There are five “wills” that directly affect us and shape our lives.
- The Will of God
This was Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Luke 22:42 King James Version (KJV)
42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
God’s will include His plans and purposes for the entire creation. But more importantly, God has a will for your life. My will must be shaped by God’s will because I cannot dream a larger dream than the dream that God has for my life.
A will is also a legal document that expresses the desires and intentions of the testator. The Word of God, the Bible, is the will of God brought to us in written form. If you want to know what God thinks and feels about a matter, you need not throw yourself to the wind or some mystical process. God has clearly detailed His will in the pages of Holy Writ.
The will of God is already settled in eternity. It is already established in heaven.
Psalm 119:89
For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.
What we need is for the will of God to be made manifest in the earth.
Matthew 6:10 King James Version (KJV)
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
God told the prophet Jeremiah,
Jeremiah 1:5 King James Version (KJV)
5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
God also told Israel,
Jeremiah 29:11-12 King James Version (KJV)
11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
12 Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you.
- The demonic will
We have an adversary, the devil who only wants to steal from us, kill us and destroy us. The Bible calls him “the thief.”
John 10:10 King James Version (KJV)
10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
The devil wants to devour you. He wants to extinguish your hopes and obliterate your dreams. He wants to take you out!
1 Peter 5:8 King James Version (KJV)
8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
The devil is actively seeking our demise. He wants us to lose our faith in God. We can see this clearly in the life of Job. The enemy sought to destroy him through collective attacks. The enemy’s will was to cause Job to curse God and die. But Job held on to his trust in God.
In Daniel chapter ten, we read about how the devil and his demons vigorously tried to hinder Daniel’s prayer from being heard on high. But God and His angels dispatched the answer the moment Daniel prayed. From this passage we learn that there is an ongoing battle for the very life and souls of men and women. But our God has and will always prevail. We are on the winning side. Hallelujah!
- Other people’s will
We are all a product of someone else’s decisions. Before being born, we were not consulted if we even wanted to be here. We didn’t have a choice who our parents are/were, the color of our skin, or the place we were born but all of these decisions made by others affect and shape us in various ways.
- Your will
The will of God is more powerful than anything in heaven and in earth. But God has given us the capacity to choose. We are a free moral agent. It is then through our own volition submit our will to God’s will. When we do that, we do not just change your own destiny but we can change and influence the destiny of a city in a day!
We can see this in the life of Jonah. When the LORD commanded him to go to Nineveh and preach to the people in that city, Jonah initially refused. He tried to flee from the presence and the will of the LORD for his life.
Jonah 1:3 King James Version (KJV)
3 But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
If you will not submit your will to God’s will, God can help you make up your will! Let us ask Jonah again.
Jonah 1:17, King James Version (KJV)
Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
You must be able to say for yourself like David said, I will bless the LORD at all times… (Psalm 34:1), my God unto thee will I pray…(Psalm 5:4), I will be glad and rejoice… (Psalm 9:2), I will praise the LORD according to His righteousness…(Psalm 7:17), I will come into thy house in the multitude of thine mercy… (Psalm 5:7), I will sing unto the LORD… (Psalm 13:6), I will call upon the LORD… (Psalm 18:3), I will declare thy name…(Psalm 22:22), I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever! (Psalm 23:6)
- Corporate will
Man when left to his own devises will destroy himself and produce cataclysmic events. When a group of individuals gather and put their wills together to do mischief against God, you have a Tower of Babel. This event in human history is marked only by confusion and chaos. This is where the people of the earth were scattered because of their willful disobedience and rebellion before the presence of God.
Genesis 11:1-9 King James Version (KJV)
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth
But when we decide to submit our individual wills and unite our hearts to do God’s will, something good is going to happen. When we purpose in our hearts to fulfil God’s grand design and participate in God’s vision for our lives, our families and for our churches, God is going to move mightily in our midst. When we decide to be united in doing the will of God and become of one mind and one heart, God is going to manifest His power among us. When the people are one, God can do some things.
