The Higher Will

The Higher Will

I want your will to be done, not mine. Luke 22:42

JESUS TOLD US TO ASK FOR ANYTHING we want (John 15:7). Then he went out to a garden that same night and demonstrated a different kind of prayer: He prayed for what the Father wants. Actually, he did ask for what he wanted, but he followed it up with a submissive prayer to the higher will, the plans he already knew to be true. He sacrificed his preferences for God’s purposes.

Submissive prayer is clearly not a sign of doubt or unbelief. It presents the Lord with a preference but also recognizes that our preference might not be the right one. Asking God for something specific when his will is already known is not a name-it-claim-it approach, as some people charge, nor is asking for the things we desire, which Jesus encouraged us to do. But submission is the background to all our prayers. If we ask anything that misses God’s purposes, anything that is contrary to his will or his best for us, we submit to the better purpose. We pray for our desires, trusting that God has put them in our hearts, but we hold them loosely enough for God to redirect us if he wants. And when we don’t know his will—or we have another preference and want to ask “if it’s possible,” as Jesus did—we simply say, “Your will be done.”

At their core, our prayers of faith are meant to represent an alignment of our hearts with God’s. Those who argue that our prayers are strictly a conformity to his narrow purposes, with no possibility of moving his heart, are missing his generosity in the relationship and denying both Jesus’ words and biblical examples. Those who argue that our prayers of faith are all about our desires—that we simply name whatever we want and claim it by faith—are missing the transformation he offers and discernment between self-generated and God-given desires. Somewhere between, we align with his heart and he is drawn to ours, and we ask whatever we want with a desire to submit to his will above all else. We hold his promises tightly in faith and loosely in submission, both at the same time.

Our satisfaction lies in submission to the divine embrace.