Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of ministers and church leaders. My talk was part of a larger program, and my task within the larger agenda was to share with those leaders about spiritual practices that can help us pay better attention to God—God’s will, God’s action, and God’s desires for our lives and our churches.

This topic is a tricky one for a speaker, of course. Unless I know my audience extremely well, I likely know very little about what their existing practices are, how rich their prayer life is, and just what they might need overall. So, among the things I decided to share that day was one that I was confident would be appropriate for leaders in our culture: the use of prayers of acceptance and relinquishment.

Let me first explain these categories before reflecting upon them further. Put very simply, “prayers of acceptance” involve opening ourselves up to God’s will, and “prayers of relinquishment” help me to turn my will over to God. As you can probably already guess, these two modes of prayer are like two sides of a coin. And yes, this material is not new; these types of praying have been around for quite a long time, but I didn’t become aware of them until about 10 years ago, through the ministry of friends who are part of 12-step programs.

A quick side note: if you aren’t familiar with the 12-step program, then I am (in part) thankful for that, because it may mean that you have avoided some significant brokenness in your own life or the lives of those near to you. But I also wonder if you might be missing out. Folks who have become acquainted with 12-step principles often wish that church was more influenced by them: the honest sharing, the focus on admitting one’s wrongs and moving forward in growth, and the incredible fellowship that can come from the openness that is needed in such a meeting. In fact, this sentiment is so widespread that a religion professor in Memphis recently wrote a book called Why Can’t Church Be More Like an AA Meeting![1]

As you may know, one of those famous 12 steps involves “praying only for God’s will and the power to carry that out.” Part of the reason this step exists is that all of us, while we may not think of ourselves as “addicts,” are in fact addicted at some level to doing things our own way (perhaps in addition to other things[2]), but that doesn’t mean we can’t end up having a pretty active prayer life. The problem is that we often end up mainly praying for what we want. In other words, even though we are indeed going to God in prayer, we are starting from what we recognize that we need, want, or desire, often not taking thought for whether God wants those things. Not a great situation, right?

Other problems arise in prayer in seasons of difficulty, confusion, or grief, when we may simply not know what to pray at all. This struggle is understandable, of course; as hard as it is to know what to say to our fellow humans at those moments, it can be even more difficult to know what to say to God!  So we question, we wonder, we wriggle, we wobble—and we often come up empty in prayer. And this emptiness can lead to significant periods of not praying in any way whatsoever.

But what if we were to open ourselves to God’s will? What if we could simply say, like Jesus did in Gethsemane, “your will be done”?

In my own experience, “May your will be done” often feels rather vague and open-ended. I have found that asking “God, what is your will for me today?” is more direct and specific. But I’ll also be up front with you: when I have prayed this prayer, I have experienced things that are uncomfortable, but that also mirror what other folks who practice this discipline report. For one thing, asking a question in prayer implies that you are waiting for an answer. And that implies that you might have to sit in silence for a little while. That can be pretty disconcerting, especially if we don’t feel like we’re getting an answer in our minds or hearts, or with our ears or eyes. Also, we will sometimes have to wrestle with the reality that there might be no answer today. Sometimes, when I ask that prayer, I sense no answer. Does that mean God doesn’t have a will for me? Is God simply telling me to decide what to do with my day, based on my own ways of following Jesus? Or might God be trying to communicate with me, and might I be blocking that communication somehow, perhaps through some kind of sin in my life?

Another challenging phenomenon that you may encounter is when you feel like you do receive an answer in your heart or mind… but the answer is exactly what you would do if left to your own devices. In other words, it’s what you would tell a friend over coffee if they asked you what they should do in a situation like yours. Does that mean it’s just you talking to yourself? Are you just in a prayer echo chamber? Or does it mean that your will is deeply aligned with God’s? It can be hard to tell, and such questions need discernment.

But sometimes you will feel that you are receiving an answer, and that answer is very different from what you might conclude on your own. Perhaps you are facing a difficult situation, and you sense that God is telling you something that is precisely the opposite of what you would like to do. For myself, I tend to think with greater certainty that these times are the ones in which God is speaking to me, and I try—admittedly with less than 100% consistency and conviction—to follow that voice.

These kinds of situations point us to the other side of our coin: the prayer of relinquishment. I have already invoked the Gethsemane story from the end of Jesus’s life, but I didn’t quote Jesus’s entire statement. He didn’t just say “your will be done”; he said, “not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). The version in Matthew reads “not as I will, but as you will” (26:39). In other words, in Jesus’s openness to the will of his Father, he had to actively say “not my will.” If the cup couldn’t pass from him, he wanted the Father’s will to be done rather than his own.

This may bewilder you, and with good cause. Does that mean that the Father and the Son had two separate wills? That they weren’t in concert with one another? I thought, as Jesus himself says in John 10:30, that the Father and the Son are one! I think that this episode is not a matter of deep theology or philosophy, concerning the oneness of divinity and the mechanics of incarnation, but rather of Jesus’s deep humanness. I think that, in this moment, Jesus is simply saying, “Father, I don’t want to do this. I will, but I don’t want to.”

And that English word “will” is important. We use it for the future tense (“we will go to the basketball game tomorrow”) and for our desires and intentions (as in the phrase “last will and testament”). But since our desires and intentions are future-oriented, we will what we hope will happen. And yet… sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we don’t get our way.

How do we handle this reality as leaders and disciples? Do we throw temper tantrums, expressing our anger to God and to our fellow humans in ways disproportionate to the situation? Do we let our woundedness lead us to withdraw from relationship with God and our fellow humans? Do we strive to grab the reins ourselves, “squeezing” the situation tightly in hopes that our desires will actually come to pass after all?

But what if we could say with an honest heart, “Not my will but yours be done”? What kind of persons would we need to be or become in order to pray that prayer?

Let’s get concrete, shall we? 

• What if I don’t get that promotion? Achieve that fame? Earn that money? 

• What if she doesn’t get well? What if he doesn’t come home? What if I never see them again?

• What if we can’t minister to our city with this program? Serve our church in that way? Start that new ministry that we’ve dreamed of?

• What if I am unknown—or more known than I want to be? What if God lays me aside—or puts me into a position of more prominence than I desire? What if I am a failure—or more of a success than I know what to do with?

I think what this boils down to is this question set: Can I be actually okay with not getting my way? Is it okay if the thing I desperately want just doesn’t happen? 

For this to happen, I find in my heart that I have to trust God pretty radically. For me to let “Jesus take the wheel” means that I have to let go of it. To be able to truly and fully lay my life, my people, and my work in his hands means that I must relinquish them. But that’s what we sing, isn’t it: “He’s got the whole world in his hands”? I believe it… but acting on that belief is a different proposition.

I find that body postures help me in this regard. As you read this, let me invite you to sit back and rest your hands on your knees or somewhere comfortable, palms upward. When you pray prayers of acceptance, consider turning your hands in this way as an expression of your willingness to accept what God puts into them. I use this posture at church when we sing songs that make requests to God (“I Need Thee Ev’ry Hour”) or that I want to be my request (as when the line “I’m no longer a slave to fear” is more aspiration than reality).

Now turn your palms downward, perhaps beginning with a closed fist and then opening your hand. This is what it would look like if you were holding something and then letting it drop to the ground. I turn my palms this way during songs like “I Surrender All” or when singing lyrics like “Yet not I, but through Christ in me.” They are prayers that require me to let go, to relinquish, and involving our bodies can help us to pray them.

As with all spiritual practices, these ways of praying are not magic. They do NOT guarantee any particular outcome. But I find that they DO help me trust God more.

And that’s a good outcome, right?