Submitting to God's will means accepting whatever suffering God brings into our lives. This, too, is part of his will. As it was for Christ, so it is for the Christian: God will not save us FROM suffering, but THROUGH suffering into glory.
One woman who surrendered to God's will was Betty Stam, a missionary in China. Betty and her husband, John, were captured by Communists, stripped half-naked, and marched in chains through the streets of their village. Betty was forced to watch as her captors chopped her husband's head off. Then she herself was beheaded. Many years before her horrific martyrdom, Betty Stam wrote the following prayer:
Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes,
All my own desires and hopes
And accept Thy will for my life.
I give myself, my life, my all
Utterly to Thee to be Thine forever.
Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit;
Use me as Thou wilt, send me where Thou wilt,
And work out Thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.
As Betty Stam's prayer illustrates, when we pray for God's will to be done, we are praying for his will to be done in everything. We are submitting to his will in all circumstances of both life and death.
In the meantime, we long for the day when we will be with God in his glory, when we will be unwilling to sin, when with all the saints and angels we will finally do God's will as it is done in heaven. While we still live on earth and not in heaven, we pray for God to do with us what he wills and to make of us what he chooses, in order to glorify himself as he pleases.
From The Prayer of Our Lord
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