Matthew 6:10 — “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
There is a particular kind of soldier that every commander fears. Not the one who openly defects. Not the one who runs from the fight. The dangerous one is the soldier who attends every briefing, wears the uniform correctly, uses all the right language, and then quietly runs his own operation. He has not abandoned the base. He has abandoned the mission while pretending he has not. The military has a name for it. AWOL. Absent Without Leave. And the most insidious version of it does not happen in a foxhole. It happens in a man’s heart, long before his boots ever hit the ground.
That is the portrait Jesus is painting in the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer, whether we want to see it or not.
We have all been to someone else’s house, and no matter how warmly they say make yourself at home, we understand that is a limited invitation at best. Try opening your friend’s closets or rummaging through his private things, and you will quickly be shown the door. It is a kind gesture, but it has limits, because it is his house and his authority governs it.
Similarly, Jesus frames the location differently. He knows you may respect heaven or even your local church. But this prayer framework repositions our thinking, and His arrival on the scene moved the discussion from a distant throne room to the ground beneath your feet. The kingdom to come was now standing right before them. Not limited to a few sacred places, but present wherever the King is. And the standard he sets is not a lowered one adjusted for Earth’s conditions. It is heaven’s standard imported to earth. The way things operate perfectly in the presence of God. The way every creature there worships the Creator without hesitation, without reservation, without redirection as we need. That order and that magnificence are now the standard he is calling down to earth. For you and for me.
The second petition moves the reader from respect of position to submission to authority. “Your will be done.” When you are at your friend’s house, you respect his authority. When you leave, his authority stays, but you are no longer under it. The structure of this prayer gives us a different, entirely positional understanding. We are not guests passing through. We are subjects of a kingdom, stewards of a King, and the authority does not lift when we walk out the door. It comes with us.
That brings us to the two most important decisions we will ever make, wrapped up in two words: ownership and stewardship. Either you own what God has entrusted to you, or you steward it. Either you run your own kingdom, or you operate inside his. There is no third option.
C.S. Lewis puts the weight of that choice plainly in The Great Divorce: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.”⁴
That is not a comfortable sentence. It is not meant to be. The man who never genuinely prays, ” Your will be done,” has made a choice by default. He has chosen his own kingdom. He just may not have said it out loud yet.
I have written about this before. The Candy Wrapper Christian looks exactly right on the outside and contains something entirely different on the inside. He bows his head. He says the words. He just never actually gets off his throne. He is not asking God what his will is. He is asking God to bless the will he already decided on. That is not submission. That is negotiation with a predetermined outcome. If that lands somewhere uncomfortable, follow the link. It convicted me when I wrote it. [Candy Wrapper Christians — stayonmission.com]
Our self-sufficiency is one of the primary instruments the enemy uses to keep us from genuine surrender. The man who removes his self-will and places it under divine authority becomes the most dangerous man the kingdom of darkness will ever face, because he has surrendered the one thing the enemy relies on most. Spurgeon said it simply: *”When your will is God’s will, you will have your will.”*⁵
So, to the question, Jesus wants everyone to ponder. Which one are you? The soldier who looks right on the outside and runs his own operation on the inside? A self-sufficient owner of everything God has entrusted to you, praying the words without meaning them? Or someone on their knees, genuinely surrendering their agenda to the one who owns it all, and trusting that God’s will is better than anything we could have engineered on our own?
Father, help us see in ourselves what you want us to see today. Pour your mercy on us. Allow us to bow the knee once more and mean it when we say your will be done, in our lives, our homes, and in all things.
YOUR will be done.
What territory in your life are you still governing that belongs to God?
Where are you asking God to bless your plan instead of genuinely seeking his?
Stay on Mission
Footnotes:
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), chap. 9.
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