Our will and God’s will

THE ideal situation, of course, is that the two, our will and God’s will, work together in perfect harmony all the time, we are doing God’s will consciously, willingly and with great love and gusto.

That’s the ideal. The reality, however, is far, very far from it, be it the personal level or the social level, be it in field of family life, or business or politics, and a long etc. Yes, we have a big challenge to face.

In the first place, the common mindset, almost immutably fixed in most people, is that we just do things on our own, or as we see them as fit or convenient or practical, with hardly any reference to God’s will.

If there’s any reference to God’s will at all, it is by pure coincidence, unintended, or because it happens to give some convenience and advantages. It’s the same narrow-minded if not selfish attitude that’s gripping us firmly.

It’s our will that leads and dominates, the opposite of how things ought to be—God’s will always reigning supreme, upheld, defended, loved and glorified by us.

We repeat many times in the “Our Father,”—“Your will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.” But they seem to be just words that leave our lips and then to the air to disappear, without leaving any impact on our lives. What
a shame!

Many questions, if not doubts, may shroud our perception and understanding of God’s will. We may think that it can not be known, or if it can it would need heroic efforts just for us to know it. It may not be worthwhile then.

We may also think that God’s will always makes our life difficult, even miserable, with pain and sacrifices galore to pepper our whole lives. We may think that God’s will is something that will be impractical and irrelevant.

Or that if we are too concerned with conforming ourselves to God’s will, we will end up being narrow-minded or cold, unfeeling and rigid. Nothing can be farther than the truth. How can God’s will do that when God is love and truth?

That’s how bad things have become. Faith is slipping away. Or it has petrified, quite dead and useless, unable to give shape and impulse to our thoughts and desires.

Faith has fallen captive to man’s laziness and indifference, later aggravated by man’s sins and vices and the complicated web of problems that these generate.

There is hardly any sense of cooperating with divine providence that should be at the heart of our thoughts and actions. We just do what we want to do. And so we create our own world, not God’s world.

We can enjoy certain benefits of our human reason and natural goodness, but unguided by faith and grace, these benefits get easily contaminated with bad elements like envy, hatred, sensuality and greed, and will fail to understand the wisdom behind patience, mercy, suffering, etc.

In fact, without a living union with God, our human will guided only by our reason and natural goodness is lamentably limited and unavoidably prone to deteriorate into evil.

We would end up being hypocritical to maintain our appearance of goodness. We have to remember that the only thing we are capable of doing completely on our own without God’s help is to sin.

The long human history we have had so far can eloquently corroborate this observation, which to a Christian believer is actually also an article of our faith.

We need to radically change our personal attitudes, convictions and life style to reflect the example of Christ, our model, who said:

“Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he sees the Father doing, for what things he does, these the Son also does in like manner.” (Jn 5,19)

We have to actively seek this transformation by consciously knowing, loving and doing God’s will.

God’s will can be known through his commandments, through the laws of
nature, through our personal intimate prayer and conversations with him, through some spiritual direction and confession, through the catechism and reading of spiritual books, etc.

From there, we need to develop and cultivate the virtues, and help through an active and massive personal apostolate to create the appropriate culture and atmosphere for our society to be truly human and Christian.