THY WILL BE DONE by A. Harris

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 18, 1869

THY WILL BE DONE.

By A. Harris

ONE of the hardest things that Christians ever find to do, is to be entirely willing that God should order their lives according to his own pleasure, that his will, not theirs, should be done. Oh! what solemn depths of peace lie in those words, when he or she who utters them does so with a full sense of their import, and a perfect acquiescence in their spirit,—peace which indeed “passeth all understanding,”—peace which must inevitably have come after conflict, after suffering, sometimes after the intensest anguish that a soul is capable of. That peace comes. God is good to grant it; but he does, after contest with God himself, after the baffled, beaten soul has given up, acknowledging humbly that he knows best, and feeling willing to trust its all to him.

For those Christians who have so struggled and rebelled, and cried out in distracted questioning against him, these words are written. When you set forth with your spiritual life, while you remember it was to be a warfare, you believed you should war only against “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,” against “the world, the flesh, and the Devil;” and you knew what armor lay ready to gird yourself with, and what weapons were before you; and you said boldly with your new zeal and enthusiasm, “Send me foes to conquer,” believing yourself certain to prevail, the way looked so easy, the road so free from special danger. You did not reckon on another more arduous, more unequal, more appalling conflict, whereby your will which you blindly thought had become conformed to his, your poor will should set itself daringly against the will of the omnipotent Jehovah himself. Your will against his! What an unlikely, what a desperate thing it would then have seemed to you! You thought when he renewed your heart, and for Christ’s sake forgave your sins, that you could do anything for him; that you had made an unconditional surrender of your all to him to do with as he saw fit. After that renunciation you could not have dreamed you would ever again be found fighting against him. That was for rebels, not for his spiritual, his forgiven, his covenant children. You would not have thought the time would ever come when you could not honestly say, “Thy will be done;” and you took those very words upon your lips, asking, you know not what, hardly pondering the sorrowful signification they might have for you if God heard and answered more earnestly than you meant, or you would have cowered and trembled in apprehension and dismay. But in your desire to become conformed to his requirements, you did so pray, and he heard you. In unnumbered ways, varied as each individual needs, comes, sooner or later, the reply to their petition. And the answer comes with chastening and scourging; to some, few stripes, to others, many, with maiming and wounding, with anguish of sacrifice always.—A. Harris.