(2) God’s will _ever seeks our highest good_. What else could any one expect, seeing that it is _our Father’s_ will? How we who are parents plan and scheme and contrive in order to secure a happy and prosperous future for our children! In exactly the same way God plans and purposes for us. He is always thinking upon us for our good. His will, says the Apostle, is our sanctification. It is a good and perfect and acceptable will. The very discipline through which He sometimes calls upon us to pass is meant to build us up in patience and purity and faith. The boy in school is apt to regard his lessons as a hardship. He would prefer the field and the sunshine to the school-room and the desk. But in after years he will be thankful he did not get his own way in the days of his youth, for he will recognise _then_ that the hours he spent over his Algebraic problems and his Latin declensions enriched his life by contributing to the culture of his mind. We are scholars in God’s schools. The discipline of the school is painful sometimes; but in later years we shall be thankful even for our sorrows and losses and bereavements, when we see how they have enriched our lives by contributing to the culture of our souls. Yes, it will be easier to embrace God’s will when we realise with the Apostle that all things work together for good to them that love God. _Thy will be done!_ Notice, God’s will is not simply to be endured or suffered—it is to be done. In our every-day speech we have unduly narrowed the scope and meaning of this petition. We talk about this petition as if it were a prayer that God would give us the grace of _resignation_. It is in times of bereavement that this phrase leaps to the lips of men. It is upon tombstones that it is inscribed by sorrowing relatives. Again do not let me be misunderstood. Suffering God’s will is embraced in the scope of this prayer. To many of us the hardest part of all is patient submission to the will of God. The man bereft of wealth, stripped of all his possessions, flung back again into the poverty from which by hard and persistent effort he had emerged, needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” The man who languishes upon a bed of sickness, who lies there helpless while perhaps wife and children look up to him for bread—he needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” Those who have parted with some loved one, who have seen father or mother, or husband or wife or child, hidden from them in the dark cold grave, and who come home again to miss the well-loved face and familiar voice—they need grace to say, while their hearts are aching and their eyes are full of tears, “Thy will be done.” Some of you know how hard it is. You find it impossible almost to say, as Job said, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Yes, it is hard to be submissive and resigned, and it is out of a broken heart the prayer often ascends, “Thy will be done.”