God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

I remember it like it were yesterday. I was fresh out of the hospital, barely out of my teens, and sitting at our family table with my friend Steve Estes with our Bibles and sodas. We had become acquainted when he heard I had tough questions about God and my broken neck. He also knew I wasn’t asking with a clenched fist, but a searching heart.

So, Steve made a bargain with me. I’d provide sodas and my mother’s BLT sandwiches, and he would provide — as best he could — answers from the Bible. Though I cannot reproduce our exact words, the conversations left such an indelible impression on me that even now, over fifty years later, I can capture their essence.

“I always thought that God was good,” I said to him. “But here I am a quadriplegic, sitting in a wheelchair, feeling more like his enemy than his child! Didn’t he want to stop my accident? Could he have? Was he even there? Maybe the devil was there instead.”

Decades later, Steve would tell me, “Joni, when I sat across from you that night, I was sobered. I mean, I had never met a person my age in a wheelchair. I knew what the Bible said about your questions, and a dozen passages came to mind from studying in church. But sitting across from you, I realized I had never test-driven those truths on such a difficult course. Nothing worse than a D in algebra had ever happened to me. But I looked at you and kept thinking, If the Bible can’t work in this paralyzed girl’s life, then it never was for real. So, Joni, I cleared my throat and I jumped off the cliff.”

God Permits What He Hates

That night, Steve leaned across the family table, and said, “God put you in that chair, Joni. I don’t know why, but if you will trust him instead of fighting him, you will find out why — if not in this life, then in the next. He let you break your neck, and perhaps I’m here to help you discover at least a few reasons why.”

Steve paused and then summed it up with ten words that would change my life:

God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

The sentence hit me like a brick. Its simplicity made it sound trite, but it nevertheless enticed me like an enigmatic riddle. It seemed to hold some deep and mysterious truth that piqued my fascination. “Tell me more,” I said. “I want to hear more about that.” I was hooked.

“God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.”

Over that summer with Steve, I would explore some of the most puzzling passages in Scripture. I wanted to know how God could permit hateful things without being in cahoots with the devil. How could he be the ultimate cause behind suffering without getting his hands dirty? And to what end? What could God possibly prize that was worth breaking my neck?

He Does Not Afflict Willingly

So, let me parrot some of Steve’s counsel to me that summer. He started off with Lamentations 3:32–33:

Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men. (NIV)

In the span of a verse, the Bible asserts that God “brings grief,” yet “he does not willingly bring . . . grief.” With that, Steve was able to reassure me from the top that although God allowed my accident to happen, he didn’t get a kick out of it — it gave him no pleasure in permitting such awful suffering. It meant a lot to hear that.

But what about my question of who was in charge of my accident? When it comes to who is responsible for tragedy — either God or the devil — Lamentations 3 makes it clear that God brings it; he’s behind it. God is the stowaway on Satan’s bus, erecting invisible fences around the devil’s fury and bringing ultimate good out of Satan’s wickedness.

Buck Stops with God

“God’s in charge, Joni, but that doesn’t mean he actually pushed you off the raft,” Steve said. “Numbers 35:11 pictures someone dying in an ‘accident,’ calling it ‘unintentional.’ Yet elsewhere, of the same incident, the Bible says, ‘God lets it happen’ (Exodus 21:13). It’s an accident, but it’s God’s accident. God’s decrees allow for suffering to happen, but he doesn’t necessarily ‘do’ it.”

These were deep waters: God decreeing, but not necessarily doing? When I pushed Steve further, he smiled. “Welcome to the world of finite people trying to understand an infinite God. What is clear is that God permits all sorts of things he does not approve of. He allows others to do what he would never do — he didn’t steal Job’s camels or entice the Chaldeans to seize Job’s property, yet God didn’t take his hand off the wheel for a nanosecond.”

Then he added, smiling, “So, the buck stops with God, Joni, even when people think he had nothing to do with your accident, that it was all your responsibility for taking a careless dive into shallow water!”

