heaven is perfectly happy, because all its people are perfect in their obedience. Before earth can be like heaven, God’s will must be done by ALL. It is done to-day only by a FEW. There are multitudes who rebel against Him. When these return to their allegiance, the day of God will break.
Thy will be done! This petition calls our attention to the most crying and urgent need of our day, the need of a simpler and more implicit obedience. It is not more knowledge of God’s will that we want, but grace to put in practice what we know. What is the use of coming here to-day to hear God’s will declared, if to-morrow in our business life, we deliberately flout and reject it? I venture to say this, that if to-morrow and the following days we only did what we know our Lord desires us to do, we should revolutionise the life of this town. And will you suffer me to remind you that it is not to those who make a profession and parade of religion that heaven is promised, but to those who faithfully and loyally obey. “Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven.”
VI
“Daily Bread”
“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Matt. vi. 11
“Give us day by day our daily bread.”—Luke xi. 3.
The petition which we are to study together this morning opens the second part of the Lord’s Prayer. Up to this point our petitions have all been concerned with God’s glory and praise. We have prayed “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” Having thus observed the rule, “first things first,” having sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, we are now at liberty to pass on to secondary things, and to offer up to God petitions for personal blessings. And the first petition we are taught to offer is this, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We begin at the very bottom. We start the list of personal petitions with a prayer for “daily bread.”
Will you notice what a gracious light this petition throws upon the condescension of God? Our Lord is the high and Holy One, who inhabits eternity, and yet He stoops to lowly folk and lowly things. “The Lord thinketh upon me.” Whatsoever concerns me is of concern to Him. “Give me bread” is not too humble a petition to bring into the presence of the great White Throne. A one-sided notion of the majesty of God has led men oftentimes to feel that the ordinary little cares of a human life are quite too insignificant and trifling for Him to notice. “God is so busy,” they say; “He has so many things to think about, that we ought not to trouble Him with our little anxieties and worries. Such petty things are quite beneath the dignity of His attention.” That was exactly how the disciples felt long ago, when they were for driving away those mothers who had brought their little children for Christ to bless. They felt that the great Preacher, on whose lips vast crowds hung, ought not to be bothered about babies. They thought that Christ had so many things of importance to think about, that it was absurd to expect Him to take notice of little children. The same kind of feeling has possessed many of the men who have commented on this petition. Many of the old church fathers, and indeed many modern commentators, refuse to believe that this is a prayer for ordinary food, for mere bread. They cannot persuade themselves that a petition for so commonplace a thing as bread could possibly find a place for itself in the Model Prayer. This is too trifling a request to trouble God about. So they cast about for some other than the obvious and literal meaning of the sentence, something which they imagine is more dignified, and satisfy themselves at last by saying that bread here means spiritual bread, food for the soul, the Bread of Life. But the simple and obvious meaning of the phrase is, after all, the true one. Erasmus, the great sixteenth century Grecian, thought a reference to physical food would be incongruous “in so heavenly a prayer.” But far from being incongruous, the prayer becomes more gracious and beautiful because this petition for bread is in it! The picture of Christ, which is given us in the Gospels, is all the more winsome for the story which tells us that He took the little children in His arms and blessed them; and the character of God becomes all the more beautiful when we see His love stooping even to caring for our commonest wants. “Give us bread.” This petition asks God to supply our primary physical wants. It is not an unworthy petition. It is not too trivial a request to bring to God; for God is not a God simply for great crises, supreme emergencies, tremendous catastrophes: He is a God for every day, and for the common events of every day. Our God is, shall I say, a Master of detail. He cares not simply for the movements of worlds and the policies of nations. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and He counts the very hairs of our head. Nothing is too small for God to notice; the commonest affairs of the commonest life are matters of concern to Him.