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Luke 22:39-46
39 And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him. 40 And when he came to the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” 41 And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, 42 saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.1 45 And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow, 46 and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Morning, everyone. Morning. Alright. Alright. My name's Thomas Ritchie.
Speaker 1:I'm an elder here at Redeemer. It is my pleasure to get to open God's word with you today. This, text that we look at today will be the last in our series of the great prayers of the Bible, at least some of the great prayers of the Bible we've been looking at throughout the summer. And while this text today, I think, is the hardest of the ones we'll look at, at least this prayer is the shortest of the ones we will look at. Which maybe explains how I ended up being the preacher to preach about it.
Speaker 1:It's not This is a story of Jesus praying in the garden before he's betrayed, before his trial and his crucifixion. And it's not a story that really lends itself to a pithy opening illustration. And so I want to start out by giving this assurance that we'll see as we go through the text, That Jesus was made like us in our weakness, even as we read in the assurance of pardon today. That when we wrestle with the sovereignty of God, that when we feel like our prayers go unanswered, when we feel lonely and abandoned, when we dread sickness and coming pain, When we wish that the world were different than it is. And when we are treated unfairly, when our anxieties are so great, that they are manifested in our very flesh, that Jesus has gone before us, that Jesus was made like us, that he suffered these very things, and that he not only has shown us the way, but he himself is the way.
Speaker 1:So with that assurance, let's look at our text today, which comes out of Luke 22 beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went as was his custom to the Mount of Olives And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. There appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him and being in agony.
Speaker 1:He prayed more earnestly and his sweat became like Drake, great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow. And he said to them, why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation. This is the word of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Yes, amen. Please pray with me. God our father, guide us through this text. Reveal to us the great agony of Jesus revealed to us its causes. Teach us, God, how we can respond rightly in prayer, but most of all, show us the glory of Christ that we may treasure him above all things and may be conformed evermore to his image.
Speaker 1:Even today, I communicate this great truth and set my words aside. May your great treasure be revealed. And God may I be completely forgotten. In Christ's name we pray these things. Amen.
Speaker 1:Alright. So the normal pattern of a sermon is to, unpack the message, learn some lessons, and then start to apply them. But this text is a little bit different. I think it calls for a different type of sermon. There's a few really practical points about prayer that are low hanging fruit, sitting right there on the ground, easy to pick up.
Speaker 1:And then there's a lot of really interesting stuff that's hidden way at the top of the tree. So what I want to do is go ahead and address some quick and practical points, and then we can put down the basket and break out the ladder and go climb up high where things are a little bit scarier. The first of these practical lessons is this. Right at the very beginning of the passage, Luke says that Jesus went as was his custom to pray on the Mount of Olives. That tells us that Jesus made a habit of his prayers.
Speaker 1:I think all of us know that we would do well to make that habit. And let me remind you again today, be like Jesus, set aside time every day, every week, every month, every year for a special time of prayer. If you want to know God, if we want to encounter God in our prayers, we would do well to be intentional about setting aside those times. 2nd, Jesus adopts a unique posture of prayer. While he always would pray on the Mount of Olives in this garden after he would observe the Passover, I don't think he always prayed with the same posture.
Speaker 1:It was traditional in that time to stand when you were praying to hold your arms out, to address yourself to God in heaven, looking up. But Jesus does quite the opposite, kneels down. The parallel accounts and Matthew and Mark say that he put his face to the ground. He's adopted the opposite of the traditional posture. And he's telling us that there's a link between our spirit and our flesh.
Speaker 1:And again, this is made more, explicit in the other gospel accounts of the same story where Jesus says, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He's pulling out this dichotomy between spirit and flesh and how they interact. It's a main theme going through this entire passage, but by the unique posture that Jesus adopts, he's telling us that we should do the same. When we pray with great joy, we can stand and we'd be excited about it. When we're praying in great sorrow, we should let that sorrow be reflected in our bodies.
Speaker 1:And the third practical point is closely related to that one. It is this, be honest before the Lord in your prayers. Don't self censor. Don't hold back. Don't feel like you've got to be all put together before the Lord, because Jesus is certainly not well put together here.
Speaker 1:The text makes clear in verse 44 that he prayed yet more earnestly. Mark tells us that Jesus was greatly distressed and troubled. And everything about this experience tells us that he, in fact, was feeling that and expressing it to the Lord. Not only Jesus, but David certainly cried out with loud complaints against the Lord and was not restrained. Job did the same thing.
