My original plan was to do one word a day for the entire year, and then maybe blog about one of the words that I studied during the week.
Today is January 9th. Notice that this is the first "official" blog. Let's face it, 2017 so far has started off a little rough for me (details on the reasons for that will either be shared at a later time, or will remain between myself, God, and any other close friends I choose to tell). I'm already behind on my own resolution.
So, I've decided to change up how I'm doing my word study. Instead of a word a day, I am going to be taking a word or phrase a week. This first one is double the fun because there's two words I want to study.
To begin 2017, my church is doing a sermon series called "Ten Degrees Hotter". It is a series of lessons on things we can do to "raise our spiritual temperature". The opening sermon in the series was about prayer. Although I've heard about prayer and learned many things, there were many great things the pastor mentioned in this sermon. Like most people probably would, we referenced the Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6 as a starting point. The prayer goes like this (and since I need to do my word study from the King James Version, I am quoting the entire prayer in all of its King James goodness!):
(1) Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
(2) Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
(3) Give us this day our daily bread.
(4) And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
(5) And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
(6) For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
(7) Amen.
Now, I could spend a fair amount of time re-explaining everything the pastor said about prayer. But, to save you (my reader) and my poor fingers the trouble, let me give you a crash course in prayer from these verses. (Please note, my lack of a divinity degree may become evident in this one paragraph. Basically, The Lord's Prayer is not the ONLY prayer we should prayer. However, it's a MODEL prayer. If we want our prayer life to get better, don't just pray those same words. But...use those words as a model.
I like models. I live by models. As a girl who has danced most of her life, I get it. It is almost impossible for a dance teacher to completely make me understand how a movement is supposed to happen. They can model it. I can take models. I can also take a dance "model" and make it my own. (This is what most choreographers would call adding in "feeling"). Because I'm a middle school teacher, let me give you a middle school teacher's guide to the Lord's Prayer (in 21st century slang). Okay...maybe it's more of a bored single girls' version.This is what you should be praying each time (in extremely simplified terms). Let's look at each line:
Line 1: You are God. I am not
Line 2: (Please see below, this is what I'm looking into)
Line 3: Please meet my needs today. No one likes me when I'm hangry.
Line 4: Forgive me for all the stupid things I've done, and remind me to forgive my friends who also do stupid things!
Line 5: Please don't let me be tempted by chocolate, cookies, or ice cream. But if I AM...turn me back towards the nearest Weight Watchers or Cardio Worship class.
Line 6: Because you da bomb!!
Line 7: TTFN, TTYL, adios amigo!!
In this prayer, stuck right between affirming that we're praying to God and asking for our needs to be met, is this line that has stumped me. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done". There's a rather new song out by Hillary Scott called "Thy Will" where she sings about those last four words. So, what does "Thy Will Be Done" really mean??
Thy is a pronoun. It's an old English pronoun that could be like saying Your kingdom and Your will ("your" referring back to the first line when we're talking about God). To not make my mind spin anymore, I just did a quick Google search for "thy kingdom come". According to one website, that phrase is "a request that the reign of God be fully established". Okay...now we're getting a little more meaty. However, I wanted to focus this study on looking at the words "will" and "done".
According to my Strong's Bible dictionary, the ancient Greek word for "will" is thelema which means "a determination, choice {special purpose, decree} or inclination". When I look up the word "determination" in my Webster's dictionary, I find out that it means "a firm intention". Okay...easy enough. God's will is His determination, His firm intention.
That last word is a little harder "done". Let's start in Webster's. The English word "done" means (simply) "completed". If I put that back into the context of the line "thy will be done", it's just saying that we're asking for God's will (or his firm intention) to be completed. I don't know about you, but the connotation I get from "completed" is a pretty easy-going one. Like, I "completed" my coursework to get a degree. I completed a training to run a 5K. I don't think it's enough to compare what God's done to my meager attempts at "completing" something.
Let's look at Strong's again. The word for "done" in ancient Greek is the word "ginomai". This word is a special verb tense of a primary verb that means "to cause to be" or "to become". The reason I say it's a special verb tense is because it is a "prolonged and middle voice" form of the primary verb. I had to do some research on what a middle voice verb is (complete with pulling out old notes from some of my TESOL master's classes). Without going into a complete English and ancient Greek lesson on here, let me explain it this way. Most verbs in the English language are followed by a predicate (the "patient" per say...most sentences will have an "agent" and a "patient"....something/someone that DOES the action and the result of the action...the verb is the action, the "patient" is who or what the action is happening to). The way this verse is written in Greek, that is not the case. As we continue reading in the line, "Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven" we are asking God to have His will (His firm intention) be done IN Earth (or ON...depending on your preferred translation)as it is in heaven.
This last part is only somewhat backed by information and about 100% my opinion. I think that when people hear the words "Thy will be done", they think it simply means that we're asking God to have what ever happens, happen. But I think it goes much deeper than that. Notice that in the line from the prayer, God does not instruct us to ask that God's will be done to benefit us, our friends, our significant others, or any other specific being. In my mind that should be a pretty easy context to understand. That's the art of the middle voice of a verb in ancient Greek. It's a way to say that we want God's firm intention to be completed to whom He wants, and how He wants. I would assume that most Americans start saying the words "thy will be done" when they realize their life isn't going the way they want it to. But I believe that we're saying something much more powerful than that. It's not just a way to say "Hey God, whatever you want to have happen, let it happen" (He's God, by the way...it's gonna happen if you like it or not!). It's not just a matter of not complaining about it or not being able to change the outcome. I think what this line of the prayer (Thy kingdom come, thy will be done...) is instructing us to pray is more along the lines of "I want you to not just fully reign over the world, but I want you to reign over the world the way you intended before sin ever entered the world". It's not just mere circumstances and complaints we're giving God control over in our prayers. We need to be honestly asking Him to reign the way he originally planned. The middle verb tense doesn't specify if the agent of this ruling is to make God happy, or to benefit us. Regardless of who it is benefitting, we still need to acknowledge that it is God's plans since day 1 of creation that are happening.
I'm not sure if this made the prayer any easier to understand...or just turned four words into the most complex English lesson you've ever had!
