Trusting God’s Plan

We’ve often spoken about how our society has become so accustomed to instant gratification, mostly because what would take so long in the past, is almost instant today. You might remember, communication could take 6 months to come from England to New Zealand before planes, today we can video chat with people via the internet in real time. Home dinners that once could mean half a day of preparation, is but a few minutes at a drive thru, or via Uber Eats, delivered to the door! And I suppose this highlights that we might have lost something in the quiet discipline of waiting.

What if prayer can help us recover a little of what we have lost? Because the ease of satisfying our personal desires, it seems, often drowns out the call to something greater, the call to something beyond our lives. Could a patient prayer life transform us in a way that leads to a spiritual flourishing that sustains us through the inevitable trials we will all experience in this life?

“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” these words that we all have prayed from the Lord’s Prayer, invites us to consider the blessing of a reality where God’s perfect will reigns, not just in heaven but that might extend into our lives today. But what does it mean to truly pray for God’s Kingdom to come? And I know from my own selfish heart that it’s hard to surrender our own plans, it’s hard to surrender our fleeting comforts and trust that God’s will is worth the wait.

That’s what this part of the Lord’s prayer challenges us to consider, to look beyond ourselves and rest in the uncomfortable uncertainty of not knowing exactly what God’s plan might mean for us personally. Can we still trust in God’s love and justice when we are suffering pain and loss, or when it might mean letting go of something we want in the moment? It calls us to acknowledge that God’s plan is better than ours, and if we have a problem with that idea, I think that we might have a ‘pride’ problem. Well we all have that problem to some degree!

We continue this Sunday with our exploration of the Lord’s prayer where our passage once again is Matthew 6:5-15. Prayerfully sit with this passage and meditate on it. May God bless us and continue to deepen our understanding of this most precious prayer.

Blessings

Josh