Speaker 1:1st Peter tells us to do the same thing. It says in chapter 5 verses 67, humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time, he may exalt you casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. When you are troubled, take your troubles to the Lord. When you are anxious, lay those anxieties upon him. If Jesus was not too good to do so, then neither are we.
Speaker 1:Alright, make prayer have it. Remember your posture when you're praying and suit it to what you're praying about. Be honest with the Lord in your prayers. Three good lessons. And now it's time to wade into the deeper waters.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you are as troubled as I am by this passage, but I am very troubled by it. It's confusing to me. It's mysterious, and I don't always know exactly what to do with it. As I've been studying it for the last week, I keep finding new things to be confused about. The root of it is this, Jesus appears more human in this passage than anywhere else in scripture.
Speaker 1:Now don't hear me preaching a heresy. Jesus is always in his incarnation, fully human, fully God. Two natures, 1 person, fully fully divine, fully God all the time. Not 5050, sometimes 6040 this way or that way. No.
Speaker 1:Always fully God, fully man. And yet it's hard to miss his humanity here. We're not used to seeing Jesus struggle. We're not used to seeing him work like this. It's almost as if the cross is exerting this gravitational pull, such that the tide of his humanity is rising and asserting itself again.
Speaker 1:His human nature isn't fallen. It's not sinful, but as he tells the disciples, the flesh is weak and we see that weakness. We see it in him working and sweating the sweat. And Luke 22 gets a lot of talk amongst the scholarly biblical crowd, because Luke says that Jesus was sweating like great drops of blood or clots of blood. It's another way that could be translated.
Speaker 1:And it's not clear whether Jesus actually had blood in his sweat or not. Luke's just not that clear about it. It's possible for someone to, sweat blood. Their capillaries near the surface of their skin can burst and they can have blood come out of their pores. But even if that's not what happened here, it's very remarkable that Jesus is sweating.
Speaker 1:It's not working, And he's on a hillside in the dark of the night on his knees. And it would have been in the fifties in the early spring in Jerusalem. It's no reason for him to be sweating if this were just an ordinary prayer. And for two reasons, I don't think it's ordinary. The first is supernatural.
Speaker 1:Jesus has just finished instituting the Lord's supper, And he's at that supper said that, his body, it represents this bruise body's represented in the bread that's broken. And we see now when he goes to this garden, he starts to take on the curse in his body. In Genesis 3, we see that toiling and sweating is a mark, the curse. And we see that sweat supernaturally manifested in Jesus as he's praying, preparing himself for the cross. And he's also sweating because he's experiencing intense inner turmoil.
Speaker 1:This word agony that's used in Luke is one that appears only here in all the New Testament that Jesus was praying in agony. That word we take to mean intense physical pain, but it's probably better understood as meaning conflict or battle contest. There, there is a war going on inside of Jesus between his natures that his divine nature and his flesh are warring with each other so much so that an angel comes to strengthen him. We just sang a minute ago about the angels in heaven falling down before the Lord and worship. And yet here we see Jesus, the man needing help, an angel coming to help him.
Speaker 1:Christians have struggled with this passage as long as this passage has been around. The very earliest manuscripts of Luke include the story about Jesus being comforted and strengthened by an angel. And they include, these, the story about him sweating like great drops of blood and being an agony. But early on, scribes started admitting those verses. They said, that just that can't be right.
Speaker 1:Surely, Jesus did not suffer like that. Surely, he was not so uncertain at the eve of his crucifixion that he was crying out to God in agony. That just doesn't seem, like the prayer of someone who was truly divine. And so in their false piety, they just omit these verses as they're copying Luke, so that when it was sent around, those verses aren't there. Now they were wrong to do that, but let's not be too quick to judge them.
Speaker 1:Because are you also struck by how human Jesus looks? Does it catch you off guard? It does me. It's really troubling to see him labor like this, to see him need to be strengthened. And not only is the story a little bit weird, consider how we come to know the story, because that when Jesus is praying these prayers, he's in the garden, praying by himself, his disciples, we are told, at first he was with them and then he left them and he took a small group with them.
