and what they are patently not worthy of receiving. Prayer is one of the means of grace that we're going to study coming January when we begin our new year, if the Lord is willing, that God mercifully gave to the church whereby patently unworthy sinners made clean by the blood of the Lamb and made righteous by the sinless life of Jesus may commune with the Owner and the Creator of the universe. And it is this internal desire to commune with God that comes about as a part of the miracle of the new birth that fuels our passion for prayer. Saved people seek to be near to God. They seek to be obedient to God, to fellowship with Him, to know Him, and to be close to Him. Prayer accomplishes those things. And that is why it is my conviction that prayer should be as common and as frequent and as natural to a genuine believer as breathing. Bible study should be as normal and natural and common as eating, and prayer should be as normal and natural and common as breathing. And so even as natural breath is the very essence of life, so too prayer is the very essence of our life with God. Prayer should be on our lips and in our hearts and on our minds and coming out of our mouths all the time. We should whisper prayer and pray out loud. We should vocalize prayer and pray without speaking. We should pray standing up and sitting down and riding in the car and walking down the road and on our knees and in our beds and at the office and at the store. We should pray with our eyes open and our hands raised to God. And we should pray with our eyes closed and our face in the dust. We should pray in the morning and at noon and at night. And we should pray all day long. But there should also be seasons in the life of every genuine believer where when the cares of life become too much to bear, that rather than turn to the pagan world, or television, or video games, or sin, or even vacations to get our minds clear, we should spend all night in prayer. And when the wickedness of a city, or a people, or a nation becomes oppressive, we should be a people who pray for several days. You see, it is impossible to pray too much. The great scandal in the modern church is that with all of our conveniences and all of our technology and all of our collective wisdom and methods and models, clever phrases and techniques, we do not pray too much. We pray much too little. Because nobody prays too much. Now, there are approximately 650 prayers in the Bible. And we took several years in this church on Wednesday night several years ago to study every single one of them. And one thing that I came away with from that season of study was that we do not pray much today like they prayed in the Bible. Our prayers are much different than their prayers. And I don't think that's because we're more advanced than they were. I don't think that it's because we are more spiritual than they were. I think our prayers are different from the prayers in the Bible because we are far too worldly, far too carnal-minded, far too materialistic, far too self-centered, and impressed with our own spirituality. When you read the prayers in the Bible, you sense a deep-seated desperation. And the best way that I know how to describe this desperation is to call it a cry, a plea, They cried to the Lord. They had pleas before God. The people in the Bible actually begged God. And that crying out, that pleading, that begging comes out of a penitent and broken mind and heart that is truly desperate to see God move and to see God's will come about and to behold the glory of God. But today, the prayers that seem to be the most common in the modern church are focused on us and what we want and what we need rather than what God desires and what is God's will. And I think that the great difference that we sense in our prayers from the prayers of the people in the Bible is emblematic of what is wrong in the modern church that has become successful rather than godly. worldly rather than holy, pragmatic rather than humble, and sensual instead of being spiritual. One of the most common themes that runs through almost all of the prayers in the Bible that we almost never hear or talk about today is the concept of repentance. When the people in the Bible prayed, they confessed their sins to God. But it is rare today to see God's people crying out to God out of a deep and profound conviction over their sin in the lives when they pray. We studied Daniel's prayer, for example, and I think Daniel was a godly man. I think Daniel was trying to serve God. Many, many, many, many verses in this prayer. It fits on the paper about like that. Many, many verses. In the majority of those verses, Daniel is including himself in the sins of the people. And he's praying that God would forgive our sins and we have done this and we have not done that right. You don't hear that much today. And this is why we almost never see this going on in the modern church that is talked about in James 5 and 14. Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. We should have times when we gather together where all we do is get together and confess our sins to each other and pray for each other. And there's only two reasons why that doesn't happen. Only two. One is pride and the other is gossip. Both of those are wrong. The twin evils of pride and gossip hinders many people today from being obedient to what the sacred Scriptures command us to do right here. And that is a shame. And that should stop today. So we should work real hard to root out the many displays of human arrogance and self-righteousness and cast out the loose tongues and the gossip so that we may be submitted to God's will here in this church. Now, I've gotten in trouble in the past for saying this, but I absolutely believe this, and so I'm trying to be an equal opportunity offender. So if I missed you this morning and you didn't get offended, then please let me know and we'll fix that next week. Every single man in the Bible prayed early in the morning. All of them. And I think that is significant. No, I don't think that's a law. I don't think it's a requirement. And, of course, you can pray at night or at noon or after you get up at 10.30 or whenever. Sure, you can do that. And thank God you can do that. But there's something special when a soul so values the Savior that he sacrifices his entire life and pushes things out of the way so that he may spend time with God early in the morning, before the phones ring, before he has to make decisions, and before he has to do something. I am reminded of one of the great men in church history, and I can't recall his name right now, busy, busy, busy all day long in this foreign mission field, preaching the Gospel, counseling with troubled souls, teaching the Word of God, and go to bed exhausted Because his day was full of ministry. And then about 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, back then they didn't have electricity, so the people who came to be with him for a week or two would hear the match being struck and see him light the candle. And he would begin to read his Bible. Because he hadn't had time to read the Bible during the day, he was busy ministering. And he didn't want to miss his time with God. And then they would hear him Do things like this. Oh God. Oh God. Help me. Help me Savior. This is 1, 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Then the light would go out. He would go back to sleep. And then start all over the next day. Abraham did this. Moses did. David did. And the Bible tells us that Jesus rose up early and prayed. And the best I could determine early meant before it was light. Jesus also prayed all night on occasion, and so should we. Now you can say that this was just the way that God moved on those guys that were in the Bible, but this habit, if that's what you want to call it, or this wonderful gift of rising early and seeking God's face didn't stop when the Bible was completed. No, no. History tells us that all of those who led the church immediately after the death of the apostles all rose up early and prayed. Augustine did. Irenaeus did. Tertullian. Origen. Justin Martyr. Polycarp. They all spoke about this. All these men rose up early and they prayed. Martin Luther, John Calvin, those that God used to bring about the glorious reformation also led a life of prayer that included praying often and early and even all night long. The Puritans did too. And those spiritual giants that we talk about so often, that we admire and value today like Jonathan Edwards and William Carey and Charles Spurgeon and John Newton and many, many others all rose up early and they prayed. In 1727, Nicholas von Zinzendorf led a small group to pray early on a Saturday morning, just a normal Saturday morning. But that day, God came down. And that was the beginning of a prayer meeting that went on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 100 years. And the outcome was that the men and women of that group were so transformed that they sold themselves into slavery in order to preach the Gospel to the slaves and the slave owners. But it was not just the men who God used to lead the church who did this. It was also the men who God used to form the nation. John Hathard, as he liked to be called. He is library of 613 volumes of which 72% of the 613 volumes in his library were Bibles. Started the college that we know today as Harvard University. And the requirement to go to Harvard for the men only back then was that you had to have two hours of prayer and Bible study before class. And class started at 7am. And that was the business school. That wasn't the theological seminary. That was the business school. No wonder we had giants of industry in this country. No wonder we changed the world. Because people prayed. George Washington rose up early to pray and he wrote his prayers down. And even the bombastic and worldly womanizer, Benjamin Franklin, who was raised by Puritans, who had turned away from the Lord as he grew up, said that he was taught by his Puritan parents to pray often and early. And in his last days, Franklin returned to this way of life again. I can't tell you that he got saved, but he started praying. In 1856, a small group bowed their knees in prayer in New York City at noon to pray for revival and an end to the violence and the wickedness of that growing city. And within two years, hundreds of thousands of people joined this prayer meeting all over New England every day at noon. And the Word of God increased in the nation. And the Gospel was preached with amazing results. But of course, the greatest example of someone who prayed was our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And so Jesus is the one who sets the standard for how to pray and what to pray for. The disciples saw Jesus do what He did, and they heard Him say what He said, and they watched Him, and they wanted what He had. And the result was that Jesus taught them how to pray. Now Jesus Himself prayed many, many times and in many, many different ways. So we should know that prayer was a major component of Jesus' ministry. And prayer should be a major component of our ministry as well because prayer is the only way to bring humans into contact with God. And it is this lack of personal, intimate contact with