GodSprings - 16, May, 2017

Am I Ready to Crucify my Dreams?

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Matthew 6:10 b,c

Reinhold Niebuhr one day said to his little girl, “Let’s take a walk, honey,” and she said, “I don’t want to take a walk.” And he said, “the birds will sing, and the flowers will sway in the breeze, and the trees will be there, and the sunlight. It will be so lovely, let’s take a walk.” And finally, she took a walk with him, and when they had their walk, and they came back, and he said to this little girl, “Now didn’t you enjoy that, didn’t you really love that?” She said, “No, I really didn’t decide; it was just that you were bigger.”

For many of us this is the view of God. God is bigger than we are and that there really is little choice and so we just do it. When we pray Your will be done what is the attitude? There are many who pray with a wrong understanding. There are people who say this prayer in an attitude of bitter resentment. They believe they cannot escape from the inevitable. They think God is an oppressive and dictatorial being.

E. Stanley Jones says, “Prayer is surrender – the surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boat hook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.”

Whenever we pray we are to pray in accord with God’s will. The literal Greek of Thy will be done is something like this: “Your will, whatever you wish to happen, let it happen immediately.” David prayed that way in Psalm 40:8 – “I delight to do thy will, O my God.” He wanted to know it and he wanted to do it; that was his heart.

But it’s hard to pray this way. It’s hard to be preoccupied with God in our prayers because of sin, pride and our self-centeredness. God’s will cannot manifest in us until we lay our life on the altar and our will is dead.

Abraham proves to be a perfect example. Abraham took Isaac, strapped wood on his back, marched him up to Mount Mariah. All the way up the mountain Abraham must have been saying to himself, “This is very strange God. You’ve told me to go up there and slay my son on the altar. You tell me to lie him down on an altar and kill him. It doesn’t make sense.”

But it’s the greatest illustrations of a living sacrifice in the world because Abraham went all the way up there, put Isaac down, strapped him down, lifted the knife and was ready to plunge it into his heart. Abraham was ready to crucify all his dreams, hopes, ambitions, goals and desires. He was literally ready to die to himself in obedience to God.

Is it possible for us to die for Christ? Can we live selflessly for him?

Let us pray – Dear Lord the one things that always stands in the way of praying Your will to happen in our life is our will. Help us to pray in conformity with Your will so that we will be changed.