Okay, I got it. God permits what he hates. But what about the next part — the part about him permitting awful things in order to accomplish what he loves? I still could not imagine what good and lovely thing would be worth the horrible cost of pain and quadriplegia.

Who Crucified Jesus?

When it comes to the old cost-versus-benefit problem, God first put himself to the test. He willed the death of his own Son, but he took no delight in the actual agony. God planned it, but Satan was the instigator.

Think of the treason, torture, death, and murder that led up to Christ’s crucifixion. How could those awful things be God’s will? Yet Judas Iscariot and the whole bunch, including the Romans who nailed Jesus to the tree, did “whatever [God’s] hand and [God’s] plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:28).

So, God as much as said to everyone who screamed for Christ’s crucifixion, “Okay, so you guys want to sin? When you do, I’ll make certain you do it in a way that maintains your guilt, yet performs my will!” In short, God steered their devilish scheme to serve his own marvelous ends. A divine plan that would bring good to his people and maximum glory for himself.

“And the glorious plan that was worth the horrible cost of the cross was,” Steve said quietly, “salvation for a world of sinners.” I would soon learn how suffering and sin are related.

Defeating Evil with Evil

“Joni, he cares about your afflictions, but they are merely symptoms of a deeper problem. God cares less about making you comfortable, and more about teaching you to hate your transgressions and to grow up spiritually to love him.

“In other words, God lets you feel much of sin’s sting through suffering, while you are heading for heaven. And it should constantly remind you of what you are being delivered from. So, one form of evil, your pain and paralysis, is turned on its head to defeat another form of evil, and that is your bitterness, resentments, anxieties, fears, and I could go on — all to the praise of God’s wisdom.”

It was becoming clearer. God permitted what he hated on the hill of Calvary to accomplish what he loved — my salvation and his honor in saving me. So, Satan ended up slitting his own throat, because the world’s worst murder became the world’s only salvation.

Suffering for the Rest of Them

“Joni, this perfectly parallels your life,” Steve said. “God permitted what he hated — your spinal cord injury — to accomplish what he loves, and that is ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’” (Colossians 1:27).

“But it doesn’t stop with you,” Steve reminded me. “Just as Christ had to suffer to reach a lost world, you too will learn to suffer for the sake of others. It’s no secret. He wants your afflictions to be a platform to win others to Christ.” My story, then, is much like the story of Joseph and his wicked brothers.

Joseph flat-out said to them in Genesis 50:20, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Yes, God permitted my hateful paralysis, but his love goes far beyond Christ in me. He wants others to experience Christ in them, their hope of glory!

Fifty Years Later

It has been over fifty years since that summer when I spent so many nights with Steve by the family table. He is now senior pastor at Brick Lane Community Church in Pennsylvania, while I am a “Joseph” being used of God at Joni and Friends to save lives by telling people with disabilities the good news.

People are sometimes mystified by my joy, especially since I now deal with chronic pain. But God shares his joy on his terms, and those terms call for us, in some measure, to endure suffering, as did his precious Son. But that’s okay. For when I hold fast to God’s grace in my afflictions, the joy he gives tops everything. It’s how my so-called hateful paralysis now makes me so happy.

Yet nowhere near as happy as I will be in heaven. “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

“God will exponentially atone for every tear, and will abundantly reward us for every hurt.”

True, God permits awful things, but (to paraphrase Dorothy Sayers) something so grand and glorious is going to happen in the world’s finale that it will more than suffice for every pain we experienced on this planet. God will exponentially make up for every tear (Psalm 56:8), and will abundantly reward us for every hurt (Romans 8:18). Best of all, God will make plain the mysterious ways of his will.

Has Horrible Happened to You?

So, I pass these ten words to you: “God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.” If you are struggling as I once did, trying to understand how a good God could allow horrible things to happen in your life, let me jump off the cliff here.