Speaker 1:And then he left that small group and he removed himself yet again, twice removed from most of the like literally everybody else in the entire world, if you tell someone to pray, what do they do? They fell asleep. You know, it's true. And so it's hard for me to imagine that they were, you know, praying, getting sleepy, looking up, seeing Jesus, beholding him in agony. You know, like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Is he bleeding? What's going on over there? Oh, I don't know. I'm just gonna go to sleep. No.
Speaker 1:No. Certainly, they were already asleep by the time that these prayers are taking place. Because if you were beholding this happen, you'd at least stay awake and watch. You might remember too, but Jesus has to wake up his disciples repeatedly. What does that tell us?
Speaker 1:It tells us that Jesus himself is our most likely source for the content of these prayers, that he had to go and tell his disciples, either in the fleeting moments before he's arrested, or more likely after his resurrection, he had to tell his disciples, hey, guys, that night when you were sleeping and I was praying in the garden, let me tell you what I was praying. I know that I had just told you in the Lord's supper that my body was going to be broken and my blood shed for you. But I was in the garden asking God not to do it. In fact, as we were walking to the garden and I said to you, you can find this in your Bibles, Luke 22 37, 2 verses before our passage today. Jesus says, for I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me.
Speaker 1:And he was numbered with the transgressor, the transgressors For what was written about me has its fulfillment. So literally walking to the garden, I was promising you guys that I was going to be numbered with the transgressors, handed over to sinful men. And yet I got to the garden and I prayed, God, do I have to be numbered? Is there another way? There's something about this story that's so important that Jesus would make this point of telling his disciples about it.
Speaker 1:And I think the point is this. I think Jesus wanted us to know that he was afraid that he saw and knew what was coming on the cross. And he did not desire to experience it. He wanted the opposite. His flesh recoiled against it.
Speaker 1:He was terrified. Not only was he physically afraid, but that fear was so great that it tempted him not to go through with it, That he was being tempted in the garden. And we can see temptation written all over this passage. Luke frames it for us really helpfully. Jesus tells His disciples, pray.
Speaker 1:And the reason you should pray is so that you don't fall into temptation. Then Jesus goes and prays. He comes back and wakes his disciples up and says, pray again that you do not fall into temptation. We should infer from that structure that Jesus is himself praying that he should not fall into temptation. And more than that, it's very significant that Jesus is here present in the garden because he's facing the same temptation that Adam and Eve were facing.
Speaker 1:Adam and Eve were God's will was revealed to them. Don't eat the fruit. And they said, I had the choice. Were they going to do their will? Seek after the good things of God the way that they saw best?
Speaker 1:Were they going to do God's will and follow his commands? Jesus is here asking God, do I have to follow your will? Is there another way that I can go to achieve these same ends without having to go through the cross. So just as the first Adam was tempted in the garden, so now is the second Adam being tempted in the garden to do his own will instead of the will of the father. Do y'all feel the thorny theological question here?
Speaker 1:Does it weigh on your mind like it does on mine? It's troubling to me that one person of the Trinity would be arguing with another. And make no mistake, I think Jesus is really arguing here. In Mark, He makes this a little bit more explicit when he says, God, I know all things are possible for you. Is it possible that this cup can pass from me?
Speaker 1:Almost as if saying, don't tell me it's impossible. Everything is possible. Surely this is one of things that we can avoid. Right? He is arguing.
Speaker 1:He's pleading. He's begging. He is making the same prayer repeatedly repeatedly again and again. And when he says not my will but yours be done, that means that one person of the trinity has a will that's different than another person in the trinity. One God in three persons, but their wills aren't exactly the same?
Speaker 1:Is Jesus out of line here? What's going on? And to answer some of these questions, we can look to the book of Hebrews which confirms for us what we already know that, of course, Jesus is not out of line. He's completely without sin. But it helps shed light on his experience, what he was going through.
Speaker 1:It's probably worth flipping over to Hebrews chapter 4. Now we were already looking at Hebrews earlier, and we're gonna be in that book a fair amount from here on out. Hebrews chapter 4:15 says that we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. Jesus knows our weaknesses, and he's been tempted in every way that we've been tempted, and yet he did not give in to sin. So we can read Jesus' questions.
Speaker 1:We can hear them and know that he's expressing the weakness of his flesh. Now Jesus' flesh isn't fallen like ours is. He's not sinful. Yet his flesh is still flesh. He's still human in that regard.
