“Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will”

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

IT’S a verse from Psalm 40 (8a,9a) that is often used as the Gospel Acclamation in many Holy Masses. It expresses the ideal condition of how our will should be, a tremendous challenge for all of us since we have the strong tendency to make our will exclusively as our own. If ever we concede to the will of another, it is mainly for our own convenience or advantage which in the end is just doing our own will.

We need to learn to live by God’s will which is what is most important to us. It’s not just following our will which is, of course, indispensable to us. Otherwise, we would be undermining our very own freedom and our humanity itself. Whatever we do is done because we want it. It should be a fruit of our freedom.

But what is most important is to conform our will to God’s will, which is even more indispensable to us. Otherwise, we sooner or later would destroy our freedom and our humanity itself, since God is the very author and the very lawgiver of our freedom and our humanity.

This is a basic truth that we need to spread around more widely and abidingly, since it is steadily and even systematically forgotten and, nowadays, even contradicted in many instances. We need to inculcate this truth to children as early as when they can understand and appreciate it. Then let’s give them the example of how it is lived.

God’s will is the source of everything in the universe. The whole of creation in all its existence, unity, truth, goodness and beauty starts from God’s will and is maintained by it. The entire range and scope of reality—be it material or spiritual, natural or supernatural, temporal or eternal—is “contained” there, not only theoretically but in vivo.

It would be absurd to believe that the whole reality can be captured by our senses and feelings alone, or by our intelligence that is working on its own and producing the arts and the sciences that we now have and that we continue to discover.

It would be equally absurd to speculate that we cannot know the origin of the universe, or that the whole cosmos just came to be more or less spontaneously, directly contradicting a basic principle that from nothing, nothing comes.

We need to conform our will to God’s will so we can attain the ultimate and real identity and dignity meant for us. That’s because God wants us to be his image and likeness, sharers of his very life and nature.

So, there is always a need to discipline our will to conform itself to God’s will. Indeed, we may start by looking for God in the things that we do, giving him glory and conforming ourselves to his will and ways.

That is why we really need to pause and check ourselves often. We have to see to it that we manage to keep our proper spiritual and supernatural bearing. In other words, we have to realize that whatever we do, whatever the situation is, we somehow would still be in contact with God. Somehow everything should be a form of prayer.

This will require of us to develop the skill of knowing what truly comes from God and what simply are a matter of self-indulgence. We need to be very discerning and discriminating in this regard. Not everything that presents itself before our mind comes from God. It can come from other sources—our weakened flesh or concupiscence, the world and the devil himself.