“Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven”
This petition of the Our Father covers three different things all in one. The first point, “thy will be done,” can be very hard for us to deal with because most of the time our idea of what we should do is radically different from God’s idea. To help combat our stubbornness, it is important to always remember that God desires us to have eternal life. For us to follow God’s will, we must first be humble and allow God to speak to us. Through this humility, our will needs to submit to God. So when we pray the Our Father and especially when we pray this petition, it is a universal call to humility. Without humility, we are too prideful and too stubborn to follow God’s desires for us.
The second part of this petition is “on Earth.” When we talk about Earth, we are talking about the dwelling of mortal man. Everything here is temporary. We can be consumed by material things that can be good, but when they take over our lives they turn into an evil. While on Earth, we still need to do the will of the Father so that we can move from the temporary world to the eternal world.
The eternal world is the third part of this petition, “as it is in heaven.” If Earth is the dwelling place of mortal man, heaven is the dwelling place of God. Heaven is complete union with God and is the final goal of all peoples. We must ask Jesus what heaven is, and how we can attain it. If we truly listen to what God is trying to say to us, it leads back to the first part of this petition is to conform our will to his by following his commandments. This petition might be the hardest to follow. If we look at the lives of the saints, we can see these great people live the will of God here on Earth. They certainly struggled, but they knew that life here is only temporary. If we dedicate our lives to the will of the Father we will bring heaven to Earth. When we pass from this world we will be united with God for all eternity. |
