Good evening.
Good to see everyone this evening.
We are in Mark chapter 14 in our study.
Let's begin with a word of prayer and then we'll get into our class.
Our gracious Lord and Father of all mankind, we bow before you, grateful for the day you've granted to us, grateful for the life that we have, the...
ability that we have to worship you and to praise your name.
The opportunity that we have to see those who we have not seen in a long period of time and the blessing that the Memphis School of Preaching is to this congregation in its
continued work and the students that have worked with us and also the families and the loved ones that we have grown to know and love through the years and through those labors.
Lord, we pray that you continue to bless the school and its efforts
and our efforts with them.
Lord, we pray that you will be with us as we go through this week.
May the things that we say and do be right and in accordance with your will.
May we strive diligently to apply the things that are in scripture to our lives, that we both might serve you in a way that is acceptable in your sight, but also might be a light
to the world around us and salt to the earth.
Lord, we pray that you will forgive us when we sin and
short of your glory.
All this we pray and ask in Jesus' name, amen.
We are in the section of Jesus' prayers in the garden.
And we're down to, we're going to pick up reading about verse 32 of chapter 14 of Mark.
Then they came to a place which was named Gethsemane.
And he said to his disciples, sit here while I pray.
And he took Peter, James, and John with him.
And he began to be troubled and deeply distressed.
Then he said to them, My soul is exceedingly sorrowful even to death.
Stay here and watch.
He went a little farther and fell on the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.
And he said, Abba, father,
all things are possible for you, take this cup away from me, nevertheless not what I will, but what you will.' Then he came and found them sleeping and said to Peter, Simon, are you
sleeping?
Could you not watch one hour?
Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation."
The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Again he went away and prayed and spoke the same words.
And when he returned, he found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy and they did not know what to answer him.
Then he came the third time and said to them, Are you still sleeping and resting?
It is enough.
The hour has come.
Behold, the son of man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners.
Rise.
Let us be going.
See, my betrayer is at hand." As Jesus is here in the garden of Gethsemane, as he is praying concerning the events that are about to transpire, a couple of interesting points
that
Mark brings out that are, I think, worth considering is number one, you can have someone in a completely natural human scenario where they go from sitting and spending multiple
hours with others in complete confidence, speaking to them, teaching them, encouraging them, instructing them.
having fellowship with them, to an hour later being in the garden in deep distress.
As humans, we have those swings of emotion, and Jesus did too.
As individuals,
We have the ability and quite often find ourselves in the midst of something and a bunch of people and things going on and everything seems normal.
If somebody was looking from the outside and we're completely functional and everything is fine and it's not a problem and we're talking and conversing and completely normal to the
point where somebody says, I am in exceeding sorrowful.
in an exceedingly sorrowful state.
And what has transpired?
One hour of time.
Walking out of an upper room after the eating of the Passover to get into the Garden of Gethsemane about a mile away.
The appreciation we need to have for the complexity of human life, the complexity of a person's mental state, the complexity of the struggles that are the way we deal with life.
Jesus could go from the upper room to the garden and even from the point in which he entered the garden to the point at which there are only three of his disciples with him
and you're seeing this progression away from satisfaction and stability and really, if you could put it in a phrase, a grip on the situation.
Every step that he takes into the garden is a step
closer to what is inevitable and he knows it.
Think about it for a moment.
You're preparing to leave the upper room.
You spent the whole night with the apostles.
And just, if I can just, for the sake of visualization, describe it in the way I picture it.
Ancient building, ancient Jerusalem, some sort of stairwell that gets out of the upper room.
don't know, stairwell inside the house, outside the house, into a courtroom area.
You know, quite often the ancient houses were built around a courtyard.
and you came and exited into different parts of the house through the courtyard.
Maybe he exited out of the upper room into a courtyard out of that and then exited the house.
You get out on the street.
Which way do you go?
You turn left, that's towards the garden.
You turn right, you go the other way.
And he has to choose to go to the garden.