Acts 2:1-4 King James Version (KJV)
2 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
This is why it is important for people, families and churches to agree and be together in prayer at this critical moment in time. Only through prayer can we truly submit our will to God’s will. Through fervent, passionate prayer we can change the trajectory of our world by aligning our hearts to the will of God.
When Moses killed the Egyptian who was oppressing one of his brethren, he was trying to fulfill God’s call on his life. I know that this is not the way the movie The Ten Commandments portrayed it, but that is the way the Bible portrays it.
Acts 7:25 says this,
“For he supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not.”
Moses knew he was a Hebrew and he was aware of God’s call on his life to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. But it is not enough to know what God wants you to do. You have to know God’s plan and timing for accomplishing His will. Moses missed it on both of these counts.
In Genesis 15:13, the Lord told Abram that his descendants would be in a strange land as servants for four hundred years.
13 And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;
Here is where it gets interesting.
In Exodus 12:40-41 it says, “Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.”
It was exactly four hundred and thirty years, to the day, when the children of Israel came out of Egypt. Why is there a thirty-year discrepancy between what the Lord told Abram and what it says in Exodus?
If you subtract the forty years that Moses spent in the wilderness (Acts 7:30) from the four hundred thirty years, you will find that Moses actually killed the Egyptian and tried to free the Israelites in the 390th year of their captivity. He was ten years premature in trying to fulfill God’s will for his life. This comes as a total shock to many people. They think, If God was not ready for Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt yet, then why did He not wait to reveal His will to Moses?
There could be many reasons, but certainly one of the main reasons is that it would take at least ten years for the Lord to get Moses ready for the job. We wrongly assume that when the Lord puts a vision in our hearts, He is going to bring it to pass right then. But oftentimes, we are not ready for His will to happen so He has to prepare us in order to bring us to His promised blessing.
If you study Scripture, you will find that it always takes years for the Lord to get His servants ready. It took twenty-seven years for Abram, twenty-two years for Joseph, and thirteen years for David to become king, seven more years before he was king over the whole nation, and fourteen years for Paul. If Moses would have understood what God was doing in his life and waited patiently on the Lord, his ten-year wait would have been one of the shortest in the Bible. Instead of having to spend forty years in the harshness of the desert, he could have spent his ten years in the comfort of the palace. Could it be that it was not God who willed Moses into the desert? Could it be it was Moses’ self-will that put him there? It certainly is worth thinking about.
Let us look at another example.
In Jeremiah 25:9-11, the prophecy was spoken that Judah will be in Babylon seventy years.
9 Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations.
10 Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle.
11 And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
In Jeremiah 29:10-12 this is what the Lord says:
“When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plansI have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
In Daniel chapter 9, Daniel learned from studying in the scrolls of Jeremiah about the appointed seventy years of captivity. Daniel knew that the seventy years is coming to an end. He began to Pray about the fate of his people and nation. He repented and sought God in behalf of their future. He interceded for them. Let us see what happened.
In 605 B.C., in the third year of Jehoiakim, the first of the four deportations to Babylon happened. This was when Daniel, his friends Azariah, Hananiah and Mishael and other nobilities were carried into captivity.
In 538 B.C., the decree by the Persian emperor Cyrus for Jews to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem was promulgated.
From 605 B.C. to 538 B.C. is only sixty-seven years. Could it be that the sojourning of the children of Israel in the land of Egypt was extended by thirty grueling, back-breaking and harsh years because they did not know the hour of their visitation? However, could it also be that the actual time of slavery of the children of Israel in Babylon was shortened because Daniel, a man who understood the will of God started to pray?
God can do in five minutes what we cannot accomplish in fifty years but there must be a church that is praying! God can turn our families, our city and our nation around in five minutes than a lifetime of our programs and technology but there must be people of God that are praying! God wants to send the revival we all so dearly want and long for but there must be people of God that are seeking after God in prayer!
God can completely turn your situation and your life around. That is His will for you. You can unlock God’s blessings and favor upon you and your family through the power of prayer. Let us pray.
Prayer – is an act that seeks to activate a hearfelt communication with God. In the narrow sense, the term