Part 4: The Prayer

Good morning. Thank you. My name is Mark. I'm one of the pastors here. I want to welcome all of you, not only those of you in this room, next door over in venue, on Facebook Live, or joining us sometime in the future on the internet through our sermon archive. We are so glad that you're joining us here today, and I want to begin by asking you to think of a defining moment in your life. What comes to mind? Perhaps it's a graduation, or it's a first job, first love. Maybe it's when you took your wedding vows or the arrival of a child. Maybe it's some kind of epic adventure that you were able to experience. You saw something you'll just never forget; it just changed you in a way. It could be any number of those things.

But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that for many of us, perhaps most of us, the first thing that came to your mind was perhaps not when God, you know, gave you your heart's desire or when you prayed and he said yes. As wonderful as those moments are, they do shape us for sure. But I think what actually defines us in the deepest ways are actually when we don't get what we want, when God says no to the very things that we ask him for. In fact, a friend of mine, you've heard him speak here, Craig Barnes, he says this along those lines: think back on one of your greatest disappointments in life. Remember when it was clear that the disaster you wanted to avoid was unavoidable? When the relationship you wanted so much fell apart? When your dreams did not come true? Remember when, in spite of all your fervent prayers, God said no? You were never the same after that. That is why it is called a defining moment.

Some of you may be in a defining moment right now, or you suspect you may be; you're not quite sure how this situation is going to unfold. Perhaps there may be a few of us going, "Mark, I couldn't actually think of anything. I don't know that I've ever had a defining moment." Well, you know, buckle up; you will. It's just a matter of time for all of us. And as we continue in our series, Light in the Darkness, we've been following Jesus through the last week of his earthly ministry. We're getting closer and closer to his cross and his crucifixion, and as we get there, the intensity continues to ratchet up. We're certainly going to see that today, and I invite you to journey with us and really try to follow Jesus into this moment because Jesus, in the passage today, is going to have one of the most defining moments of his life.

It's an amazing passage, and if you've ever been under just unbearable pressure, a pain you feel overwhelmed, I'm here to remind you this morning that Jesus knows exactly how you feel and then some. And not only that, but he's going to show us in this passage how to respond in faith. We're going to be in Mark's Gospel, chapter 14, despite what it says in your notes, chapter 14, verses 32 through 42, where we arrive at the Garden of Gethsemane. Last weekend, we were in the upper room, the Last Supper, and if you missed that, you really owe it to yourself to go to our webpage, TLC.org, and watch Renee's message on that because he just did a masterful job. But now they've moved from the upper room to the Mount of Olives. They're in a garden called Gethsemane.

And please follow along as I read, starting at verse 32. They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray." He took Peter, James, and John along with him and began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death," he said to them. "Stay here and keep watch." Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. "Abba, Father," he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will." Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Simon," he said to Peter, "are you asleep? Couldn't you keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray that you will not fall into temptation. The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Once more he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back, he found them sleeping again because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him. Returning the third time, he said to them, "Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go. Here comes my betrayer."

This account is one of only two times in all of the Gospels where we see Jesus in a state you can only call emotionally undone. The other time is when he's on the cross and he cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But this moment in Gethsemane, it's like an amplification of that very same cry. And bear in mind, everywhere else in the Gospels, all four Gospels, Jesus is always in command. He's in control of himself, his circumstances. You know, people come and they try to engage him in a debate; he just flips their argument on its head. Or someone is sick; he heals them. Even his friend Lazarus is dead; he resurrects him. He's out on stormy waters; the boat's about to sink. He just says, "Hush! Be still!" to the wind and the waves. Even demons tremble in his presence, and now Jesus is the one trembling.

Jesus knows that just in a few hours he's going to be tortured. He knows that he's going to be crucified. He knows that before this following day, before the sun sets, he will be laid out dead in his tomb. And the weight of this comes crashing down on him in a way that is unique to any other time in his life. Gethsemane means oil press, which is a fitting name because of the pressure that Jesus is feeling. And if it was only about his physical sufferings, we might expect Jesus to be a little bit more resolute, a little bit more calm, like you see so many times with Christians who have died for the faith over the years. In fact, just in the book of Acts, just a couple books over from Mark, there is one of the first church leaders, a man named Stephen, and when he is being stoned to death, what's he doing? He's praying. He's asking Jesus to forgive the very people that are executing him in this brutal way.

