The will of the Father is the salvation of men. All the leadings of God’s will, down to the minutest details of the life of every hour, have their root in this great fountain of redeeming love: that not even one of the little ones should perish. Christ’s coming down from Heaven, all His speaking and doing, His living and suffering and dying, it all held its unity in this: It was the revelation of God’s will to save, and of Christ’s surrender of Himself to do that will in saving all the Father had given Him.
When we yield ourselves to do the Father’s will, must the will of God for the salvation of men be to us, as it was to Christ, the main object of our life? It must, indeed.
The life that was in Christ is the same life that is in us. The glory of the Father; the blessedness of being the channels of the Father’s love; the entire surrender to the one work the Father wants done in the world—all these claim our devotion as much as they did that of Christ.
There is an infinite difference in the part He took and the part we are to take in carrying out that will, but the will itself is to be as much the joy and the aim of our life as it was of His.
So many Christians seek to know the will of God only in its minute details concerning themselves, and so they live practically under a law consisting of commandments and ordinances. Their own personal happiness is the first thing; obedience and sanctification are subordinate to these, as means to an end. They have no conception of the nobility, of the heavenly royalty of spirit that comes to the man who forgets and loses himself as he gives himself away to that will of God for the salvation of men.
What a change it would bring into the life of believers to know and love this will of the Father, to lose self and to sacrifice all in order to be mastered and consumed by its blessed fire! If you would thus know it, reader, and be possessed by it, you must make it a definite object of study and desire. It needs above all the indwelling of the Christ, in whom that will realized and manifested itself, to make us partakers of His own Spirit and disposition. Then we can know something of that infinite will of love working itself out through us, filling the little vessel of our will out of its own living stream, and making the will of God indeed our will.
Let us begin doing the will of God in this too, really giving ourselves to Him for this saving of the lost. There is no other way for us to have the fellowship of God but to have one will with Him.
Andrew Murray (1828-1917) was a prolific South African writer, teacher and pastor who championed Gospel missions as the chief work of the church.
Adapted from “Thy Will Be Done: The Blessedness of a Life in the Will of God,” by Andrew Murray. Work is in the public domain.
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