Speaker 1:And it means that he's subject to the weakness of the flesh. And I imagine that all of you like me have been tempted to ask God if I really have to do his will. There are times I know the right thing to do, and I don't want to do it. I doubt that that experience is unique to me. If I'm tempted in that way, Jesus also has been tempted in that way.
Speaker 1:We see it very clearly here. We don't see Jesus asking God to change his character. We don't see Jesus saying, God, I know what justice requires, but I don't want you to do justice. I want you to be different than your revealed will. I want you to break your promises.
Speaker 1:Jesus isn't praying that. That probably would have been sin. Instead, Jesus is saying, I know the end that we must achieve. Is there another way that we can get there? Because I really want there to be another way.
Speaker 1:Hebrews 5 talks about this. Just a few verses over, beginning in verse 7. It's talking most likely about Jesus's prayer in the garden. And it says this, in the days of his flesh, emphasizing the flesh of Jesus again, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. This is the really important part.
Speaker 1:Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. He learned obedience through what he suffered. Isn't it remarkable? In the garden, hours before the cross, Jesus is still learning obedience And obedience is a fascinating word because you can't have obedience if you don't have the divergence of wills. If someone asked me to do something, and I think it sounds like a great idea, I agree with them and do it, but I haven't obeyed them.
Speaker 1:If someone asked me to do something I've always wanted to do, I can agree with them and do it. But obedience is only obedience where I would rather do nothing or do something different. Obedience requires some difference in wills, And that's exactly what we're observing here. Jesus is praying to God. My will is not to do what I think your will is.
Speaker 1:How does he respond? Not my will, but yours be done. I don't want what you want, God. I want to do this literally any other way, but not what I want. What you want is what needs to happen.
Speaker 1:That prayer, not my will, but yours be done is a prayer asking for the strength to obey, to have our human will be overridden by God's perfect and sovereign will. Jesus did not have many occasions to pray this prayer. It's included in the Lord's prayer, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He taught us to pray this way, but it's not something that he had to pray a lot. We see Jesus throughout the gospels, for the most part, having this supernatural knowledge of God's will, able to discern the will of God perfectly and do it.
Speaker 1:But here under the impending strain of the cross, his will is diverging. His flesh is drawing back against the cross and he's having to ask God, I know what I want, but what I want is not right. Let's do your will instead. This is a prayer that we can use a lot with our fallen wills. We are sinners.
Speaker 1:Jesus was not our will will lead us astray very often. And yet I think we pray this prayer too flippantly or too easily. Especially, I think it's especially a problem with people with reformed theology. This is a evil that besets the Calvinists amongst us, with whom I should be counted. It's easy not to presume on God.
Speaker 1:Say, well, God, I don't wanna tell you what to do, so I'm gonna offer up a half hearted prayer. Oh, please help my friend, but not my will, but yours be done. And it's a cop out. It's an absolute cop out to say, I'm not going to bring honestly before the Lord my heart's desire. I'm going to hedge.
Speaker 1:So I don't really think God's going to do it. So I'm just going to kind of back off and pray half heartedly. Do you want to pray that way? That's fine. I guess don't pretend that you're praying like Jesus in this passage.
Speaker 1:There's nothing half hearted or weak faith about this prayer. In fact, you could rightly say that Jesus has nothing except his faith in this prayer. Everything else has abandoned him or is about to abandon him. He says that his flesh, his body is sorrowful almost to the point of death. It's breaking down before us, sweating profusely, laboring, feeling agony.
Speaker 1:His will is trying to turn away from God's revealed will, from the things that Jesus knows to be true, because he said them in the last hour. This is what has to happen. And now he's doubting, gosh, does this have to happen? He's coming apart at the seams. His hands do not want the nails nor his back.
Speaker 1:The lash his head does not want the crown of thorns or his side, the spear Beyond these purely physical tortures, Jesus, the judge of all mankind, does not want to go through a sham trial. He does not want to suffer injustice at the hands of men that he created. He does not want to be abandoned by his friends or reviled by those who should rightly worship him. More even than these emotional and mental trials. He does not want to be abandoned by his father.
Speaker 1:He does not want to experience the absence of that perfect love that he completely deserves and that he has always enjoyed. He knows that that will be withheld from him, that he, instead of the smile of God will face wrath and judgment that he will be forsaken. That is hateful to him and he hated it and he was right to hate it. Jesus is the crown of all things. The firstborn of creation, all of the glory of God dwells in him and is revealed in him.
