Spiritual Hiccups - God's Will

My Presbyterian denomination, along with many others, expects the Lord's Prayer to be part of just about any worship service. I have some questions about the wisdom of this, but regardless, it means that most who have any church experience know that the prayer asks for God's will to be done. More specifically, the prayer asks that the world conform to how things already are in heaven. In the Bible, heaven is where God lives, so to speak, and not where folks go when they die. In heaven, all is as it should be with God's will always done. And the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God is about God's will being done here as well.

Given this, you'd think that we Christians would expend more energy than we sometimes do in seeking to conform the world, or at the least our own lives, to God's will. According to Jesus, God's will is about good news for the poor, release to captives, welcome to the outsider, healing and embrace for the sick and the untouchable, denying self for the sake of others, taking up a cross, and so on. And in a pointed parable told to the religious purists of his day, Jesus slams those who get their doctrines straight, who say and believe all the right things, but don't change their lives to conform to God's coming Kingdom, the new day Jesus says that he brings.

Too often my prayer goes, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is heaven. Just don't ask me to change or bear any real cost for this happening." Obviously Jesus' own prayers were a bit different, seeing how they led him to a cross.

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