has become a badly tangled skein of threads.  God with infinite patience and skill is at work untangling and bringing the best possible out of the tangle.  What is absolutely best is rarely relatively best.  That which is best in itself is usually not best under certain circumstances, with human lives in the balance.  God has fathomless skill, and measureless patience, and a love utterly beyond both.  He is ever working out the best thing possible under every circumstance.  He could oftentimes do more, and do it in much less time if our human wills were more pliant to His.  He can be trusted.  And of course trust means trust in the darkest dark where you cannot see.  And trust means trust.  It does not mean test.  Where you trust you do not test.  Where you test you do not trust.  Making this our prayer means trusting God.  That is God, and that His will, and that the meaning of our offering this prayer.  “Thy will be.”  A man’s will is the man in action, within the limits of his power.  God’s will for man is Himself in action, within the limits of our cooperation. Be is a verb, an action-word, in the passive voice.  It takes some form of the verb to be to express the passive voice of any action-word.  It takes the intensest activity of will to put this passive voice into human action.  The greatest strength is revealed in intelligent yielding.  Here the prayer is expressing the utter willingness of a man that God’s will shall be done in him, and through him.  A man never loses his will, unless indeed he lose his manhood.  But here he makes that will as strong as it can be made, as a bit of steel, better like the strong oak, strong enough to sway and bend in the wind.  Then he uses all its strength in becoming passive to a higher will.  And that too when the purpose of that higher will is not clear to his own limited knowledge and understanding.

“Thy will be done.”  That is, be accomplished, be brought to pass.  The word stands for the action in its perfected, finished state.  Thy will be fully accomplished in its whole sweep and in all its items.  It speaks not only the earnest desire of the heart praying, but the set purpose that everything in the life is held subject to the doing of this purpose of God.  It means that surrender of purpose that has utterly changed the lives of the strongest men in order that the purpose of God might be dominant.  It cut off from a great throne earth’s greatest jurist, the Hebrew lawgiver, and led him instead to be allied to a race of slaves.  It led that intellectual giant Jeremiah from an easy enjoyable leadership to espouse a despised cause and so be himself despised.  It led Paul from the leadership of his generation in a great nation to untold suffering, and to a block and an ax.  It led Jesus the very Son of God, away from a kingship to a cross.  In every generation it has radically changed lives, and life-ambitions.  “Thy will be done” is the great dominant purpose-prayer that has been the pathway of God in all His great doings among men.