Father, May I?
I recently came across a quote from Kathryn Kuhlman, a healing evangelist during the 1900s, prompting me to pause and reflect on my relationship with God regarding how I pray to Him. She said, “When you can get to the place of full surrender, when you have no will of your own, then you will know God’s perfect will, not His permissive will.” I began to think about how I address the Father when I pray. Do I share my desires with Him, or do I ask to know His? Do I ask Him to heal me, or do I seek to understand how He will use the sickness in my body to glorify Him? Do I ask Him to give me that new position at work, or do I ask if He wants me to have it? Am I requesting His permission for something, or am I asking to know His perfect will for me?
How did Jesus pray? We can see how He taught His disciples to pray in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. In both cases, Jesus starts the prayer by saying, “Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven…” He wants us to pray for our Father’s will to be done, not our own. In John 5:19, Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in the same way.” Jesus did not even speak using His own words. He said in John 14:10, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own, but the Father, as He remains in Me, does His works.”
Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” Why are we to be transformed into the image of Christ? What purpose might we find in being exactly like the One who saved us from our sin? Paul says in Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” Who are we proving God’s will to? We are proving His goodness and perfection to a lost and dying world. Without this evidence, how can they see our Savior? How can they come to Jesus if we are not showing them who He is?
I have written on this in detail in my book, Ministering to Our Father, but God showed me something new when He contrasted our Father’s perfect will with His permissive will. Our Father loves to give good gifts to those who ask, but those good gifts do not always align with His perfect will. Does He want to heal us of our infirmities? Yes, of course, He does, but He might have a greater plan on how and when He does it. If He allows us to obtain something outside His perfect will because He loves us, He is allowing us to walk in His permissive will. There are many examples in the Bible where God permitted someone to walk in His permissive will rather than His perfect will. There are also examples where the Father said, “No,” regardless of who was asking.
God promised Abraham a son with his wife, Sarah. Because they lacked patience, they attempted to have a son outside His perfect will. God is the only giver of life, so Abraham’s son, Ishmael, was evidence of God’s permissive will. When it was time for Abraham to have Isaac, the son promised to him by God, Abraham asked God if He would allow Ishmael to take Isaac’s place. God told Abraham, “No.” He had a perfect plan for the redemption of mankind, and it was going to come through Isaac, not Ishmael. This was the Father’s perfect will, and He was not going to grant Abraham His permissive will, even though Abraham pleaded with God for it. Abraham raised Ishmael as his heir because God had allowed him to have his way, but it is a mistake to believe that we are walking in God’s perfect plan for our lives simply because He tells us “Yes” when we ask Him for something.
In John 9, Jesus encounters a man who has been blind since birth. His disciples asked Him who sinned that he would be born blind. Jesus answered them and said, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Jesus had declared His divinity to the world only moments before when He said in John 8:58, “Truly, Truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.” He was explaining to those who were with Him that He and the Father were One, and to know Him was to know the Father. In John 9:4-5, He said, “We must carry out the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.”
When Jesus finished speaking, He healed the man's blindness, and the man was brought to the Pharisees as a witness to what Jesus had done. The Pharisees did not receive this miracle as a work of God, but the blind man did. He saw the Light of Jesus for the first time and believed. These were the “works of God” being displayed in him, as Jesus said they would be.
Every word Jesus spoke and every work Jesus did was in direct obedience to the Father. Jesus said in John 9:4-5 that we must carry out the works of the Father as long as it is day or there is light in the world. Jesus also said He is the Light of the world. Since He and the Father abide in those who love Him and who keep His word, He is still in the world because we are in the world. Since He is the Light of the world and He lives in us, there is still day. As it says in Romans 12:2, we are not to “be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” By living in His perfect will, we can be the Light of the world as sons and daughters of God because Jesus lives in us.
There are four stages in the process of walking in our Father’s perfect will. If we can identify the stage we are in, hopefully, we can move forward instead of staying where we are or, even worse, retreating. This is the transformation process Paul spoke of in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “from glory to glory.” We should seek this transformation as we obediently pursue love according to His word. Jesus is love, so our love for God and others should serve as evidence of our transformation. Our obedience to His word is evidence of our love for Him and proof of God’s will for us.
