February 01, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
February 1, 2026
New Year Series(5)
Pursuing God’s Will Together
The Prayer for Indifference
Luke 22:39-42
There’s an old preacher story from back in the day when appointments of pastors in The Methodist Church were not known until the Bishop read them at Annual Conference. Well, one pastor had spent the better part of the year leading up to conference complaining that he had to be moved. The church he was serving was not pleasant and he needed the bishop to get him out of there. He would go anywhere!
Then Annual Conference came and at the end of conference the Bishop read the list of appointments. He read this pastor’s name and then the location of his new appointment. It said that everyone throughout the auditorium could hear the pastor say out loud, “O Lord, I forgot about that place!”
That old story has some correlation to discerning God’s will. Sometimes out of desperation, or even confidence and comfort, we can boldly say, “Lord, I will go wherever you send me and do whatever you tell me,” until we receive the message. Discerning God’s will is a bit like what Mark Twain said about the Bible, “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts I do understand!”
It’s not always the discernment we don’t have that is bothersome. It’s the discernment we do get. Last week we concluded a list of features of discernment saying that Action is the obvious last step. We must act when it comes to doing God’s will. But what determines our willingness to act? What frees us to act on the discernment we receive even when it’s uncomfortable and it’s not what we want to hear? It is a simple prayer that is anything but simple to pray. It is The Prayer for Indifference.
The title is somewhat misleading. It sounds like apathy or not caring, but in fact, it’s just the opposite. When we seek spiritual discernment it usually involves something we care about deeply. We likely have our preferences and outcomes we want to see happen. So the Prayer for Indifference is asking God to make us indifferent to anything except the will of God.
Ruth Haley Barton, whose writings we have relied on throughout this series, says, “This is a state of wide openness to God in which I am free from undue attachment to any particular outcome, and I am capable of relinquishing whatever might keep me from choosing for love. I have gotten to a place where I want God and His will more than anything—more than ego gratification, more than looking good in the eyes of others, more than personal ownership, comfort, or advantage. I want God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” (SRp119)
What does it look like to pray the Prayer for Indifference?
The best example is Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified. It is a beautiful grove of olive trees that is still there today. It’s a very peaceful place and you can see why Jesus would have taken the disciples there often. So after the Last Supper they went there. Jesus told them to pray not to be tempted, and then went further alone to pray himself. He said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) Jesus clearly had a desire. He wanted not to face crucifixion. “Remove this cup from me,” he asked. But then he said, “Not my will but yours be done.” That is a perfect example of the Prayer for Indifference. Note a few things about this prayer:
--Indifference involves struggle. It’s no easy thing to become indifferent about things we want deeply. The more we care about an outcome, the harder it is to release that desire, but the releasing is critical to receiving. Otherwise we just want God to be like a Magic Genie. I like what Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote with a somewhat sardonically tone. She said, “…on the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony who said, ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” (Leaving Church, p7)
Well, clearly for Jesus, living out God’s will did not coincide with his own desires. It was a struggle for him. The Gospel of Luke even adds parenthetically that as he prayed “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” (22:44)
Now this raises the question, why would God will that Jesus be crucified? It’s a good question. Many years ago, a British Methodist pastor and theologian named Leslie Weatherhead published a little book of sermons he preached on the will of God. He pointed out that the will of God is not one dimensional, there are three in fact: God’s Intentional Will, God’s Circumstantial Will, and God’s Ultimate Will.
God’s intention was not that Jesus should die. It was that people would follow him. But when evil circumstances prevented God’s intention, then God’s circumstantial will took over. This involved the cross. The cross became God’s way of working through human circumstances to achieve God’s Ultimate Will, God’s original intention.
I share this because Jesus’ prayer was not to accept the cross as God’s intention, but to trust in God to work through his circumstances and take an unwanted, evil instrument and use it to accomplish God’s ultimate will. Was it easy to accept God’s will as he understood it in that circumstance. Of course not. He prayed so hard that he sweat and it was like bleeding. Have your prayers ever felt that way?
Next, notice in Jesus’ experience, how Indifference often Requires Praying Over and Over. Receiving indifference is not something that happens easily or quickly. We have to keep praying for it. Notice it says about Jesus that, “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly…” (v.44) It was not one prayer. He prayed over and over, “not my will, but yours be done.”
We also see in Jesus’ prayer that Indifference is something God does in us. This is not about will power. This is not positive thinking. This is asking God to do something in us for which we need help. We need God to help us be indifferent to our personal preferences, our professional preferences, even our political preferences. And that last one may be hardest of all! The church has become highly politicized, as much as any organization right now. God’s will often gets subordinated to our political will. And when we can’t look at events like the killing of citizens on the streets in Minneapolis and say, “That is not God’s will,” then we have problems as Christians. Jesus said, “It is the will of my heavenly Father that not one of His children should perish.” I believe keeping people safe is God’s will. But we can’t become unsafe in the process. Doing God’s will always looks like the way Jesus lived, and we need God’s help to do that.
Finally, Jesus’ prayer shows how Indifference leads to freedom and courage. Ruth Haley Barton says that the Prayer for Indifference produces what she calls “interior freedom.” This is a detachment, detachment from things we want to hold onto. Jesus arrived at a place of detachment, where he could rise and face the cross.
When we have interior freedom we can do hard things. We are free from self-preservation, free of outcomes that assure our own good. When Jesus rose from his prayer in the Garden he was a free man, free to face the cross.
Now, the vast majority of us will never face such a decision. We will never face having to give up our lives, though some could face such a thing. But for all of us, the spiritual life involves dying to things. To be free to let God live in us and use us fully, we have to die to things, over and over. We have to die to getting our way, even when what we want is noble. We have to die to our belief in the way things have to be, to our comfort, to our fear of discomfort, to our need for everyone around us to be happy. These are the everyday Gethsemanes we face. And while a cross might not loom before us, letting go of what we want can feel like a little death. But when we can get to that place, God’s will often gushes forth. As Barton says, “A question that can help us identify where we need to be made indifferent is, What needs to die in me in order for God’s will to come forth in my life?” (PGWT, p63)
After Kent Millard retired as senior pastor here at St. Luke’s, he served several interim appointments in churches around the country. One was in Minneapolis, a large downtown United Methodist Church. Kent was there 4 months to prepare them for the arrival of a new senior pastor. The church had been in a long standing feud over worship times, and the bishop asked Kent to help them get that resolved before the new pastor arrived.
The issue had to do with a need to change their Sunday morning schedule. They had a contemporary service in their fellowship hall that went from 9:30-10:30 and a traditional service in the sanctuary from 10-11. The 30 minute overlap was causing big problems. There wasn’t enough parking space. It negatively affected Sunday school and children’s ministry. But perhaps more concerning was the way members were becoming hostile to each other in which people identified as either traditional or contemporary and they both demanded the other had to change their times.
When Kent met with the board he asked them to consider “What does God want?” They spent lots of time discussing the question, sharing their thoughts with each other, and getting to know each other better. They gathered data for making a decision. They sent out a survey to the congregation with six options then went away for retreat.
They started their time with the data hoping it would show them a way forward. Out of six options, no choice had over 20% support. So Kent invited everyone to go for a walk in the woods by themselves and simply pray, “God, what do you want for our church on this matter?”
When they returned they broke into small groups to share what came to them. One man on the board who attended the traditional service had been in the church many years. He said, “I have in my pocket the names of 50 beloved members of the church who said if their worship service changes time at all, they will leave the church! But as I walked, I thought, that’s not fair to others who worship in the contemporary service.” He had gotten to know another person on the board who worshipped at the contemporary hour. They had developed a respect and appreciation for one another. He looked at that person and said, “If all we do is make you change, that won’t be fair.” So I decided to go with Option 6 which was for the first service to start 30 minutes earlier and the second service 30minutes later.
Well, after he said this, the others in their group said that Option 6 was also what kept coming to them. When the whole board regrouped, several more shared that Option 6 was what came to them.
So Kent then said, “Now, we don’t want to leave anyone out. If this was not your first option, we need to hear from you.” Five people responded. But when they spoke they said, “We chose Option 2 or 4, or whatever number they had, but Option 6 was our second choice, so we can go with that.” By the end of discussion everyone voted together to support choosing Option 6. They sang Praise God from whom all blessing flow, and most of them had tears in their eyes.
So then, they decided to take it before the church. As a group, they went to one service and then the next. Both services gave standing ovations. And a few weeks later a new pastor arrived with a new worship schedule enacted and new level of unity and energy in the church.
That story sounds a lot like our story of the Jerusalem Council we heard last week. What started in dissension and debate ended with gladness, encouragement and peace. It happened as people joined in community, listened to each other, looked for God’s will, and became indifferent to having their own way.
We have a Prayer in our Methodist tradition that is like the Prayer for Indifference. It is called the Wesley Covenant Prayer…
“I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.”