Or a couple decades later, many Polycarp, who was discipled by the Apostle John, the Romans are about to burn him at the stake. And yet just before that, according to ancient witnesses, Polycarp says, "The fire you threaten burns but an hour and is quenched after a little while. You do not know the fire of the coming judgment. But why do you delay? Come, do what you will." Now that's calm under stressful circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of Christian martyrs have died in this way. So what's going on with Jesus? Well, if you look at verse 33, it says he took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. The original Greek, that phrase "deeply distressed," it has the idea of being astonished. This is a new awareness, a deeper awareness of his sufferings, and "troubled" has the idea of being struck with terror.

So it's not just the physical sufferings; that's bad enough. But the spiritual suffering that he's about to endure is far worse. In 2 Corinthians 5, it says that God made him who knew no sin to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. Think about what's going on here: Jesus Christ, God in flesh, the eternal Son of God who is holy, who is perfect, who has never known sin, he is about to become the focal point, the one who will receive upon himself every evil, despicable, horrible thing that human beings have devised since the beginning of time—past, present, future. It is all going to be focused upon him, and it's not just the stain of sin that will come upon him. I mean, we're used to wallowing in our sin; you know, that's all we've ever known. He's never known this before.

And it's not just that; it's the guilt, and it is the punishment, and it is the Father's wrath that will come upon him. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, Mark, I don't like the idea that God could have wrath. I mean, I like to think of God just as happy." Well, if that's the case, I would just respectfully encourage you to think if a God who is never offended by rape, murder, genocide, evil, if that God is worthy of your following. Because aren't you offended by those things? And we're not even holy; we're not even truly good. Because God is holy, God is good, God is love; he is, yes, offended. He is about to have wrath over the immeasurable evil that has played out in front of him. And again, this is all going to be focused on Jesus, and it comes crashing down on him in such a way that in verse 34, just hours before the cross, Jesus says, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." Now if you've ever read what Jesus says in the Gospels, you'll never find him exaggerate, like at all. And so when Jesus says, "You know, my soul is killing me, guys," it's killing him; it's that horrific.

And sometimes in our own Gethsemane moments, we might wonder, "You know, where is God? Where are you, God? I mean, I prayed, and yet I don't hear an answer." It's like it just kind of goes out into nothingness. And yet, is it possible that Jesus felt the exact same way in this moment? Matthew's Gospel makes it clear that he prays the same thing three times. Did you hear me, Father? I'll pray it again. Did you hear me the second time? Let me just pray it one more time. And making matters worse, his very best friends, Peter, James, and John, they completely fail in this moment. He says, "Guys, I feel like I'm dying here. Would you please watch and pray?" And minutes later, what does he hear? He gets and he rouses them. He's like, "Come on, guys! No, I really, really, really need you to pray for me." Luke says he's sweating drops of blood. Just like us, "Yeah, I'll pray for you," and off they go. Not the only time the church has been caught sleeping, I might add, but I digress.

The point is that someday, if not already, if not today, someday you are going to find yourself in a situation where you feel pressed in on all sides, where because of grief or stress or loss, you feel overwhelmed, and in fact, you feel alone because the people you thought you could count on, they failed you, and they're gone. What will you do? Well, my prayer for you today is that you will remember something key to this story, that when you're in Gethsemane, you may not remember the points that I'm going to make; you may not remember the points of any particular sermon. But I hope that you will remember this. I listed it as the big idea in today's passage. It's right at the top of chapter 2, because if you remember nothing else, I hope that you'll remember this: when you wonder what God is doing in your darkest hour, I pray you will remember what Jesus was doing in his.

Because if you can remember that, first of all, you know, I am not alone. A friend of mine lost his wife of many years to cancer just a couple years ago, and I remember talking to him about his experience. He said he discovered that the second year of that grief was actually worse than the first. Because in the second year, he'd become accustomed to the fact that she was gone. He'd come to terms with that. But the crushing reality of that second year was the aloneness that he felt. And he didn't begrudge his friends or families for getting on with their life and doing things. He said night after night after night, "I just felt this intense loneliness, and it was in those moments when I thought nobody knew what I was going through. I would be reminded, 'Oh, there's one. Jesus knows. Jesus knows exactly what I'm going through.'" And that's what brought him through that grief. That's why there's no one but Jesus who's better equipped to show us, to lead us in the midst of our own dark moments of life, our own Gethsemanes.