The first stage in this transformation process is to recognize that we are sinners who walk in rebellion against His word. At this point, we are as far away from His perfect will as possible. We are walking contrary to His word and are following our will rather than His. 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous, so that He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” It is with our confession that sin is brought into the Light.
Our confession and His salvation become our testimony of how He saved us and what He saved us from. We can share our past with others, so they may witness His love for them as well, since we are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God, as stated in Romans 3:23. If we refuse to acknowledge our past, what testimony will we have to share with others who are living in sin as we once were? We must not boast of our past sins, but instead, we must walk in humility and boast in the tremendous power of God to save us from ourselves. We do not stand condemned but delivered. Our testimony proves that our Father’s will is for not even one to be lost. Transparency makes hypocrisy difficult because people can witness for themselves that Christ is the power within us, not ourselves.
The second stage is when we listen to the words of Jesus Christ and obey them. Jesus said in John 10:28, “My sheep listen to My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” He said in John 14:15, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” At this stage, we are more concerned with obeying His words than following our own thoughts and desires. We are learning to listen to His voice, so that we may show Him our love by aligning our will with His own. We seek His obvious will in the Word of God, otherwise called the scriptures or the Bible. There are many passages in the Bible clearly showing us exactly how He wants us to live.
The third stage is to seek His will rather than our own in “everything” we say or do. When we cannot find directions in the scriptures for a specific issue in our lives and we do not hear His voice regarding His plans for us in a particular area, we should spend time seeking Him to discover what His will is for us at that moment. As Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in the same way.” Again, He said, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own, but the Father, as He remains in Me, does His works.” Do we want to be transformed into His image and be conformed to His word or not? This is a step in the process of becoming like Jesus, the Son, so that we might also be revealed to the earth as sons of God.
When we are revealed as children of God, as it says in Romans 8:19-23, we will enter the fourth and final stage of walking in our Father’s perfect will. Servants might know their master’s desires because they listen to them and obey their commands, but a loving son will know his father’s desires without asking or being told because he knows the ways of his father. He knows his father intimately. He was born of Him and has spent countless hours in his father’s presence, learning what moves his heart and from what thoughts his desires originate. A loving and obedient son will know his father’s ways and will obey them without hesitancy because he has become like his father. Jesus and the Father are One, and because He is One with the Father, He knows the will of the Father without asking for it. We should all desire to know our heavenly Father this way.
As children of God, we belong to Him, and the scripture says that those who belong to Him are one spirit with Him. We can know our Father’s perfect will for us because we are one spirit with Him, as the Son, Jesus, is One with Him. We no longer have any will of our own because our will is to do the will of our Father in every way. This stage “proves” our love for Him because it “proves” His will for us. His will is for us to love and obey Him perfectly as Jesus does. We love Him as an obedient child and not merely a servant. We seek to glorify Him in every way that we live our lives by living according to His perfect will, and we do not allow our selfish plans or desires to get in the way of pleasing Him.
I shared a dream in a previous post about a visitation I had from Jesus. In that encounter, Jesus told me that He loved how much I loved Him, and He loved how much I wanted to please Him by doing everything I could for Him. However, He made it a point to let me know that He was not in all those things, even though they were done out of love for Him. It was difficult to hear, but He wanted me to understand how important it was for me to seek our Father’s will even above all my good intentions towards Him. It was about ministering to the Father by living according to my Father’s perfect will. His will is for Him to do His good works in me. I am nothing without Him. As it says in Psalms 39:5, “Every man at his best is a mere breath.”
When Peter walked on water, it was in response to the Lord’s summons. Jesus let His disciples know that He was approaching them while walking on the water, so that they would not fear. Peter, however, needed further confirmation to ensure it was Jesus, so he asked Jesus to command him to walk out to Him, if He was indeed Jesus. Peter was not asking if it was His plan or will for Peter to come out onto the water. He was listening for Jesus’ command so that he could obey Him, knowing he could trust His commands if he knew it was Jesus giving them. Peter was operating in the second stage of walking in God’s will, but he was asking for His permissive will, not His perfect will. He desired to obey the Lord and trust in Jesus, knowing his place as His disciple, but he was still learning to follow God’s perfect plan rather than His permissive one.