You go down the street, you get to the end of the street, you know if you go left, you're headed toward the garden, you go right, you're headed in the other direction, and he's got
to choose to go left.
My point is this.
At every step out of that room, he had a choice to turn and go the other way.
gets to the edge of the garden with the apostles.
And to them, this is just normal.
This is just Jesus' nighttime activities.
ah You go through and read the gospels and you'll read about the things that Jesus did at night, the times where the apostles all went to sleep in the house.
Jesus was in the house, they woke up and Jesus was gone.
They were familiar with Jesus' nighttime activities.
Jesus gets to the garden and that part's normal.
Leaves a few of them behind, takes three of them with him.
That part's normal.
Jesus says to the three, I am exceedingly sorrowful even unto death.
That's not normal.
but every step into the guard.
is another step where Jesus is determining and choosing to lay His life down of His own free will.
Quite often we think about the idea of Jesus going to the cross, carrying the cross, being lifted up on the cross, and even the expressions of the fact to pilot that you have no
power except it be given you from above.
Those statements are all true, but the reality is there are so many steps ahead of that point where Jesus could have been somewhere else.
and I'm reminded
what Mordecai said to Esther.
As Esther is faced with the scenario of the impending attack against the Israelite nation in the Persian Empire, and Mordecai comes to his niece through messenger and says, you
have to go before the king.
and the message is sent to Esther, if you don't go, God will save His people.
He will accomplish his will in saving his people, but your family will not be safe.
and the statement that perhaps...
She has come to that position for such a time as this.
So she has to make the choice to see that, to understand that, to grasp that, and to walk into that court where just merely by walking into the presence of the King unbidden and
uncalled for, she could have lost her life.
at his whim.
and she puts that on the line for the sake of her people.
She had to choose.
It wasn't easy.
when we walk into a scenario where we have the potential of something bad happening, like she did.
It wasn't as though it was 100 % guarantee she'd die if she walked into the court, but there was a real potential that that was going to happen.
When we walk into a scenario where we have an unknown, but there's a potential threat, we start doing things like buying insurance.
If there was no potential of catastrophic loss, the life insurance industry would be gone.
If you knew, you know what, I'm gonna live to 88 years, 88 years in four days, I'm gonna die, guess what?
Who needs life insurance in their 20s?
All right, no possibility of catastrophic problems.
And yet, because we don't have such assurances, we do things like buy insurance.
Just in case.
Now imagine Jesus.
He knows exactly what's
It's not a possibility.
He's been telling everyone around him for weeks and months what's going to happen.
He's been telling his disciples, I must go to Jerusalem to die.
But now he's got to walk out of the house and down the street and into the garden and wait.
Yeah.
Put yourself in the mental position of a family member.
when that family member's sitting in the hospital room, in the waiting room, while a dear loved one is in emergency surgery to save their life.
The surgery goes on through an hour.
and then another hour, and then another hour, and then another hour, and how excruciating.
waiting, waiting, waiting to know are they alive?
Are they going to be able to be saved?
Modern times, we're incredibly grateful for those periodic phone calls from the surgical nurse saying, everything's going well, it's gone a little slower, we expect to be done.
Hey, look, we're done.
There was a time where you didn't get that.
And you wait, and you wait, and you wait.
And you hope when the person goes through that doorway and starts walking your way that the message isn't, I'm sorry.
But it's, they're resting.
They're alive, they're fine.
But the waiting.
See now Jesus has to not only decide to go down that road to go into that garden, now he gets there and it's three hours of waiting.
So for three hours, every minute that ticks by, Jesus could get up and leave.
Jesus could have walked out and been in Bethany by then.
And yet, Judas knows right where to find him.
every minute that He chooses to stay there.
He chooses to go to the cross.
and yet he has to deal with the difficulty and the pain.
of the choice.
and in the midst of that choice.
Jesus chooses continual prayer.
We don't learn anything else from Jesus.