And so I want to focus today on what Jesus prays in this moment. I'm not going to call it a little prayer; it's a short prayer. It's only one verse long, but in this prayer, there are three things wrapped in it that I think are very instructive for us, things that we can follow by his example. And the first one is this: that in his darkest hour, Jesus was looking to his Father. He was looking to his Father despite the pain. Jesus looks beyond that; he looks to his Father. It's like what Trent was saying so well earlier in the worship time, where he reached through the feelings and he grabbed onto what was true. And again, bear in mind, we have no way of comprehending what he was going through. This is a level of insight we wouldn't be able to have or a story we can't totally understand. But you know, every once in a while, we sing a song, "I'll never know how much it cost to see my sin upon the cross." You know that song? That's what's true; a song as true as you'll ever sing right there. I don't know that we will ever know, even in heaven, because it might spoil it for us to know how much it actually cost. But Jesus knew; make no mistake of that.

And again for us, a lot of times we just kind of stumble through life. We don't really know what's around the next corner. Like, have you ever gone on a hike that turned out to be longer and harder than you imagined it would be? You're like, "Why did I do that?" Yeah, or you sign up for some exercise class like my wife did. She signed up for this hot yoga class where they crank the heat to like 110 or something. I know she comes back; she looks miserable when she comes back from this class. It's like we go through certain things, and we go, "Why did I do that? I will never do that again." But again, Jesus has a full view, and yet he doesn't run from it. The first thing he does in his prayer, the first thing he says is, "Abba, Father." Abba is an Aramaic term; it's a term of endearment. It's not what you call some distant God. It's not what you call, you know, the man upstairs. It's what you call your father.

And looking to his Father is what Jesus has always done. It's been his first instinct his entire life on earth. He just has never known anything else than to look to his Father. And somehow we lose that childlike instinct in our journey of faith. You know, for some of us, maybe it's always been hard because you had a father who hurt you or disappointed you, and so to imagine that your Heavenly Father, your Abba Father, could be good and perfect and loving could be a struggle for you. I understand that. For most of us, though, I think we just get comfortable. You know, we grow up; we live in a place here that there's just resources, there's beauty, there's amenities. And if we're able to kind of, you know, get into the right lane, it's like, "I got this. You know, I'm okay. God's got my back." But right now, hey, I'm fine.

Listen, Jesus was the most self-sufficient, the most composed, the most secure, the only perfect human being on the planet, and yet he lived every moment of every day with this childlike dependency and intimacy with his Father. He never outgrew that. In fact, he prayed way more than we do, and he's Jesus. You think, "What does he have to pray about?" Well, I don't know, but he prayed all the time. That type of relationship he had with his Father, it reminds me of when years ago we went out to Wisconsin, northern Wisconsin, to spend some time with some friends on their gorgeous lake house on a beautiful lake in northern Wisconsin. And when we were there, Luke was three years old. And while he was accustomed to swimming in a swimming pool or something like that, the lake may as well have been like the Pacific Ocean to him. It was just huge and daunting.

And so when I first tried to get him into the water, he would do it so long as he could ride on my back in such a way that he wasn't really even in the lake. In fact, the first couple times we went out there, I don't think he ever got a drop on him. You can see he's holding his feet up like, "I'm not even going to touch the water. You can touch the water, Father. I'm just going to stay right here." So I get rid of the little floaty mattress, and now he's kind of perched on my back. And if it were possible, he would have just crawled up onto the crown of my head. He would have been like, "That's where I'm going to be." But it wasn't quite so. He just would grip me quite tightly, I might add, around the neck as I'm supposed to breathe.

And over time, we were in the shallows. I'm just waiting. But over the course of time, I would swim out further out into the lake. What were the murky depths of the unknown for him? And yet it was then, and really only then, that I could feel his body relaxing and trusting. And in that moment, there's this bond of trust and there's this experience of love between father and son that only happens when you're depending on your father in that kind of way. You know what? This is how Jesus did life ever and always. And some of us are here today; maybe you have big problems. I don't mean that to insult you; that just might be a reality. You may have some really tough challenges, some really tough facts to your life, or really painful realities in your life. I don't want to minimize that in any way.

