Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
On the same pattern we add THY WILL BE DONE, IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH — not that anyone could obstruct God's will from being done, as if we were praying for his will to succeed, but we are asking that his will be done in all things. On the figurative reading of flesh and spirit, we ourselves are heaven and earth. [2] Yet even if it is to be taken plainly, the sense of the petition remains the same: that God's will be done in us on earth, so that it may then be able to be done in heaven as well. And what does God will, but that we walk according to his teaching? We ask, then, that he furnish us both the matter and the strength for doing his will, so that we may be preserved both in heaven and on earth — since his will, taken as a whole, amounts to the rescue of those he has made his own. [3] There is also that will of God which the Lord carried out by preaching, by acting, by enduring. For if he himself declared that he did not do his own will but the Father's, then without doubt the things he was doing were the Father's will, and to these we are now summoned as to patterns, that we too may preach and act and endure even unto death. And to be able to fulfill these, we need the will of God. [4] Likewise, this phrase "Thy will be done" has us invoking good upon ourselves as well, acknowledging that God's will contains nothing evil — even when something befalls us that runs contrary to what each has deserved. [5] By this same saying, moreover, we brace ourselves in advance for endurance. The Lord himself, too, when under the strain of his passion he chose to display the flesh's weakness in his very own flesh, said, "Father, take this cup away" — then, catching himself: "yet not what I will, but what thou dost." He himself embodied the Father's will and might, and yet, to show what endurance that will demands, he surrendered himself over to it.