What Does 'Thy Will Be Done' Mean?

“Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” completes the first set of petitions—and again Luther notes the same pattern: “The good and gracious will of God is certainly done without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may be done among us also.” God’s will will be accomplished; his purposes cannot be finally thwarted. So we are not praying to enable God’s will, but to be brought into line with it—to be among those in whom and through whom it is done.

But there’s a striking realism in Luther’s explanation of what stands against God’s will. He writes that we pray “that God would break and hinder every evil plan and purpose of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature, which do not want us to hallow God’s name or let His kingdom come.” Notice the three enemies—devil, world, and our own flesh. To pray “thy will be done” is to acknowledge that there are forces, including inside us, actively resisting God’s good will, and to ask him to overrule them. It is a prayer for God to win the battle we cannot win ourselves.

And it is, at heart, a prayer of surrender and trust—the hardest and most freeing words in the whole prayer. It is the prayer Jesus himself prayed in Gethsemane, in agony, facing the cross: “not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). To say “thy will be done” is to hand God the outcome—to trust that his will, even when it cuts across our own wishes and hurts, is good and gracious, because he is good and gracious. It is not grim resignation to fate; it is the confidence of a child who believes his Father knows best.

This petition therefore reshapes how we pray for everything else. We bring God our real desires honestly, and then we lay them down before a wiser love, trusting that a Father who “desires all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4) and works all things for our good will do what is finally best—on earth, in our lives, as perfectly as it is already done in heaven.