But we can become so focused on those things that we forget to look to our Father who's bigger than all of that and who is able to carry us through, even if it means kind of putting us on his back and doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. Jesus looks to his Father in this dark moment. And the second thing that we see him doing is that Jesus was also pleading with his Father. He's pleading with him. Now, this is going to be a little bit shocking to you, but Jesus knows what it's like to have a prayer come back to him with the answer, "No." Does that shock you? That Jesus could pray something and the answer would be no? And yet that's what he does. He's all by himself now; he's wandered a little bit away from his friends, and they're asleep. And there, with his face in the ground, he says, "Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me." You can imagine how much it broke the Father's heart, just like it breaks his heart when we plead, "Please take this from me." And Jesus Christ, fully human, fully God, in his humanity, is saying, "Man, Father, this is too much. Take it." And yet the clear answer is God didn't take it.

The answer to "Will you take this cup of suffering from me? Will you remove me from this hour?" is "No." Not if you and I are to be saved; not if you and I are going to be spared that cup. Jesus had to drink it all the way to the dregs. You know, we can look back on this moment with, you know, two thousand years later, and we can read the rest of the story, right? And it all kind of makes sense, at least as much as it ever does to us. And yet in that moment, it was just this mystery where Jesus is being stretched to his very limit. It reminds me of, as I was trying to kind of wrap my head around this, because it's just so—it's like sacred territory. You just look at it, and you just go, "I can't even begin to scratch the surface of what's going on, this exchange between Jesus and the Father." But as I tried to wrap my little puny brain around this, I thought of when Anna, my daughter, was just a toddler. She was about a year and a half, not even that, and she got the flu. And it was severe enough; it just completely dehydrated her. We took her to a doctor; he says, "You got to take her to the hospital." We take her to the hospital, and they have what they call IV therapy. That's, you know, it's a simple thing: put an IV in her, pump her full of fluids, and she'll be better.

Well, simple does not equate to easy. And I will never forget having to hold my little daughter down, her little body straining against me as the nurse is trying to find one of her tiny little veins. She's not finding out on the first or second time. And so while there's no words, Anna could barely speak, but she's looking up at me, tears coming down her eyes, and just with these piercing blue eyes, she's just burning into me, just saying it as if I could read her thoughts, "Why, Daddy? Why are you doing this to me?" And there was, of course, no way to explain to her, "Well, you know, this is ultimately going to benefit you. You know, this is actually a good thing, even though in the moment it's a very painful thing." That's how we live our lives of faith. We don't get the answer to all the whys on this side of heaven from that perspective, and it can confound us. The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, "Now we see through a glass lit darkly." You know, we just kind of see just the fuzzy contours. But then, talking about when we're in heaven, "Then face to face. Then we will know just as surely as we are known." There will be things we see from the vantage point of heaven that will just astound us—God's glory, his ability to bring good from our sufferings.

And again, I don't mean to minimize that or be glib. I need to understand how he's going to do that in a lot of ways and situations. What I know is this: this episode in the life of Christ, this terrible night that would lead into a terrible day, the most horrific moment in the history of this planet became the greatest news, the greatest event in the history of this planet. And only God could do that. And if God can do that, God can bring beauty from the ashes of our lives. Jesus is not only looking to his Father and pleading with his Father and pouring out his heart to his Father, but the third thing I see him doing in this prayer is that Jesus was surrendering to his Father. Yes, he pours out his heart; he says exactly what he wants. But then there comes that point of surrender. And if you ever wonder what the essence of faith is, it's right here because after saying, "Take this cup from me," Jesus continues, "But nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will." And again, that's faith in a nutshell right there.

When you have poured your heart out to God and you say, "But nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will." And I'm not talking about, you know, just adopting some sort of victim mentality or becoming fatalistic and going, "None of it matters." I'm not talking about that. God never tells us to abandon our desires. What he tells us to do is surrender them. There's a big difference. Tim Keller is a pastor and author many of you have heard of him, and he talks about the difference in one of his books between what he calls our loudest desires and our deepest desires. One of your deep desires might be to speak kindly to your loved ones, you know, cute loving tones and stuff like that. That's a good deep desire. But if you were to hit your thumb with a hammer, one of your loudest desires, which is going to, you know, might trump your deeper desire right in that moment of pain and anger or frustration, that's how it kind of works. There's always this tension between loudest desire and deepest.

