Not My Will, but Yours

Not My Will, but Yours

Surrendering Even What I Cannot Fix

Our last two conversations about Pharaoh, stubbornness, consequences and the terrible power of “my will” brought another sentence to my mind:

“Nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” — Luke 22:42

Jesus said those words in Gethsemane.

And the more I think about them, the more I realise that surrender is not only about giving God our plans, desires and ambitions.

Sometimes surrender means giving God the things we desperately want to fix.

A World Gone Wrong

Jesus came to earth and became human to restore what sin had broken.

Think for a moment about everything that had happened since Eden.

God had brought order out of chaos in creation. He created Adam and Eve, loved them, provided for them, taught them and entrusted them with authority in the garden.

And then came the Fall.

Satan deceived.

Adam and Eve chose.

Human will turned away from the will of God.

Could they possibly have comprehended the consequences that would follow their decision through thousands of years of human history?

Sin.

Destruction.

Hatred.

False gods.

Violence.

Perversion.

Injustice.

Death.

Chaos had entered human experience in ways Adam and Eve surely could not have fully imagined when they made that first choice.

And yet, when Jesus eventually walked upon this broken earth, something strikes me.

Jesus Didn’t Fix Everything Around Him

Jesus healed the sick.

He delivered those who were oppressed.

He touched people others wouldn’t touch.

He fed the hungry.

He welcomed children.

He confronted hypocrisy.

He raised the dead.

He was moved with compassion.

And yet Jesus did not immediately stop every terrible thing happening in the world around Him.

Rome remained Rome.

People still abused power.

People were still poor.

People were still imprisoned.

People still suffered injustice.

People still hurt one another.

Even Saul was allowed, for a time, to violently persecute the followers of Jesus.

Saul later admitted:

“And when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them.” — Acts 26:10

He may not have personally carried out every act of violence, but that did not make him innocent.

He participated.

He approved.

He pursued.

He consented.

When Stephen was killed, Saul was there consenting to his death.

Jesus teaches us that sin is not merely about what our hands physically accomplish. The heart matters too. Intention matters. Approval matters. Willing participation matters.

Jesus demonstrated this principle when He taught that adultery begins in the heart before the physical act occurs (Matthew 5:27–28).

Romans 1:32 similarly warns not only about doing evil, but about approving those who practice it.

So Saul bore responsibility for the suffering he helped cause.

And yet Jesus did not stop him immediately.

Until one day, on the road to Damascus, He did.

Why that day?

Why not earlier?

Why after Stephen?

Why after believers had already suffered?

I don’t know.

And perhaps that little sentence is one of the most important sentences I have had to learn in my Christian life:

I don’t know.

But God does.

The People Behind the Windows

For many years I struggled with this.

We would drive past a large block of flats containing perhaps hundreds of families.

I would look at all those windows.

And my mind would start wondering.

What is happening behind that window?

Is somebody lonely?

Is somebody frightened?

Does somebody have enough food?

Is a child being hurt?

Is a marriage breaking?

Is someone crying?

Does somebody desperately need help?

And I would begin praying.

Especially when I heard or read stories about children being abused, my heart could become so troubled that I would carry those thoughts with me into the night.

Sometimes I couldn’t find peace enough to sleep.

I wanted God to help them.

I wanted Him to intervene.

I wanted everything terrible to stop.

Someone eventually said something to me that shocked me.

Essentially:

Stop trying to take God’s place.

At first I couldn’t understand that.

I wasn’t trying to be God!

I cared.

I was concerned.

I wanted people to be safe.

But gradually I began to understand something.

The problem wasn’t compassion.

Jesus Himself was moved with compassion.

The problem was believing, even unintentionally, that because I had become aware of someone’s suffering, I now had to carry it.

I had to learn:

Not everybody’s problem is my problem to solve.

That doesn’t mean I stop caring.

It doesn’t mean I stop praying.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that when God places someone directly in front of me whom I can help, I turn away and say, “That’s God’s problem.”

Scripture tells us:

“Bear one another’s burdens…” — Galatians 6:2

But only a few verses later we read:

“For each one shall bear his own load.” — Galatians 6:5

There are burdens we are called to help carry.

And there are weights that belong in God’s hands.

Learning the difference changed something in me.

Even Perfect Compassion Had Boundaries

Jesus cared more perfectly than I ever could.

He knew every suffering person in Israel.

Actually, He knew every suffering person in the entire world.

He knew what was happening behind every door.

Every window.

Every prison wall.

Every frightened heart.

Nothing was hidden from Him.

And yet Jesus lived according to the will of His Father.

He said:

“I can of Myself do nothing.” — John 5:30

And:

“For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” — John 6:38

Jesus did not confuse loving everyone with personally changing every circumstance around Him.

Perfect compassion operated within perfect obedience.

That has become enormously important to me.

What About Saul’s Guilt?

I sometimes wonder about Paul.

After meeting Jesus, he became an entirely different man.

He was forgiven.

He was called.

He became an apostle.

He preached Christ.

He suffered for the Gospel he had once tried to destroy.

Yet Paul never pretended his past hadn’t happened.

He wrote:

“For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” — 1 Corinthians 15:9

And then:

“But by the grace of God I am what I am…” — 1 Corinthians 15:10

What a sentence.