God’s decrees have allowed your afflictions. I don’t know why, but if you will trust him instead of fighting him, you will find out why — if not in this life, then in the next. He permitted your hardships, and perhaps I’m here to help you unravel the beautiful riddle that will bless your life, enrich others, bring maximum glory to your Savior, and make your heavenly estate more joyful than you can now imagine.

Ever heard of Elmer Gantry?

If not — or if the name only vaguely rings a bell — then you might, like many today, lack an important bit of context for understanding the origins of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.”

The choice of the singular “Rule” also may represent two additional misunderstandings. Graham and his three closest ministry associates made four resolutions, not one — and importantly, they did not call them rules (to enforce on others) but resolutions (embraced for their own lives). Graham says it was an “informal understanding among ourselves.”

Just as He Was

In his autobiography, Just as I Am, published in 1997, Graham himself tells the story of the beginning of the now (in)famous “Rule” that bears his name. During a two-week crusade in Modesto, California, in October of 1948, the 29-year-old Graham found himself at a critical juncture.

He had been working as an evangelist for a large and long-established ministry called Youth for Christ. Now, he was beginning to launch out on his own, to begin a new work as an independent evangelist, and he and his team felt the weight of the public scrutiny they’d be under. And they longed not to become, or even appear to be, what characterized some evangelists in the first half of the twentieth century. They heard their share of stories, and personally knew evangelists whose “success” became devastating. Such men slid from one small degree of compromise to the next in their desires for money, power, and illicit sex, all under the cloak of Christian ministry and seeming fruitfulness.

Graham and his team were not the only ones aware of such stories. Twenty years before, in 1927, author Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) — the “red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds,” as H.L. Mencken called him — published the satirical novel Elmer Gantry, dedicated to Mencken, his fellow satirist. The title character was a narcissistic, womanizing evangelist. And the book was as a sensation.

On the one hand, it was banned in Boston and denounced by evangelist Billy Sunday, Graham’s forerunner, as “Satan’s cohort.” On the other, it became the bestselling fiction work of 1927. And this just two years after the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial,” reported on by Mencken, as part of the growing social critique of “fundamentalist” Christianity. (The fictional Gantry would make another pop culture appearance in the 1960 summer film bearing his name, introducing the character, and his notorious lack of character, to yet another generation.)

Hallmark of Integrity

In the fall of 1948, as Graham contemplated leaving the security of a respected and rooted ministry to found his own evangelistic association, he saw an imposing obstacle on the horizon: “the recurring problems many evangelists seemed to have, and . . . the poor image so-called mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people.” Then he adds, “Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given traveling evangelists a bad name” (127).

Importantly, Graham says these resolutions among the four founders “did not mark a radical departure for us; we had always held these principles.” Yet the act of resolving, and doing so together, had purpose and effect. “It did,” he says, “settle in our hearts and minds, once and for all, the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry” (129). (The 500-word section in Graham’s autobiography on the four resolutions is available online at billygraham.org.)

First Up: Money

What, then, were these four resolutions (rather than one rule) that made up the “Modesto Manifesto,” as Graham and his team came to call it?

First, they renounced “the temptation to wring as much money as possible out of an audience.” I’m not aware of any public outcry then or today against this first resolve. Traveling evangelists had little accountability in those days. As they moved from town to town, supporters had no clear sense as to whether the evangelistic team had fallen behind on its costs, or was way ahead, and living in hidden luxury.

The temptation was great to push the extra buttons to wrest as much income as possible out of each town, like the televangelists of the next generation would learn to do on cable TV. Knowing the love of money to be the “root of all evils,” Graham and his team resolved then, ahead of time — before one subtle concession after another dulled their conscience to the danger and accustomed their tastes to indulgence — to steer clear of such “financial abuses” and to “downplay the offering” and “depend as much as possible on money raised by the local committees in advance” (128).

