Around the Year With Emmet Fox - 8 February 2011
 

THY WILL BE DONE

Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

Now we too often choose to use our free will in a negative way; allowing ourselves to think selfishly, and this wrong thinking brings upon us all our troubles. Instead of understanding that it is our essential nature to express God, to be ever about our Father's business, we try to set up our own account. We abuse our own free will, trying to work apart from God; and the very natural result is all the sickness, poverty, sin, trouble, and death that we find on the physical plane. We must never for a moment try to make plans or arrangements without reference to God, or suppose that we can be either happy or successful if we are seeking any other end than to do his Will.

Our business is to bring our whole nature as fast as we can into conformity with the will of God. "In this will is our peace," said Dante, and the Divine Comedy is really a study in fundamental states of consciousness, the Inferno representing the state of the soul that is endeavoring to live without God, the Paradiso representing the state of the soul that has achieved its conscious unity with the divine Will. It was this sublime conflict of the soul that wrung from the heart of the great Augustine the cry, "Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find themselves in Thee."