My Will Be Done! 21st century Christianity

My Will Be Done: 21st Century Christianity and the Sacred Weight of Waiting

Scripture Readings:** Psalm 40:1 & Isaiah 64:4

 The Opening Hook: The Three-Second Eternity
It happens to all of us at least once a week. You are sitting at your desk, or looking at your phone, trying to load a video, pull up an article, or send an important message. And then, it appears: that little, spinning, animated circle. The loading wheel.
Psychologists and tech developers have actually studied our collective reaction to that little wheel. Do you know how long it takes for the average 21st-century person to start feeling a physical spike of frustration?

**Two seconds.**
If a webpage takes longer than two seconds to load, our cortisol levels rise. At three seconds, a massive percentage of people will abandon the page entirely. We live in a world engineered for immediacy. We have instant streaming, instant coffee, next-day delivery, and high-speed algorithms designed to ensure that we never, ever have to experience the agonizing discomfort of a pause. We have successfully banished waiting from almost every corner of our daily lives.Except, it seems, from our spiritual lives.

Because sooner or later, every single one of us hits a season where life slows to an agonizing crawl. A medical diagnosis that doesn’t clear up. A relational rift that won’t heal. A career door that remains obstinately shut despite all your talent and effort. You pray, you plead, you bring your deepest anxieties before the heavens, and what do you get back?

Not an Immediate Solution
Not a direct download. You get a spiritual loading wheel.

Our modern, 21st-century instinct—the culture we breathe every day—tells us to take control. It whispers, *”If it’s taking this long, you need to fix it yourself. Force the door open. Build your own kingdom. Make your will be done.”* We treat waiting as a waste of time, a failure of planning, or a sign that God has simply scrolled past us.

But thousands of years ago, a king named David sat in a dark, muddy pit of despair. He didn’t have a smartphone, but he knew the agonizing weight of a pause. And in **Psalm 40:1**, he writes something that sounds almost scandalous to the modern ear: *“I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined to me, and heard my cry.”*

Notice he didn’t say, “I waited two seconds and then figured out a backup plan.” He waited.
And centuries later, the prophet Isaiah pulled back the curtain to show us exactly *why* that waiting isn’t wasted space. In **Isaiah 64:4**, he reminds us that no eye has seen, and no ear has heard, the incredible things God is actively preparing **for those who wait for Him.**

Today, we are going to challenge the loudest mantra of the 21st century. We are going to look at what happens when we stop demanding that our own short-sighted wills be done right now, and instead learn the sacred, counter-cultural art of dropping our anchors and waiting on a God who works in the pause.

Point 1: From Surrender to Self-Actualization
Learning that art is incredibly difficult because it requires us to fight against the very air we breathe. Every billboard, every social media algorithm, and every self-help podcast tells us that we are the authors of our own destiny.

This brings us to the first major tension we face in 21st-century Christianity:

**The subtle shift from surrender to self-actualization.**
You see, the gospel we are handed by modern culture isn’t one of laying down our lives; it’s a gospel of *optimizing* our lives. The cultural mantra of our day is: *“Your will be done. Your authentic self be expressed. Your happiness be secured.”*

When we bring that exact mindset into our faith, something changes. We stop looking at God as the Sovereign Lord to whom we surrender our lives, and we start looking at Him as a divine consultant hired to help us achieve our goals. We take the core petition of the Lord’s Prayer—*“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done”*—and without even realizing it, we flip it. We look toward heaven and whisper, *“My kingdom come, my will be done, on earth as it is in my plans.”*

When that happens, waiting is no longer a spiritual discipline.

Waiting becomes an insult to our autonomy. If God is moving too slowly, we feel entirely justified in taking the wheel back, forcing the door open, and running ahead of Him. We trade the deep, transformative work of spiritual surrender for the shallow exhaustion of self-reliance. And when we build a faith that never challenges our timelines or our comfort, we don’t actually worship God anymore. We just worship a mirror.

Point 2: The Subtle Rise of “Consumer Christianity”
Once we make that shift—once the self becomes the ultimate ruler of what is right, what is good, and how fast things should happen—it fundamentally changes how we interact with the body of Christ. It leads us directly into our second modern tension: **The subtle rise of “Consumer Christianity.”**

Think about how we navigate the rest of our world. If a streaming service raises its prices or doesn’t have the show we want, we cancel our subscription. If an online retailer takes a week to ship a package instead of two days, we find a different vendor. We are conditioned to think like consumers, always asking one baseline question: *“What is this product doing for me right now?”*

Tragically, we have imported that exact retail mindset right into the pews.
When “my will be done” is the driving force of our hearts, we approach the church, the scriptures, and even God Himself with a shopper’s mentality. We look for a community that fits our current preferences, a message that never rubs our rough edges the wrong way, and a spiritual timeline that matches our busy schedules.