They wanted to make reasonable efforts, like the apostle Paul, not to be perceived as “peddlers of God’s word” (2 Corinthians 2:17) but as those who had “renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways” (2 Corinthians 4:2). Who knows what devastation, and shipwreck, they saved themselves, and others, by this early resolve to handle their finances with Christian integrity?

Next: Sex

Second, and now famously, Graham and friends resolved — expressly in light of their constant travel and being so regularly away from home — to take particular precautions against sexual sin. Graham writes,

We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. From that day on, I did not travel, meet, or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. (128)

In contrast to Elmer Gantry, known for his sexual exploits, Graham and his team committed to take unusual care to protect their marriages, not indulge the suspicions of cynics, and work toward establishing a new reputation for their profession.

Then, Of Course: Power

The fourth Modesto resolution (we’ll come back to the third) addressed publicity, or truth in advertising. Graham and friends renounced “the tendency among some evangelists . . . to exaggerate their successes or to claim higher attendance numbers than they really had.” In other words, “we committed ourselves to integrity in our publicity and our reporting” (129). That is, the reporting and publicity that goes hand in hand with a lust for power and sinful ambition to swell influence. Is this not yet another resolution all can rally to?

Power in itself is not evil. And in local churches, the question is not whether pastors have power but how they use it, whether to serve self or the flock. So too with evangelists, holy influence is understandably desirous, to be put to holy use in gospel work. But deception and exaggeration, however seemingly good the intended end, poison the work. Graham and his team saw it then, before fame had clouded their vision, and they resolved to be honest and accurate. Oh, for more such “integrity in our publicity” today.

Finally: Pride — and the Local Church

Whatever the thinking behind Graham’s ordering, and whether third in the list was intended as the climactic position or not, it is no small inclusion that the third resolution purposed to commend, rather than criticize, local churches and their leaders. And especially given the particular traveling or “wider ministry” sphere of the team’s work.

In their own words, they determined “to avoid an antichurch or anticlergy attitude” (129). What troubled Graham, he says, was “the tendency of many evangelists to carry on their work apart from the local church, even to criticize local pastors and churches openly and scathingly.”

In an important sense, the resolutions about money, sex, and power aren’t all that surprising, or even probing. This deadly trio, while ruinous, does not represent the deepest sins of the heart. They are manifestations of unbelief and rebellion, but they grow in the soil of “the great evil,” as C.S. Lewis calls it: pride.

So, it’s actually this third resolution — the one that many eyes might overlook — that may be the most preceptive and profound, the most searching, the most unexpected and significant of the four: to not talk down churches and pastors.

Graham and his associates demonstrated admirable maturity and biblical anchorage in their relative youth in resolving for their new evangelistic endeavor to respect, bless, and partner with the local church, rather than criticize it.

Cherish the Local Church

Doubtless, they faced a great temptation at this critical juncture. Unproven and perhaps insecure about their own place in the constellation of Christian ministries, they might have focused on the evangelistic work local churches weren’t doing, which made Graham’s work necessary. Surely, the team heard the worst of stories about local churches and pastors as it traveled. With a prideful, self-serving mindset, it would have been easy to seize upon those, and ignore the other stories of God at work in local churches.

But the young evangelistic associates, with their emphasis on preaching the gospel, knew that faith in Christ not only creates new individual persons but also a new people. In his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul celebrates this people as the church, the corporate body that has received the sovereign Christ as its head (Ephesians 1:22; 5:23), has been loved by him (Ephesians 5:25), and is nourished and cherished by him (Ephesians 5:29).

Paul himself had a traveling team, but when it came time to say how the manifold wisdom of God is made known not only in more and more earthly places, but also in the spiritual realm, he says it happens through the church (Ephesians 3:10). The hosts of heaven are watching. And not only is our God glorified in Christ Jesus and his perfect gospel but also in the church (Ephesians 3:21) and his imperfect people.

We will do well to remember not just one infamous Billy Graham “rule,” but all four resolutions, and particularly the one we may be most prone to conveniently overlook: cherishing the local church.

