Half-Hours With The Saints and Servants of God/Part 1: 3. On the Holy Will of God
3.— The Will of God.
"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
[Father F. Nepveu, born at St. Malo in the year 1639, embraced the Society of the Jesuits in 1654. He was at the head of the College at Rennes, where he died in the year 1708. All the works of this learned Jesuit are replete with earnest piety. A list of his numerous works may be found in Moreri's Dictionary.]
Is there any evil in the city, says the prophet, that God has not made?
Sin, the only evil that God does not will, He simply permits, but the consequences of sin He wills. He condemns the envy of Joseph's brethren, but He wills the effect, which was the slavery of Joseph. He had a horror of the rage of the Jews, but He willed and ordained the death of our Lord, which was the consequence." He will punish the injury which is done to you, but He wills the loss or affliction it causes you.
Why not complain of these evils when looked at in themselves? but wherefore murmur when we look upon them as the will of God? God wills it! Ah, that has a great weight with a man who has faith, who knows and loves God. A good Christian, would he dare to say, God wills it, but I wish it not?
Our perfection consists in doing the will of God, and it is for us to submit. The will of God is infinitely holy. If this be the rule of all sanctity, we are then holy in proportion to our conformity to His will.
Jesus Christ is our model, and we are saintly when we are like unto Him; and we are so much the more like Him in proportion to our conformity to the will of God. Thus does He not say that He is not come to do His will, but that of His Father?
In fine, our perfection and holiness consists in charity. Charity is the fulfilment of the law, says St. Paul. Perfect charity consists in doing the will of God in the highest sense it can be placed. "He who keeps my commandments and does my will," says Jesus Christ himself, " is he who loves me " {John xiv.)
You are sometimes in anxiety; if you love God, that is a just subject of uneasiness. If you are always ready to do His will and to submit to it, then be sure that you love Him.
Conformity to the will of God also makes a man happy as God, who is happiness itself.
What is it that makes God infinitely happy? It is that He does all that He wills; it is that He wills all that is good; it is that He finds in Himself all the good that He wills.
Thus a man perfectly conformed to the will of God possesses all these blessings.
He does what he wills because he only wishes for what God wills; because it fulfils also, in whatever manner it may be, His fulfilment also.
He also wishes only for that that is good, for he wills only what God wills.
In conclusion, he finds all things good in themselves; for his conformity to the will of God, united as it is to God, makes him possess God; and what benefit can fail to occur to him who possesses God?
[John Baptist Massillon was the son of a notary residing at Hyeres in Provence. Born on the 24th of June 1663, he entered the Congregation of the Oratory in the year 1681. His fame as a fine preacher having reached the ears of Louis XIV., he was summoned to Versailles to preach the Advent. It was, after the course of these discourses that he received the following encomium from the lips of the French king: — " My father, I have been well satisfied with many orators, but as for you, every time that I have heard you I have felt very discontented and vexed with myself."
In the year 1717, the Regent nominated him to be the Bishop of Clermont. He remained in the government of his diocese until the year 1742, when he died at the age of seventy-nine.]
Joseph, raised to the highest dignity in the court of Egypt, by his elevation became to be the terror and protector of his brothers. These (of whom he had so much reason to complain) did he not consider them as only executors of the will of God, notwithstanding the outrages they inflicted on him — that the treason and cruelty which they employed against him proved, by the decrees of Divine Providence, to be more beneficial than their jealousy could have imagined?
It is true that they had sold him to go into Egypt, but it was not on account of their perfidy, rather it was by the will of God that he should be sent to this foreign land. Non vestro consilio sed Dei voluntate hie missus sum.
Such were the feelings of so many Saints and martyrs with regard to those by whom they had been persecuted.
They reverenced even the scourges which God had sent to chasten them. The early Christians blessed the hands that struck them.
Give us, O Lord, the will to do what Thou commandest, and to do what Thou wiliest.