In this point in His life, we ought to learn.
that when we are destined to have a scenario that we cannot fathom actually having to walk into and dealing with.
The best place in the world for us to be is in prayer to God.
Not because we've got it all figured out.
Not because we enter into that prayer with all confidence, all assurance, and no worries or stress in our heart, but because they have the exact opposite of that.
because we do have worries and we do have stress if we don't have confidence and we are in distress.
I have often been told.
that one of the struggles that...
the wives have with the husbands is that they want to tell them about what happened and they don't want it fixed.
just want to tell them what happened.
And our first response is, well, here's what you need to do, here's how you should have responded, and here's how to fix that.
And I think I've made that mistake, I don't know, at least 365 days out of the year for the last 18 years.
But the point is, I'll eventually learn, I'm sure, or I'll forget.
But anyway, the point is...
They just want someone to listen.
When Jesus prays this prayer, there's always been, I think, perhaps some issue grasping this because the prayer we read is short.
The time it was prayed is long.
So what filled in the rest?
He prayed for an hour, but the prayer that we read is three sentences.
I don't, I'm not of the perception that Jesus kept repeating the same phrase over and over and over again for an hour and then went and checked on the disciples and then came back
and repeated the phrase over and over.
I don't think that's what we're reading.
think what we're reading is that is the prayer and the remainder of the time praying is a conversation with God.
When you go back to the Old Testament and you look at Moses after the tabernacle is built and up on the mountain, but I want to use the illustration from the tabernacle.
When Moses comes back down from the mountain, the people are worshiping the idol, the golden calf that they've made.
through the course of events, the calf is destroyed, the people are forced to consume it in the form of a drink.
And if you track between the events where that event occurred...
and step over a lot of the giving of the laws that are recorded from when Moses goes back up the mountain and track forward to the point where Moses comes back down the second
time.
You read, I think it's around Exodus 32 or 33, I think it's 33, that as a result of the sin of Israel.
the tabernacle which had originally been erected in the middle of the camp.
So the way the the Israelite encampment worked at Sinai is the tabernacle was in the middle and there was one tribe to the north, one tribe to the west, one tribe to the
south, one tribe to the east, and then in between them another, another, another, around the clock.
12 tribes, all surrounding a central point of the Tabernacle.
But as a result of the sin of bowing down to the golden calf, the tabernacle is picked up, uprooted.
and moved outside the camp.
So now in the middle of the whole nation is an empty hole where the tabernacle used to be.
And God's presence, which was once there over the tabernacle, isn't there anymore.
Moses and Aaron and the tabernacle are now outside the camp.
and you read in Exodus that Moses would go into the tabernacle, which by the way, Moses was the only non-priest.
who we ever read about, who was a leader of Israel, who was allowed to go into the Tabernacle.
and Moses would go into the tabernacle and would commune, the text says, with God.
and then Moses would come back out of the tavern.
And you think about that and you have to ask yourself, if you're me, what were they talking about?
Now, I have my suspicions.
I have my suspicions that's where Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy came from.
because every indication is all five of those books were written during the wilderness wanderings as Moses communed with God for 40 years while leading the people in the
wilderness.
So maybe that's what they talked about.
Yes.
John has the prayer in John 17, but that's before they leave the upper room.
That's not in the garden.
Yes.
Yes, that is in the upper room still.
Correct.
I don't believe John actually records the prayer in the garden.
I may be wrong, but ah somebody can check me on that.
So the question, why the difference, why John records the long one, the answer is that one's in the upper room.
So John 17.
I didn't think so.
John does not record the prayer in the garden.
So where I'm going to this, what did Jesus talk to God about for an hour?
whatever it was, it wasn't incredibly important for what we need to learn about the story.
But we know this, we know his disposition as he was praying was in deep sorrow and deeper sorrow all every hour.
that the request...
we do have, the request was, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, not my will, but thy me done, which means the rest of it wasn't a request.
And we're challenged, in my mind, we're challenged to ask ourselves if we had a conversation with God, would we have anything to talk about for an hour?
