Precept and Practice – DECEMBER 5 – God’s Will

It is not mere resignation.   How often is this prayer toned off into mere endurance, sufferance, passivity.   ‘Thy will be done,’ people say resignedly.   ‘There is no help for it.   We may just as well submit.   God evidently means to have His way.   Better to give in at once and make the best of it.’   Well, this is far from the ideal prayer.   It may be nobler to suffer God’s will than to do it;  perhaps it is.   But there is nothing noble in resignation of this sort – this resignation under protest, as it were.   And it disguises the meaning of the prayer, ‘Thy will be done.’   It is intensely active.   It is not an acquiescence simply in God’s dealing.   It is a cry for more of God’s dealing – God’s dealing with me, with everything, with everybody, with the whole world.   It is an appeal to the mightiest energy in heaven or earth to work, to make more room for itself, to energise.   It is a prayer that the Almighty energies of the Divine will may be universally known, and felt, and worshipped.

(Professor Henry Drummond – The Ideal Life)

How often we speak of things as though they were God’s will which are simply brought about by our own foolishness or sin.   How much we need the virtue of discrimination here, so that we may blame ourselves, and not our Heavenly Father, for our misadventures.

(Ruby Ellis)

oooOOOooo

From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW