“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). “Thy kingdom come” is such a powerful expression of hope and personal commitment. Our Savior Jesus Christ taught us that God’s work is not done, His Kingdom has not yet fully come. But he also taught us with this expression that it is not for us to sit idly by and wait for it to come all on its own. President Thomas S. Monson explained, “God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity in the cloud, the oil in the earth. He left the rivers unbridged and the forests unfelled and the cities unbuilt. God gives to man the challenge of raw materials, not the ease of finished things. He leaves the pictures unpainted and the music unsung and the problems unsolved, that man might know the joys and glories of creation.” (Thomas S Monson, “In Quest of the Abundant Life”). To pray sincerely and truly “thy kingdom come” is to acknowledge without flinching that the world is not yet as it ought to be, and that we have a responsibility to do our part to make of it all that it could be. God’s very first commandment was “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28). God wasn’t only talking about children and families when He said to be fruitful and replenish the earth, and He wasn’t only referring to some authoritarian and oppressive subjugation and exploitation of natural resources when He said to subdue and have dominion. He was saying more or less that He wanted us to help Him finish His work, help His Kingdom come, help make of this fallen and corrupted and imperfect and sometimes hellish place a Heaven on Earth. We are children of an all-powerful creator. We make and remake the world according to our desires. We get to decide if we will make it worse or better, more hellish or more heavenly, more of Satan’s Kingdom or more of our Heavenly Father’s Kingdom. If we ever look around and feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, then our job is not to jump in the handbasket with it, but rather to grab the basket and haul it back closer to the Kingdom of Heaven. I hope that however many times in the past we have actively made our lives and the world around us worse, or tried and failed to make it better, we nevertheless will humbly kneel before our Father once more and pray “Thy Kingdom Come.”