I'm sure in John 17 as we have the prayer recorded, you look at that and a lengthy portion of that prayer doesn't have anything to do with him.
It has everything to do with them.
Absolutely.
So turn to Romans chapter eight.
Romans chapter 8.
We read beginning in verse 25, but if we hope for what we do not see.
Romans 8, you need to appreciate there is an Old Testament context to Romans 8.
It is derived from a Psalm where the psalmist writer expresses the fact that
The people of God are suffering.
The people of God are being persecuted.
The people of God are under the thumb and the attack of someone else.
And it does not appear as though God is doing anything about it.
And the psalmist writer is writing, expressing the deep difficulty that they are facing and in need of God's help.
And it appears as though they're not getting it.
But as the song culminates, it culminates into an expression of confidence in the Lord.
So in Romans 8 you find, verse 25, but if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.
Likewise, the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses, for we do not know what we should pray for as we ought.
The expression of the psalmist writer is, I'm praying, God, that you will hear us, that you will save us, but I don't even know what to do.
I don't know if you're going to act.
I don't know if we're going to be saved, but I have confidence in you." And Paul in Romans is pulling from that and going, there's times we don't know what to pray for.
He says, the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Paul reveals to us that part of the function of the Spirit of God
in knowing us and knowing the Lord is to turn the prayers we don't know how to pray into prayers to God.
Have you ever been in a scenario where a person is so
so deeply struggling with their health that every moment of their life is pain.
And they're at that brink from a medical perspective of they can either recover or they can pass from this life.
And the struggle as a Christian, especially if they are a Christian, go, I don't know whether to pray that they pass or that they recover.
Because if they recover, they're just going to stay in that same pain for however much longer they have.
Sometimes we go bored.
whatever your will is.
Because we don't know what's best for them.
Verse 26 he says, sorry, verse 27, now he who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the spirit is because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
I don't really have the best way to describe this, but the way I understand that to be.
is you have Jesus described.
as one even while he was on the earth who knew the hearts of men.
And you have the spirit over here, who Paul is describing as the rightfully, the comforter.
and his role with the Christian in understanding what they're going through.
And the one who searches the hearts of men knows what the Spirit knows about the Christian.
And so the one who searches the hearts of men knows what the Spirit knows, knows what the Christian is going through, and makes intercession before the Father on behalf of the
Christian.
because Christ is the mediator.
He is the intercessor.
So even though Christ's name's not mentioned here, the one who searches the hearts of men, my personal belief, that's Christ.
Also, because he's the only one described as being the intercessor and mediator on behalf of Christians.
So the Spirit in His role is an interaction with the Christian.
Christ as the mediator, knowing the Spirit, intercesses on behalf of the Christian who couldn't express the prayer.
and didn't know what to pray for.
Christ does.
He says.
And we know, verse 28, that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Now you've got to be real careful with that verse, because that one gets preached up one side and down the other across every country mile in every context that it never was
intended to be in.
You get a verse like that out of context and you can go hog wild with it.
You know what?
Think there's possibility of a new job coming right around the corner and all things work together for good.
Those that love the Lord's I expect that offer for a million dollars to be on my doorstep any day.
I don't think that's the context.
This passage lives inside an Old Testament context of a psalmist writer who is saying, we're at the point of breaking because of the persecution and the trials that we are
enduring and we have confidence in God, but we are not seeing in action the deliverance of God.
And so we are in a great distress, unable to even express the difficulty that we are going through and we're hoping that God understands that He sees and that He knows and we have
full confidence that He does.
And Paul in Romans is telling these brethren, not only does He, but it will work out for your good.
But be careful.
because we're studying the book of Revelation right now and remember when those souls that were under the altar who were Christians who had been killed for their testimony of the
cause of Christ arrived in heaven?
It was for their good.
But that didn't mean they didn't lose their life in the process.
So often, for our good to us means it turns out the way we would like it to turn out while we're still alive.