As C.S. Lewis ended his lecture on petitionary prayer, he asked his audience of clergymen a question: “How am I to pray this very night?” He did not know. “I have no answer to my problem, though I have taken it to about every Christian I know, learned or simple, lay or clerical, within my own Communion or without” (C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 204).

What problem could he not solve? In short, he could not reconcile the seemingly mutually exclusive ways in which we are taught to make our requests known to God.

The first way, which Lewis calls “the A Pattern,” is the “Thy will be done” prayer. The deferential prayer, the creaturely prayer. We bring our requests to our All-Wise Father, but leave them at his feet to answer how he sees best.

Jesus taught us to pray this way in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus prayed this prayer himself in that most dire hour in Gethsemane, when he first asked for deliverance from the cup and yet ended, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assures us that our Father in heaven will give us good things when we ask him, but often not the exact thing we ask for (Matthew 7:9–11). We ask for “bread” and only know our Father will not give us a “serpent.”

So far, so good.

Ask Whatever I Wish?

Then comes “the B Pattern,” the “Ask whatever you wish” prayer. Instead of explicit deference, this prayer requires faith that what is actually prayed will be given by God. “Whatever you ask in prayer,” the perfect Pray-er also taught, “believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Or again, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22). This pattern requires “faith that the particular thing the petitioner asks will be given him” (199).

Jesus is not bashful to teach this pattern. “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Jesus (not some modern prosperity preacher) teaches, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14; John 15:7; 16:23–24).

So, the question: “How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith — an untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (James 1:6) — that you will get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance for a possible refusal?” (Letters to Malcolm, 35).

When he (now we) bend the knee in prayer, interceding for ill Mrs. Jones, by which pattern do we pray? Do we ask for her healing if the Lord wills (Pattern A)? Or should we pray for her healing in Jesus’s name, expecting — and not doubting — this to happen?

Lewis wrestles:

Have all my own intercessory prayers for years been mistaken? For I have always prayed that the illnesses of my friends might be healed “if it was God’s will,” very clearly envisaging the possibility that it might not be. Perhaps this has all been a fake humility and a false spirituality for which my friends owe me little thanks; perhaps I ought never to have dreamed of refusal, μηδὲν διακρινόμενος [without doubting]? (Essay Collection, 203)

If we pray prayers of deference (Pattern A) when we should have prayed prayers of assurance (Pattern B), could we be the doubter who clogs the drain of his own prayers (James 1:6–8)? Yet, if we pray Pattern B when A was best, we expose ourselves to presumption, false expectation, and disappointment.

What Wicked Men Understand

To deepen the question, we hear this same promise on the lips of another in the Gospel of Mark. Though he was a wicked man, the scene provides another valuable lens.

When Herodias’s daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.” And he vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” (Mark 6:22–23)

This, you remember, is how John the Baptist’s head ends up on a platter. What did he mean by this promise? When Salome requested the prophet’s head instead of half the kingdom, “the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her” (Mark 6:26). He realized (and assumes his guests realize) that having promised “whatever she wished” up to half the kingdom, anything other than John’s head would break his word.

This understanding strikes the nerve of our silent misgivings over Pattern B. What do we make of the unanswered prayers of so many saints who thought they prayed with expectant faith? “Every war, every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted” (Letters to Malcolm, 35). Again, he sees no problem with Pattern A — God always knows best. But how can we comfortably make eye-contact with Pattern B when it contrasts so much with our experience, dwelling now on the borderlands of the unbelievable?

Unhappy Birthdays

Some hurry to man the gap between the promise and our apparent experience of the promise by insisting that “whatever you ask” really means “whatever you ask . . . according to his will.” They cite 1 John 5:14: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” See, “according to his will.” Whatever is not a blank check in which one can write “a new Ferrari” or “a Christian spouse” or even “the conversion of my son” and safely believe to have it. Only checks that accord with his definite plan will cash.

Lewis finds this answer unsatisfactory.

