Message #9 (of 20) from the PrayerPower radio series
"Jesus' Teaching on Prayer"

by Kaye Johns

I ask the question because Jesus taught us to pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." [Matthew 6:10] I have prayed that prayer many times without giving it serious thought. But when I began to think about it, I realized God’s will in heaven must surely be done immediately, without hesitation, without question. I had to ask myself, is that the way God’s will is done in my life?

In the model prayer of Matthew 6, Jesus gave us the fundamentals of daily prayer. We are to pray to our Father, to hallow His name, to surrender our lives with, "Thy kingdom come" [Matthew 6:10]--in and through my life. How does that happen? The next phrase tells us, "thy will be done"--in my life today, "as it is in heaven."

That’s not easy to pray, yet Jesus Himself is our best example of submitting to the Father’s will. Throughout His life and ministry, Jesus lived the surrendered life. He lived in reverent submission to the Father [Hebrews 5:7], acknowledging that He had come to do nothing on His own but to speak what the Father had taught Him, to always do what pleased the Father [John 8:28-29], and to see the Father’s will as His priority [John 4:34]. Three times in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus yielded His will to the Father’s [Matthew 26:39,42,44]. Should our submission be less than His?

Pray with me now -- Father, may we pray "thy will be done in my life," and mean it. In Jesus’s name, amen.

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