Luke 11:2 And he said to them, When you pray, say, Our Father which are in heaven, Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done… To do God's will we must know what it is. How shall we find it out? The first and most obvious answer to this question is that His will has been revealed, and that we find it in His Word. It is especially to be found in the teaching of Christ and His apostles. Our Lord Himself has condensed the whole of God's law into two short commandments — "Thou shalt love," etc. He who perfectly obeys these two commandments perfectly does God's will. So then we find in this Holy Book such a declaration to us of the will of God as may serve to guide our feet into the ways of obedience. If we study the Word with a prayerful and teachable mind, we shall know more of His will than we shall ever find time and strength to do. And if, in all our study of the Bible, we sought this mainly — to find things to do — to get hints as to the kind of work God has for us, in the cleansing of our lives, and in the serving of Him and of our neighbours in the world; if we went to it as to an order-book in which we expected to find some definite direction for the doing of God's will to-day — I am sure that our study of the Bible would do us much more good than it now does. We are too apt to read the Bible and study the Bible as a mere perfunctory service. It is a thing to be gone through with, there is so much Bible-reading or Bible study to be done; it is a duty, and when it is done it is done, like any other duty. Or else we fall into the habit of thinking that there is a certain charm about it; that the study of the Bible in some mysterious way has a kind of alterative effect upon the character; so that to spend a certain time every week reading it will prove to be a means of grace. If we could get rid of all such formal and superstitious notions, and just remember that our main business with the Bible is to find out from it what God wants us to do, the book would speedily come to have new meaning and value. Mr. Matthew Arnold says that conduct is three-fourths of life, and that the Bible, far above all other books, is the book of conduct. We shall be safe, I am sure, in adopting his maxim, so that while we pray, "Thy will be done," we may search the Scriptures to find each day how to help in answering our prayer — what part of God's will we ought each day to be doing. (Washington Gladden, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. |
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