‘Yet not My will, but Yours be done!’ These deeply moving words of the Lord Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane are often misused horribly. People who do not know what God’s will is and, for example, ask for someone to be cured of an illness, finish their prayer humbly with these words.
But how entirely different were these words when Jesus spoke them! Jesus knew very well what was the will of the Father and when He spoke these words, He completely submitted to this clearly revealed will of God.
There is so little genuinely spiritual struggle in our lives because we actually understand nothing - or next to nothing - of God’s will. As Christians, we are then not different from Muslims and other religious people. To us, God is often nothing more than a distant power. We bow under various religious rules and requirements, hoping this distant God will mean well in the end, just in case there might be eternal life. Everyone who thinks and feels like this, is an aspirant member of the great world church that will arise under the leadership of the Antichrist.
But whoever learned to submit his life fully to God - entrusting it to God as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God - perceives how God through His presence changes his life. Then God renews our thinking, so that we can understand His will for us and for the whole world around us. Then, in spite of all the horrible things that happen here on earth, we become captivated by the mighty deeds of God.
Who then prays, ‘Father, yet not my will, but Yours be done!’ really knows the will of the Father and desires to live and die fulfilling it.