We are all familiar with Peter’s failure when he denied Christ three times, but did that failure affect his ability to hear the Lord’s voice and obey Him? I can only imagine what it must have been like for Peter when he denied the Lord. That failure would probably destroy most people, but Peter still believed in Jesus and His words. When Jesus appeared to Peter at the Sea of Galilee after His resurrection, Peter experienced a moment that was sure to bring back some fond memories of his Lord, Jesus.
When Peter first met Jesus, it was while fishing, but Peter was not doing well. Jesus told him to throw his nets out again, and when he did, he brought in a tremendous catch. Peter began his relationship with Jesus with an act of obedience. After Christ’s resurrection, Peter found himself in a similar situation, having caught no fish for the day. At first, Peter did not recognize the man on the beach as being Jesus. When Jesus told him to cast his nets in the water again, I believe Peter’s memories flashed back to that first moment when he met Jesus. Again, when he obeyed the Lord’s command, there was a great catch. It was at this moment that they recognized Jesus, and the scripture says that Peter put on his clothes and jumped into the water. The rest of the disciples followed in the boat.
Why didn’t Peter ask Jesus to call him out onto the water when He realized it was Him, as he did before? One explanation might be that he was so excited to see Jesus that he could not wait to row the boat the hundred yards into the shore. However, why did he go fully clothed? It would be easier and much faster to swim without being fully clothed and put them on later when his clothes arrived on the boat. In that moment, I believe Peter thought he would walk on the water again because Jesus willed it. After all, He had given the command to Peter once before to walk on water. Why would He not want Peter to do it again?
Have you ever assumed to know the will of God simply because He has allowed you to do something a certain way in the past? Peter did not ask Jesus if it was His will for him to jump out of the boat, nor did he ask Jesus to give him a command to obey. Perhaps he thought he knew the will of God well enough to act without asking and allowed his excitement to get the better of him. I know the feeling. This is the exact point Jesus was making to me in my dream when He told me that He was not in all the things I was doing for Him. Peter allowed His excitement and desire to please Jesus to get the best of him, and he ended up sinking in the water because of it. He did not ask for God’s permissive will, nor did he seek God’s perfect will, so he ended up having to struggle with his decision and swim fully clothed to shore.
When the disciples arrived at the beach, they found a fire already lit with fish and bread waiting for them. Jesus told them to come and eat. In John 21:15-17, when they finished eating, Jesus asked Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” What or who was Jesus referring to when He said “these?” What had Jesus given to Peter only minutes before? Jesus fed His disciples fish and bread, just as He had done before with the five thousand. John 6:2 says that the thousands who followed Jesus followed Him for what He would give them. They loved and sought His healing, not Him. They enjoyed His earthly food, not the Bread of Life. Jesus was asking Peter if he loved Him more than the worldly things He provided, such as the fish and bread, or the signs and wonders, like walking on the water.
When Peter responded to Jesus’ question, he said, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.” Jesus instructed him to feed His sheep. He wanted Peter to show this love to others as He had shown it to them. He asks Peter two more times if Peter loved Him. Peter says, “Yes, Lord,” and Jesus tells him to shepherd and tend His sheep. Jesus was telling Peter what His perfect will was for him. He was giving a clear command to Peter, so he would know His perfect will and not ask to walk in His permissive will.
Peter obeyed His words because of his love for Jesus, but Jesus wanted Peter to realize that his love for Him was not based on the “things” Jesus provided for him. He wanted Peter to understand that he loved the Lord because the Lord first loved him and gave His life for him, even after his dismal failure of denying Jesus. Peter was being told to show his love for the Lord by obeying His perfect will while tending to His sheep, not by pursuing His permissive will, like walking on water. This is why Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 14:1 to pursue love, not spiritual gifts. We cannot walk in our Father’s perfect will until we learn to love Him perfectly as Jesus loves Him. When we can fully surrender and have no will of our own, we will learn to walk in God’s perfect will rather than His permissive one because of our love for Him and our desire to prove His will to all creation.
