The Lord's Prayer...Week 4

"This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.' " —Matthew 6:9–15 (NIV)

Thy Will Be Done:

So few words that we can utter are as vital to us as these words in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done." In uttering these words we surrender to the will of a Power greater than our own. This is the essential act in the third of the Twelve Steps, the step that is the very heart of our program.

The instincts that rule our material selves are largely instincts of self-preservation. They make Self our first concern and they are the causes of most of the troubles that we can fall into. Self-concern leads to egotism, to self-assertion, to vanity, to lack of concern for the feelings of others: It leads to things that destroy us: lust, greed, and similar excesses of body passions.

A sane view of life is that all things are good in their right use. But we have devoted ourselves to the misuse of a number of things and have regarded ourselves accountable to no man. Now that the bill
for our misconduct has been presented, we find ourselves thoroughly rooted in misuse and thoroughly the victims of our impulses.

Now that we are in AA, most of us have recognized our chief errors. Most of us see the need for control, for responsible action, for curbs on selfish acts. We have seen how some of the results of our
habits of thought, in resentment, in self-pity, in jealousy, in other aspects of self-love, return again and again to harass us.

Our head strong tendencies demand surrender, demand a yielding of ourselves to the will of an external power. To place ourselves in the hands of that Power, we have to create new habits of action to
keep us out of old ruts.

We may continue to do all the things that nature intended us to do, but it is important that we do those things under control. We must control impulses, particularly those associated with our excesses.

Most difficult, perhaps, are those times when there is an urge that we cannot define, just a general tension under the skin and a hazy hut strong impulsive feeling in the mind. These are times when it is
particularly necessary to call on the aid of the Supreme Power.

We must develop the habit of turning to the Supreme Power at all times, at regular daily intervals, at times when we are under stress. Impulses should be discharged by addressing ourselves directly to the Supreme Power and asking for guidance. We must learn to see the signs of headstrong and self-willed action and remember the troubles that such action has brought in the past. Our watchword here is, "Easy does it."

It is the will of the Supreme Power that we love our neighbors, that we be merciful and just in all our action. Perhaps we should be especially mindful of the warning that we should not judge others. We have to learn to be tolerant and to improve our own ways of living.

These things are hard at first because they run so contrary to the habits we have developed. Our task is to develop new habits in which we place the direction of our lives in the hands of a Power greater than our own. We have to do it first by conscious effort. Eventually we find that when we turn to the Supreme Power and accept the guidance of that power, the painful shackles fall away and the driving impulses lose their force and we find a measure of peace.

[* Reprinted from a series of eight editorial articles written in 1944 and first published in the Cleveland Central Bulletin an Alcoholics Anonymous newsletter.]