But here is the hard truth of the gospel: You cannot experience deep spiritual transformation while maintaining total consumer control. True community requires staying power through friction. Deep faith requires standing firm when the cultural wind blows against you. But if our primary goal is maintaining our own comfort and ensuring our own immediate desires are met, then the moment a church requires deep sacrifice, or the moment a teaching causes us discomfort, our consumer instinct kicks in. We don’t lean in; we simply swipe left and look for a more accommodating space.

But as we look back at David in the pit and Isaiah in the wilderness, we find a completely different invitation. They invite us out of the exhausting marketplace of consumerism and into something far more beautiful: the sacred space of holy expectation.

 Point 3: Reclaiming His Will and Understanding God’s Timing
To reclaim *“Thy will be done,”* we have to completely change our relationship with God’s clock.

Look closely at the Hebrew text of **Psalm 40:1**.

When David says, *“I waited patiently,”* the original language uses an intense repetition: *Qavah qavithi*—literally, **“Waiting, I waited.”** It doesn’t mean David was sitting on a couch, twiddling his thumbs, bored out of his mind. *Qavah* means to bind together like a tightly wound rope. It is a posture of robust, tense, expectant hope.

It is an active anchor.
Consider a ship caught in a massive storm. The captain doesn’t drop the anchor into the ocean to change the weather. The anchor cannot stop the wind, and it cannot dissipate the clouds. The captain drops the anchor into the unseen depths for one reason: to hold the ship’s ground so it isn’t driven into the rocks while the storm rages.

“My will be done” is the spiritual equivalent of trying to row a massive ship out of a hurricane by human strength alone. It leads to exhaustion, panic, and ultimate shipwreck.

“Thy will be done” is dropping the anchor of *patient waiting* into the unchanging character of God, trusting that the unseen foundation is stronger than the visible storm.

And why can we trust that foundation? Because of what Isaiah reveals to us.
In **Isaiah 64:4**, the prophet declares that since the beginning of the world, no one has ever heard or seen a God like ours. Every other ancient religion featured gods who demanded that humans perform for them, build for them, and sweat for them to get their attention. But Isaiah says our God is completely unique: He is a God who **works on behalf of those who wait for Him.**

When we insist on our own timeline—when we cry out *”my will be done”*—we settle for what *our* hands can build. And let’s be honest, what our hands can build in a panic is usually pretty fragile. But when we step back, wait, and allow *His* will to unfold, we enter a realm of divine preparation. God is doing a work behind the scenes in the hearts of others, in our circumstances, and most importantly, *in us*, that our current capacity cannot yet hold. He isn’t being slow; He is being thorough.

 A Thought-Provoking Closing: Creating Introspection
So, where does that leave us today, standing in the fast-paced currents of the 21st century?
I want to ask you a question to carry with you out of these doors, and I want you to let it sit uncomfortably in your heart this week.

If God answered every single prayer you uttered over the last seven days exactly the way you wanted Him to, and on your exact timeline… **what would the world look like?**
If every prayer was answered instantly, your bank account might be full. Your discomfort would be gone. Your current path would be smoothed out. The loading wheel would be banished. But ask yourself this: *Who would get the glory?* Whose kingdom would actually be built? Yours, or His?

If your timeline was always perfectly met, you would never have to develop patience. If your comfort was never disrupted, you would never develop resilience. If you never had to wait in the pit like David, you would never know the awe-inspiring experience of God reaching down, inclining His ear, and pulling you out onto a rock.

The ultimate trap of 21st-century Christianity isn’t that we will openly reject God. It’s that we will subtly try to manage Him. We will try to tame Him into a God who exists to execute our will, rather than a Lord whose will we are privileged to serve.
The next time you hit that spiritual loading wheel—the next time the answer doesn’t come in the two-second window of your expectations—do not panic. Do not reach for the wheel. Do not swipe left on your faith.

Take a deep breath, drop your anchor, and whisper: *“Waiting, I will wait. Not my will, but Yours be done. Because I know You are working on my behalf.”*

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father,
We confess that we are children of a fast-paced world. We confess that our hearts are easily frustrated when Your clock does not align with our calendars. Forgive us for the times we have tried to twist Your grace into a tool for our own ambitions, and for the times we have spoken “with our lips while demanding “My will be done” with our actions.
Give us the grit and the grace to wait. Strengthen our grip on the anchor of Your character. Teach us to trust the work You are doing in the dark, in the quiet, and in the pauses of our lives. We declare today that Your kingdom is better than our kingdoms, Your timeline is safer than our schedules, and Your will is infinitely greater than our own.
Establish our feet upon the rock of Your faithfulness. It’s in the beautiful, sovereign name of Jesus we pray.
Amen.