Dare we say that when God promises “You shall have what you ask” he secretly means “You shall have it if you ask for something I wish to give you”? What should we think of an earthly father who promised to give his son whatever he chose for this birthday and, when the boy asked for a bicycle gave him an arithmetic book, then first disclosing the silent reservation with which the promise was made? (Essay Collection, 203)

Although the book might be better for the child, Lewis argues it arrives with a sense of “cruel mockery” for the boy without his bicycle. And Lewis’s understanding that sees whatever as quite simply whatever accords better with Herod’s understanding as well.

Splashing in the Shallows

As I wrestled with the tension Lewis exposes here, I began to realize a problematic tendency in my own prayer life: How often I have defaulted to Prayer A as a way to protect unbelief?

How many of my own If the Lord wills prayers have, beneath the surface, really been prayers saying, “I don’t really expect you to answer, so I’ll not get my hopes up?” How much has unbelief masqueraded, in Lewis’s words, as “fake humility and a false spirituality”? A tying of a rope around my waist as I venture out to meet Jesus upon the waves — just in case.

How many of us are men and women of little faith, not seriously considering Prayer B as an unconscious strategy to ward off suspected disappointment? I see this most in myself in my willingness to pray grand and abstract prayers, but rarely granular and specific prayers. Even if I ask Whatever I want prayers, they’re general requests that beget general (and open-ended) answers. But if I pray specific, time-dependent prayers, I know whether they’re answered as I prayed them or not.

Although I abide in Christ, ask in his name, have his words indwelling, possess a concern to bear fruit for his fame, I too often beach-dwell, splashing in the shallows of prayer, tempted to distrust that I ever will see whales and dolphins in the depths, as God offers.

Where Did Lewis Land?

How does Lewis answer his own riddle? Lewis guesses that Prayer B prayers must be expressions of a special God-given faith for specific kingdom work.

My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work. It is the prophet’s, the apostle’s, the missionary’s, the healer’s prayer that is made with this confidence and finds the confidence justified by the event. (Letters, 37)

In other words, this is a special “prayer of faith” for God’s fellow-workers. And the faith for this prayer, for Lewis, is not manufactured by us through a feat of “psychological gymnastics,” rather, it is God-given. We do not clench our fist and furrow our brow and prod our imaginations and confuse this with faith. God must give the gift. “For most of us,” Lewis admits, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model” (Letters, 37).

So, how should we pray tonight?

Lewis reasons along these lines, “Can I ease my problem by saying that until God gives me such a faith I have no practical decision to make; I must pray after the A pattern because, in fact I cannot pray after the B pattern? If, on the other hand, God ever gave me such a faith, then again I should have no decision to make; I should find myself praying in the B pattern” (Essays, 204).

Even this solution, however, did not ease all tensions,

But some discomfort remains. I do not like to represent God as saying “I will grant what you ask in faith” and adding, so to speak, “Because I will not give you the faith — not that kind — unless you ask what I want to give you.” Once more, there is just a faint suggestion of mockery, of goods that look a little larger in the advertisement then they turn out to be. (204)

How Will You Pray This Night?

For my own part, I look forward to help from wiser, more experienced saints. I confess my weakness, that I still do not know how to pray as I ought (Romans 8:26). Yet doesn’t Paul unearth a secret to our trouble with the next line commending the Spirit’s help to our faltering prayers? “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and, “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). He always prays B-pattern prayers on our behalf (if so they can be called). So, I must pray as I’m able, knowing that the Spirit’s groans make up perfectly for my ignorance.

How will I petition this night? I will petition God as one who loves God, his glory, his church, and his world. I will petition to bear fruit and to see souls bow to Jesus. And I will pray for faith to pray more boldly, more expectantly, as one who has a check signed by the King. I pray to experience this prayer of faith (if so it is). And I also pray reverently, “Thy will be done,” leaving room in my prayers for his will, the Spirit’s groans, but not for unbelief.

How will you pray this night?