And now Jesus' loudest desire in the moment and at Gethsemane is for relief. His deeper desire is to do the will of the Father. So what does he do? How does he prevail? It says in Hebrews 12, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for what? Let me hear you—for the joy set before him endured the cross." Again, he's looking beyond that moment, and he is affirming his deepest desire. In other words, Jesus does not allow his loudest desire to overrule his deepest desire. And this is so practical because, follow me here, we live our life in this tension between loudest desire and deepest desire. And when the rug is pulled out from underneath you, you know, tragedy strikes, and there's a death, or there's disease, or there's divorce, or you lose your job, or you just fill in the blank—you’re wounded, you're in pain.

What compounds the difficulty of those seasons is that we're also more vulnerable. In fact, pain is like gasoline to our sin nature; it's an accelerant because the loudest desire becomes, "I just want some relief here. I just want to be happy again." Is that asking too much for me to just be happy again? And that loudest desire, it starts to almost carry on a conversation with you. You know, "If you just did this, it's no big deal." And the double tragedy, you know, the first wound's bad enough, but if we let our loudest desire to rule the day, we can end up doing things that are stupid, immoral, regrettable, and we make a bad situation even worse. Be wary of your loudest desire.

And along these lines, again, Jesus shows us by his example here how faith responds, how faith is strengthened because Jesus shows us that really the path to surrender that we see, the path to surrender is found in the posture of surrender. And what's that mean? How do you say, "Thy will be done"? Well, a lot of times you sit on your knees. But whether it's literally on your knees or however you do it in prayer, it is a posture of humility; it's a posture of dependency. It comes when we own our own weakness and we say, "God, I don't have what it takes. I need for you to do for me what I could never do for myself. I can't get myself through this season of life, Lord, without you." Jesus says to his disciples, "Watch and pray that you do not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing; that's the deeper desire. But the flesh is weak; the louder desire." And if you believe this, if you own this, it will motivate you to pray; it will motivate you to seek God's resources. And in that surrender, there is power. In that weakness, there is strength because that's where we come before him with open hands who say, "Father, help me," and he's faithful to do that.

1 Peter 2:21—in a passage that's all about suffering—says this: "To this you were called because Christ suffered for you that you should follow in his steps." See, Christ has gone before us. He's been through Gethsemane; he's been through the cross; he's been through the grave, and he has emerged victorious. We will have our Gethsemanes, our crosses. We will have our ultimate death, but Jesus has been there ahead of us so we can trust him. I saw an amazing example of this. I don't know if any of you are following the Paralympics. In some ways, it doesn't get, you know, kind of all of the media blast, but in some ways, it's far more inspiring than just the regular Olympics, which I love. But just the other night, I saw an example of this where they were doing downhill skiing for the visually impaired. I've never heard of this before—visually impaired; that's another word for blind.

And here's how they do this: I'm going to show you. This is the Super G; that's the fastest downhill race they have in these competitions. And they have a guide who goes out in front of the visually impaired skier. There's the guide; there's a skier behind, and they call out commands on the way down. They tell them when to turn and when to lean in, to edge a little bit more. And hey, don't kid yourself; they're skiing way faster than you do. And yet look at this: the person in back there, she can't see the course, and yet she's competing in this race because she's tuned in to the voice of the guide who knows the way down the hill. What a great picture of the Christian life right there. You know, Jesus knows how to get you down the hill. He knows what's around the next turn, and he says, "Just lean into me. Listen to my voice. I will guide you; I will direct you." And when you believe that, and by the grace that he gives us in the power of his Spirit, you're able to just surrender yourself to him and go, "Man, Lord, no matter what, not my will, but your will be done. I surrender myself to your loving care."

Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we may not understand it all, but as much as we do, Lord, I pray that I speak for many of us, if not all of us in this moment, to say, "Lord, by faith, we want to entrust to you the things that we don't understand. We want to lean not into our own understanding but into you, Lord." And Lord, I know that there are some really difficult situations represented in this room—excruciating losses, problems that seem insurmountable. And yet, Lord, you have promised never to leave nor forsake us. And Lord Jesus, I thank you that you rose from that garden, that moment of crisis and testing, and you rose again. Your face is set like flint into the arms of the soldiers that would take you to the cross, and you did that for us. May that convince us of your love and your faithfulness in a way that is either new or stronger or fresher than we've ever thought of that before. But Lord, I thank you because you are victorious; you are a God. We place our lives into your care. We pray, "Thy will be done." Amen.