Speaker 1:And yet he is facing hell itself to suffer not just my sin, which is sufficient for hell, but everyone's sin in all times, in all places, in all nations. He will bear all of that, though he deserves none of it. And he recoils and his flesh is so overwhelmed by the prospect that he's blinded by it, but praise be to God that Jesus recognized his blindness. He knew that he was not seeing rightly that his will was leading him astray. And so he prayed, not my will, but yours be done.
Speaker 1:God, I cannot want the right thing, But what must happen is not what I want, but what you want. Though he rightly was the king of creation, he said, I must lay this down. So do not see Jesus offering some cheap surrender. In some ways, I guess, surrender is a word we could use, but that's not the picture of what we see here. Is it?
Speaker 1:Nor is it what you will experience when you fight against your will. This is not let go and let God. This will be a constant battle, a battle in your body, in your mind, in your flesh. It will hurt. It will be a real sacrifice.
Speaker 1:You will be in agony. You will feel your 2 natures warring against each other, just as Jesus did. But Jesus, when he was faced with his great temptation, said not be all else to me, save that thou art as we'll get a chance to sing later. When he was blinded to everything, he still saw the goodness of God and clung to him. And that is why we recognize this prayer is one of the great ones in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Not because it teaches us helpful things about prayer. It does. There are helpful things here. This prayer is truly great for us because Jesus accomplished our salvation through this prayer. One commentator that I read said that Jesus conquered sin on the cross.
Speaker 1:He conquered death through his resurrection, but he conquered his flesh in the garden. When Jesus stands up from these prayers, his betrayal has already begun. His disciples, though he's woken them repeatedly and instructed them earnestly are sleeping. And yet he stands up and he walks out to meet his betrayer who is at hand. And he goes with head high into his trial so much so that when the Roman soldiers come to arrest him and they ask him, are you Jesus of Nazareth?
Speaker 1:And he says, I am. He speaks the name of the Lord. The soldiers fall down. They fall back. And Jesus has so mastered himself that he just stands there and waits for them to gather their courage, stand up, ask their question again, and arrest him.
Speaker 1:He has been so strengthened for this trial, which is to come. His will has now been so conformed to the will of God that he's able to lay down his life fully in control. Gone is that doubt. Gone is that travail. And he has been strengthened to do the will of God.
Speaker 1:In the dark night of his soul, he saw clearly the goodness of God when he could see nothing else. And because of that, we can walk in eternal light because he would take sin upon himself. We do not have to bear the consequences for our sin. Though he was in anguish, we do not have to fear that we would experience what He did. He took that punishment for us, and the wrath of God has been fully satisfied.
Speaker 1:He asked God to take the cup from him, and God said, no. It cannot pass unless you drink it. And Jesus did. Hear these words from Philippians chapter 2, Jesus being found in human form, humbled himself by becoming obedient. Is that word again to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Speaker 1:Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him. The name that is above every name. So that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the father, our right response to Jesus here is not to mimic his prayer, but it is to take our wills, our desires, our plans, and to lay them down. To say to Jesus, not my will, but yours be done. Or as Paul puts it in Galatians to say, I have been crucified with Christ.
Speaker 1:It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me and the life, which I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. With the author of Hebrews, let us say that we should fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross and despise the shame and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Let us consider him who endured from sinners, such hostility against himself so that we may not grow weary or faint hearted. In our struggle against sin, we have not yet resisted to the point of shedding our blood, though Jesus shed his blood on our behalf.
Speaker 1:Please pray with me. God, how clearly I feel that my words are unequal to these truths, that my mind cannot comprehend the mystery of this text. And by mystery, God, the glory of it, that Jesus would so desire our salvation, that he would suffer so much for us, that he had to steal himself to do it, that he sought a way not to pay that cost and yet paid it anyway when there was no other way. God, would you help all of us to hold our wills loosely, to lay them down joyfully and gladly, and cling only to the cross of Christ. May we reflect on his great love for us, demonstrated clearly, and may we enjoy with him victory over the flesh, that we would no longer be slaves to sin or even just to times that our will is different than yours.
Speaker 1:But instead that you would conform our every thought indeed to your will. God accomplish this in us for your glory. Amen.