And that's not what God means by for our good.
What God means by for our good is no matter what happens to you, I'm still here and you're still my child.
and I will deliver you whether through life or through death.
So Jesus.
Interestingly.
Cries out, verse 36.
ABBA?
What does ABBA mean?
Yeah, not a rock group.
It means father.
It's father, father.
One of those times where a Greek word is used and a Hebrew word is used.
Maybe Aramaic, right?
But the expression in two languages.
father?
Other.
All things are possible for you.
back to Abraham.
in Genesis 18.
Three individuals have walked to the door of Abraham's tent.
have had a meal prepared by Abraham because he saw strangers coming and passing where he dwelt.
And he ran out to them and called them and said, Come, allow me to show hospitality.
And he killed the fat calf or killed the young calf and delivered a meal and stood before them and served them as an old man.
but as a service.
And when their time in conversation was over and after Sarah and Abraham had been told that within a year from this moment in time they would have that son that God had promised
them, then the three individuals get up and start going.
And Abraham showing the hospitality that he had already showed and continuing to do so begins to go on their journey with them because that's what you did in that day and time.
You didn't stand at the door and wave because they weren't getting in the car.
You grabbed your staff, you put your shoes on and you started walking.
And you went down the road with them as they started their journey.
And as Abraham and these three individuals are walking towards Sodom,
one, turns to the other two.
and makes the point that given everything that Abraham had been faithful in, it's not right that Abraham not be told what is about to happen.
And so the Lord reveals to Abraham that the cry has come up against Sodom.
And that city is about to be destroyed at the hand of God.
And the way I read it, the way I understand it, God stops and keeps talking to Abraham and those two other individuals keep walking.
And as Abraham is there with the Lord, Abraham declares, all things are possible with God.
and declares that the judge of all the earth will do righteousness.
But then he prays.
He asks God.
There are fifty righteous souls.
Will you spare?
Sada.
And the Lord says, there's 50 righteous, all spares not.
and Abraham policies.
And then he shows his humble homage to the Lord and says, if there are 45 righteous souls, will you spare Sodom?
And the number goes down and down and down until Abraham asked if there are 10 righteous souls.
will you spare us on them.
But it drew us into that for that one point.
Abraham says all things are possible with the Lord.
And Jesus says as Mark recorded, all things are possible with the Lord.
even in the midst of His prayer.
You can't get Jesus talking without Old Testament scripture flowing out of His
but unlike Sodom.
there wasn't another option this time.
And so Jesus will say, take this cup away from me.
Nevertheless, not what I will.
but what you will.
as we wrap this up.
my encouragement to you.
in everything in this life.
is for your disposition to be the disposition of Christ.
Not my will, your will.
And that's a challenge.
Because we have a lot of things we are highly opinionated about that we would like to see done in this life.
that may or may not be the will of God.
and when the things that we so desperately think are important
and that are so embedded into our lifestyle or our actions or our choices suddenly become readily apparent that they are not the will of God.
Do we continue in our choices or do we go?
This is not going to be easy, but not my will, but yours to be done.
And that's what we face every day.
Because when this life is over...
we are to be reminded that Jesus said on that day,
Many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?
Did we not do many wonderful works in your name?
And he will say, depart from me.
I never knew you.
And what's the differentiator between the two of welcome into my father's house and I never knew you?
Jesus said, they who do the will.
of my Father who is in heaven.
There's the line.
Do the will of the Father, you're mine.
Don't do the will of the Father, I don't know you.
Jesus knew the will of the Father.
And no matter how great the expression of His heart, to not go to the cross.
There was no other way.
and it was His Father's will.
So it became Jesus's will.
just like in the days of Abraham.
where Abraham said,
the judge of all the earth will do righteousness.
And so Abraham left it in the hands of the Lord if Sodom would live or Sodom would be destroyed.
whichever one it would be, as far as Abraham was concerned, it was the will of God.
We need to learn that.
And then we need to live that.
Thank you for your attention.