Have you ever felt like you just couldn’t go on anymore?
Have you felt like your circumstances were too great to bear?
Have you ever prayed that God would just simply make things better?
You are not alone, and you are in good company.
Right after Jesus gave His disciples the Lord’s Supper, and right before He was arrested, Jesus got away in order to spend time with His Father. He spent the night in prayer. This was a prayer of anguish and a prayer of pain.
Luke 22 tells us that His prayers were in such earnest that He literally sweat drops of blood. In fact, Luke 22 tells us that great drops of blood fell to the ground, and we are privileged to hear a few of the words that Jesus prayed that night.
Now before I tell them to you, ask yourself what you would be praying. If you had been betrayed by one of your best friends and you knew that you were about to be executed for a crime for which you were innocent, what would you be praying?
I might be angry, bitter, depressed, or all of the above.
I might pray for revenge.
Who knows? Everything would be on the table.
Well here is what Jesus prays.
Jesus says, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
Jesus, in one of His most human of moments, cries out to His Father. He, in essence, says, “If there is any other plan for me other than my excruciating death on a cross, then please do that, but what I really want, Father, is your will and not mine.
I don’t know how much comfort this brings you, but this passage should be one of the most fundamentally comforting passages in all of the scriptures.
Jesus, our Savior, knows what it is like to anguish over a difficult set of circumstances and Jesus, our Savior, knows what it is like to wrestle with God’s will.
Many of us right now are wrestling with God’s will as we know it, meaning we are struggling to be joyful and content in situations that we do not enjoy, and the rest of us are struggling with God’s unknown will. We ask questions about school, marriage, jobs, children, finances, and the like.
And here we see Jesus doing it in Godliness. He cries to God asking for any change that is possible but resting ultimately in whatever God thinks is best.
Our Savior knows our pain. Our Savior secures for us, not only an example, but a hope through His death on the cross. And our Savior gives us yet another reason to love Him. He gets us.
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