Praying with Unruly Wills and Affections

Almighty God, you alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men: grant to your people that they may love what you command and desire what you promise...

Collect for the 3rd Sunday after Easter

God calls us to pray. Even our "unruly wills and passions" are not to prevent us asking of God in prayer.  Yet for some of us our unruly wills and passions scare us off praying freely. Perhaps we fear our prayers are too petty or impetuous.  We  often feel the need to footnote our prayers with the disclaimer  "...if it is your will"   -  a caveat with which we hope to throw a loin-cloth of modesty over our own shamelessly exposed wills. 

In a sermon published in "The World in Small Boats", Oliver O'Donovan reflects on the shame we sometimes feel in asking directly of God...

  "When we ask, we reveal the content of our wills. They are disclosed to the scrutiny of God, and to our own scrutiny; and our self-image takes an awful knock. Our wills are not naked and clean and upright and heroic. They are bent double, entangled, ensnared in the petty and the routine. What we want, we discover, is a miserable pay rise to put us on an equal footing with our colleague at work; we want fine weather on Thursday for our half day off; we want some medicine that will settle our bowel disorder...   If we were not told to ask for them, we should never have to face the fact that we wanted them. They would simply have taken the form of vaguely diffused anxiety, the causes of which could be left to the imagination..."     (O'Donovan - Sermon on Lk 11:9 in The World In Small Boats)

Jesus is clear that we are to ask of God in the manner of a child freely addressing her attentive father (Matthew 7), not in the manner of a bureaucrat justifying some contentious community grant application.  Yet even as we ask freely, we become aware of where our wills and affections most need re-ordering.   An analogy from O'Donovan from the same sermon...​

If as you try to frame a prayer you find, as you feared, that it is altogether too base... that is the first step to ordering your unruly will to something less ignoble. Desires are like seeds; once put in the soil of prayer under the sun of God's attention, they begin to sprout upwards.

We are not asked to subdue our own wills and affections BEFORE asking of God in Prayer.   Indeed, we often do not know the true nature of our wills and affections UNTIL we begin to pray. It is  through actually ASKING God in prayer, that our own desires begin being trained towards the light of his revealed will.  Jesus' own "will and affections" were never unruly as ours are,  yet he too knows what it is to have one's will ordered through prayer to the Father.

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Matthew 26:39
Going a little farther, He fell facedown and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will."

Matthew 26:42
A second time He went away and prayed, "My Father, if this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, may Your will be done."

Matthew 26:52-54
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

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We are to ask freely of our Heavenly Father.  And as our own wills are exposed before the light of his perfect will, our unruly desires and passions will begin to be trained by him.

For more about Oliver O'Donovan, check out this  Oliver O'Donovan Facebook Page.

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