Paul knew grace.

But grace didn’t change history.

He could repent.

He could be completely forgiven.

He could spend the remainder of his life serving Jesus.

But he could not undo the suffering he had already caused.

He couldn’t bring Stephen back.

Earlier, while thinking about this, I wondered whether Paul’s past might somehow have been connected with the mysterious “thorn in the flesh” he describes in 2 Corinthians 12.

Perhaps those memories caused him enormous pain.

But Scripture doesn’t tell us what Paul’s thorn actually was, so I cannot say that it was his past. That belongs in the category of possibility, not biblical fact.

What Scripture does show us is that Paul remembered.

And yet he did not live under condemnation.

He lived under grace.

But Paul’s Surrender Did Not Stop the Persecution

There is something important we should notice here.

Paul’s surrender to Christ did not mean that the persecution of Christians suddenly stopped.

Paul stopped persecuting them because Paul had changed. He had encountered Jesus. The man who had once hunted down followers of Christ had now become one of them.

But others continued the persecution.

And eventually, Paul himself would experience the very thing he had once inflicted upon others. He would be opposed, beaten, imprisoned and persecuted because he now belonged to the Christ he had once opposed.

What a reversal.

The persecution had not disappeared. The circumstances had not suddenly become easy. Paul had changed.

And perhaps this is something we sometimes misunderstand about surrender.

When we say,

“Not my will, but Yours,”

we are not saying,

“Lord, I will surrender to You as long as You make everything around me better.”

We are saying,

“Lord, even if the circumstances do not change, I belong to You. Your will above mine.”

Sometimes God changes the circumstances.

Sometimes He removes the difficulty.

Sometimes He opens the door.

But sometimes, the first thing He changes is us.

Paul could not control whether other people continued persecuting believers. He could not control what rulers, religious leaders or crowds would do to him. But he could surrender his own will to Christ.

And that is exactly what happened.

The man who had once lived as though his will should prevail became a man willing to suffer in order to obey the will of God.

Same man. Different Lord.

That is the heart of surrender.

“Not my will, but Yours.”

That brings me straight back to something we discovered while thinking about Pharaoh:

Repentance can change the direction of our future without necessarily erasing every consequence of our past.

My Will

There is an extraordinary contrast here.

Adam and Eve chose according to their own will.

Pharaoh hardened himself again and again:

My will.

Saul pursued Christians with astonishing determination:

My will.

And then we come to a garden.

Not Eden this time.

Gethsemane.

There is Jesus.

Knowing what lies ahead.

And instead of:

My will.

We hear:

“Nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”

What a contrast.

And perhaps surrender doesn’t only concern the things I want for myself.

My house.

My future.

My plans.

My family.

My dreams.

My health.

My finances.

Sometimes surrender concerns what I want God to do for somebody else.

Lord, please change this.

Please stop this.

Please heal them.

Please rescue that child.

Please change that person.

Please make this situation right.

There is nothing wrong with bringing those cries to God.

We should.

But eventually my prayer has to arrive where Jesus’ prayer arrived:

Not my will, but Yours.

Not because suffering doesn’t matter.

Not because injustice doesn’t matter.

Not because God doesn’t care.

But because He knows what I don’t know.

He sees what I cannot see.

He knows what is happening behind every one of those windows.

He knows yesterday, today and tomorrow simultaneously.

He knows every heart.

Every motive.

Every consequence.

Every possibility.

Every person He will send.

Every opportunity for repentance.

Every act of justice.

Every act of mercy.

Every story He is still writing.

I don’t.

I Can Pray — And Then Let Go

This is what I had to learn.

I can look at those apartment windows and pray:

Father, You see every person behind every one of those windows.

You know who is frightened.

You know who is hungry.

You know which child needs protection.

You know who is lonely.

You know who needs somebody to knock on their door.

Please help them.

Send the right people.

And if there is something You want me to do, show me.

And then…

I can leave them with God.

I don’t have to take them to bed with me.

I don’t have to lie awake trying to solve situations I know almost nothing about.

I don’t have to carry the suffering of the entire world upon my shoulders.

That isn’t a lack of compassion.

It is trust.

I can care deeply.

I can pray faithfully.

I can act obediently when God places something within my responsibility.

And then I can surrender what I cannot fix.

Because God is God.

I am not.

He is righteous.

He is all-knowing.

His thoughts are higher than mine.

His plans are better than mine.

And perhaps one of the deepest forms of:

“Not my will, but Yours”

is being able to say:

Father, I don’t understand why You haven’t changed this.

I don’t understand why You haven’t stopped it.

I don’t understand why You haven’t answered the way I desperately wanted You to.

But I trust You.

Jesus said:

“Without Me you can do nothing.” — John 15:5

And strangely enough, discovering that I cannot carry everything has not taught me to care less.

It has taught me where to put what I care about.

Into His hands.

I can do what He asks me to do.

I can love the person He puts in front of me.

I can pray for the people behind the windows.

I can help carry the burden He asks me to help carry.

But I do not have to become the saviour of everybody I see.

We already have a Saviour.

And He is far better at being God than I could ever be.

So I pray.

I obey.

I help where I can.

And what I cannot do, cannot understand and cannot fix, I surrender.

Not my will, Lord.

Yours.

19 August 2026