"Every one remembers the words of the ideal prayer: “Thy will be done.” (Matt. vi.10).
Now mark the emphasis on done. He prays that God’s will may be done. It is not that God’s will may be borne, endured, put up with. There is activity in his prayer. It is not mere resignation. How often is this prayer toned off into mere endurance, sufferance, passivity. “Thy will be done,” people say resignedly. “There is no help for it. We may just as well submit. God evidently means to have His way. Better to give in at once and make the best of it.”
Well, this is far from the ideal prayer. It may be nobler to suffer God’s will than to do it, perhaps it is. But there is nothing noble in resignation of this sort—this resignation under protest as it were. And it disguises the meaning of the prayer. “Thy will be done.” It is intensely active. It is not an acquiescence simply in God’s dealing. It is a cry for more of God’s dealing—God’s dealing with me, with everything, with everybody, with the whole world. It is an appeal to the mightiest energy in heaven or earth to work, to make more room for itself, to energise. It is a prayer that the Almighty energies of the Divine will may be universally known, and felt, and worshipped."
"The ideal man has no deeper prayer than that. It is the truest language of his heart. He does not want a bed of roses, or his pathway strewn with flowers. He wants to do God’s will. He does not want health or wealth, nor does he covet sickness or poverty,—just what God sends.
He does not want success—even success in winning souls—or want of success. What God wills for him, that is all. He does not want to prosper in business, or to keep barely struggling on. God knows what is best.
He does not want his friends to live, himself to live or die. God’s will be done. The currents of his life flow far below the circumstances of things. There is a deeper principle in it than to live to gratify himself. And so he simply asks, that in the ordinary round of his daily life there may be no desire of his heart more deep, more vivid, more absorbingly present than this, “Thy will be done.”
He who makes this the prayer of his life will know that of all prayer it is the most truly blessed, the most nearly in the spirit of Him who sought not His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him.
-by Henry Drummond, from The Ideal Life, pg 113