God in prayer from where all of our troubles and all of our failings flow. Now, several people have come up to me over the years to tell me that they don't feel comfortable praying. Don't call on me to pray, Brother Blair, because I don't know how to pray. And I always tell them the same thing. You learn how to pray by praying. You can't read a book about prayer and know how to pray. Learn how to ride a bike by getting on a bike and falling off of it, and skinning your knees, and blooding your nose, and messing your elbows up. And by the end of the day, when I was five, my father left it. Early that morning, I was trying to ride the bike, and I said, by the time you come home today, I will be riding this bike. And he drove up that night, and I was a bloody pulp, but I was riding the bike. You learn how to pray, beloved, by praying. Prayer is not about style. It is about being serious and desperate to contact God. Let your baby get a 107 degree fever. You will pray. Let your life be turned inside out. You will not have to be encouraged to pray. Sleep will fall away from you and you will pray. And I thank God for those times. Prayer is about things like earnestness and honesty and truthfulness and anguish of soul to see God honored, to see God's will carried out in the earth to the same degree that God's will is carried out in heaven. And so prayer isn't effective because it is beautiful or poetic. God doesn't answer prayer because He's impressed with our style. Now, I'm as rough as a cob, and I'm not formally educated in the ministry, so you've just got to have mercy on me. I have names for everything. And so I have names for different kinds of prayer, and there's a type of prayer. When you're in the anguish of your soul, and your child is dying, and your life is upside down, and you don't know what's happened, And you probably haven't been taught so well. That was my case. And you don't really understand how suffering relates to a believer. And so you're very confused and you're very in turmoil. And I call that kind of praying, Oh God prayers. Because you don't even know what to say. You don't even know how to vocalize what you're needing. You don't even know what you need. And you spend your time on your face and you say, Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! And you do that for hours and days and weeks and months, and in some cases, years. So prayer is not effective because it is beautiful or poetic. God is not answering our prayers because He's impressed with our style. God is impressed with His own delight in answering our prayers as we cry out to Him. And we also need to know that prayer isn't about us informing God about some information that He's not aware of. No, in His omniscience, God understands more about what we are asking Him than we do. Now, God could have chosen to move in the earth any way He wanted to, but He didn't. The Bible reveals that God has chosen to operate through His creation and throughout history by answering the prayers of His people. In other words, God does what He does in response to His people asking Him to do what He has already said is His will. You don't understand what I just said. So don't say amen yet. So just meditate on this. When I first learned about sovereignty, the first casualty in my theological toolbox was prayer. If God's sovereign, why pray? He already knows what He wants. He can't be defeated. Why does He want me to pray? What is He getting out of me praying? And this is the mystery of prayer. God tells you in His Word what He wants. And then you're to pray that. And then He answers your prayers by doing what He said He already was going to do. That's exactly what the Bible teaches about prayer. Don't throw rocks at me yet. Let me say this another way. God has predetermined to do many things in His creation. And God has been good to reveal many of those things in the Bible. Not all of them, but many of them. And so by reading and studying the Bible, we learn what is God's will. And because we are saved, we want God's will to be done more than we want anything else. Is there somebody that doesn't want God's will? We need to pray for you. And so we discipline ourselves by the power of the Holy Spirit to love what God loves. Right? To want what God wants. To find the fullness of joy, the highest and best expression of genuine satisfaction in that which is God's will. And our prayers flow out from that. And so we cry out to God in accord with God's will, which is found in God's Word, and we pray that what God has already revealed to be His will will come to pass. Jesus told John the apostle, Behold, I come quickly. A declarative statement. I'm coming back quickly. And John's response to the will of God was, Come, Lord Jesus, come. And then God moves and answers those prayers by doing what He has already said He wants to do. In fact, those are the only prayers that God answers. 1 John 5, verse 14 says, This is the confidence which we have before Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. So the reason we have so many unanswered prayers is because we are praying in rebellion to or in opposition to God's will. I want you to turn with me. I want your eyes to see this James chapter 4, please. James, the book of James, the epistle of James chapter 4. James chapter 4, verses 1-10. Turning your Bibles to James chapter 4, 1-10. James 4, verses 1-10. What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. This asking is this pleading, this begging, this crying, this praying. And then verse 3 says, you ask and you do not receive. So you're praying good, but you're still not receiving. Why? Because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses. This is an insult to the men of the church. This is the feminine. This is the correct translation. He calls them female adulterers. So he calls them adulteresses. Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or, do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us. But He gives greater grace. Therefore, it says, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble. He's connected all this to prayer now. In an Alabama English way of saying it, your prayers are not answered because you're self-righteous, you're arrogant, you're proud. Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God. He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. Look at this. Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and He will exalt you. So part of what prayer is and what prayer does is designed on purpose by God to change us. To alter the way we think. To change what we love and what we want and what we desire so that we will want and love and desire God's will to be carried out so that God will be honored and magnified. And this is why Jesus told us to pray in Matthew 6 and 10, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. and nobody carried out God's will in the earth better than Jesus. Now, does that mean that God will not move in the earth unless we pray? Does that mean that God has already revealed what He wants to do in the earth, but He won't do what He says He wants to do unless we pray? Does it mean that, brother Blair? Yes! God will not do what He wants to do unless we pray. That's radical. But, because it is His will to do certain things in the earth, He will assure that His people pray. And so God will sovereignly burden the hearts of His people to cry out to Him what He has already said is His will so that He may graciously and wondrously move on those prayers that are in full accord with His will and do what He has already said He wants to do. That's how prayer works. Now, this particular setting of prayer that Dr. Luke recorded for us in these eight verses that Brother Andy just read to us is just fascinating to me. So let's look again at what Dr. Luke told us in Luke 22, 39 and 40. Now the good doctor was very careful here to tell us, as he was moved along by God the Holy Spirit, that Jesus came out. So Jesus came out of the upper room where He was taking the Last Supper and He proceeded up to the Mount of Olives. So this is approximately late Thursday evening or very early in the morning, Friday of the last week of Jesus' life. And Luke says that the disciples followed Jesus into the Mount of Olives. So from this we know that every evening after Jesus had taught down in or by the temple in Jerusalem, He went back up to the Mount of Olives at night to pray and to rest and also to hide from the authorities. It wasn't time yet. Now the apostle Levi gave us a much more detailed description of this very event in Matthew twenty six chapter verse thirty six Levi says then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane and said to his disciples sit here while I go over there and pray. So evidently there was a place within the Mount of Olives called Gethsemane. And it was a garden area that was thick with olive trees that could have very well belonged to a believer. So this man had allowed Jesus to use his garden to hide from the authorities until it was time for him to be captured and killed. Now keep in mind that Judas by this time has already left the group and he's out now trying to betray the Lord. And so when Luke tells us that the disciples also followed him He was referring to the other eleven men who were still with Jesus. Now look again at what Luke says in Luke 22 verse 40. When He arrived at the place, He said to them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And once again, Matthew's Gospel gives us additional details. In Matthew 26, 37 and 38 it says, And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be grieved and distressed. Then he said to them, my soul is deeply grieved to the point of death. Remain here and keep watch with me. Now the way that I understand this is that when they got to the garden, Jesus told the entire group of eleven faithful disciples, pray that you may not enter into temptation. But then Levi tells us that Jesus began to be grieved and distressed. Now we must understand a few things about this. First of all, Jesus was not afraid. He was not a coward. And I don't think that Jesus was even fearful of what those evil men were going to do to Him when they took Him. And here's why I believe that. John 13, verse 3 says, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God. So unlike us, Jesus was omniscient. And here the Apostle John tells us that Jesus knew three very important things. Number one, He knew that the Father had given all things into His hands. It's not just that He had all of that power. He knew that His Father had given Him that power. He had that knowledge. Number two, He knew that He had come from God. And number three, He knew He was going back to God. Now one of the main reasons we fear is because we don't know the future. So we fear the unknown. But because He was God, there were no unknowns with Jesus. Jesus already knew what it was like to be in heaven with God in glory. And He knew that as soon as He died, He was going to go back into heaven with God in glory. We don't know that. We trust that. We believe that. We have faith that the eternal reward that God has promised us in Scripture is true. Because we have come to understand that God cannot lie and what God says is true. But that is not knowledge. That is faith. Jesus did not have faith about His Father or eternity. Jesus had first-hand knowledge. And so Jesus had no fear of the future because He controls the future. So Jesus understood perfectly that the wicked men were going to arrest Him and take Him and brutally torture Him and then kill Him. And in His fleshly body, Jesus felt every blow that the Roman soldiers gave Him. He bled. His skin broke apart. He bruised. And it hurt Him real bad. But he didn't fear that. Jesus understood that he had to fulfill Isaiah's prophecy. When the golden-tongued prophet had said in Isaiah 53, 3-5, he was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hid their face, he was despised and we did not esteem him. Now, when you hide your face from somebody, it's because you're ashamed of them. And so people became ashamed of Jesus. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried out, yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He must be evil. Look what God is doing to Him. But He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourgings, we are healed. So Jesus knew that every blow that He received was to satisfy the damnation that every elected sinner deserved. As these demonically motivated men beat the only sinless man who ever lived, our souls were being set free. And they whipped the Prince of Life, the fury of the wrath of God against our greed, and covetousness, and lust, and lying, and murder, and theft, and idolatry, and the dishonoring of our parents, and the breaking of the Sabbath, and our willful rebellion against God. All of that was being absorbed by Jesus in our place. And so because Jesus loved His Father, He was willing to go through this. So the pain and the anguish that He was about to go through was not what made Jesus go into the grief and distress. It wasn't even the horrific death that He knew was coming. No, what caused Jesus to grieve and to be distressed was knowing that in order to pay for the salvation of every single sinner who had been chosen by God from before the foundation of the world to experience the beauty of holiness and to see God in His glory, God would have to impute every evil thought, every putrid deed, every wicked imagination, every vile action that has ever been carried out by any of God's elect, and God would impute those sins on Jesus. And Jesus would have to legally become pure sin. And for a perfectly sinless being to become nothing but pure sin for the sake of unworthy sinners was the source of His grief and distress. Because Jesus knew that as soon as God placed on Him the sins of us all, God could no longer be near to Jesus and would have to withdraw Himself. And that had never happened before. You see, since before God made the world, Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit have been in constant and continuous and perfect relationship. The love between the three persons of the Trinity is hard to even grasp. They have perfect unity, perfect fellowship, perfect love, because they have perfect knowledge of one another. And now Jesus is going to be made sin for us, and so that perfect unity will be interrupted for the first time in all of creation. And that is bothering Jesus more than anything else. Now keep in mind that as Jesus was made sin for us, that sinfulness is an alien sinfulness. It is an external sinfulness, a forensic sinfulness. In other words, Jesus was and is and always be perfectly sinless on a personal level. He became sin for us on a legal or forensic level. So, as Jesus was on the cross dying for us, He remained perfectly sinless personally while being sinful only through imputation. And this is exactly the opposite as it is with us. We are in reality wicked sinners who are made righteous only through imputation. At the very moment of our justification, God takes the perfect and spotless righteousness of Jesus Christ that He earned by living a perfectly sinless life, and God imputes or He credits that righteousness to us through the agency of faith alone. Hallelujah! If you believe that, you're a Protestant. I don't care what church you go to. If you don't believe that, you're a Roman Catholic. I don't care what church you go to. And it is that imputed righteousness that allows us to enter into heaven. So at that moment, we, you and I, hold a dual status before God. We are personally still sinful. And we are still unworthy of anything that God does for us. But legally or forensically, we are sinless. Because the spotless righteousness of Jesus Christ has been imputed to us. And the Reformers developed a Latin phrase, I wish they'd have done it in Alabama English, but they did it in Latin, to try to describe this great mystery. And that Latin phrase is simo justus et peccator. We are simultaneously just or righteous because of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. And at the same time, we are still personally sinful. Jesus, however, was personally sinless and was sinful only because of the imputation of our sins upon Himself. And it was this and the fact that this imputed sinfulness would force God the Father to withdraw Himself as to why Jesus was in grief and distress. Now in Matthew's Gospel, it gives us further insight into something that Jesus told these three men. Matthew 26, verse 38 says, My soul is deeply grieved. to the point of death. Remain here and keep watch with Me." Now this is the first time in all of the Bible where Jesus ever asked anybody to pray for Him. And evidently He didn't ask the other eight men to pray for Him. Just these three. Now I've taught you before that all of the apostles were not created equal. They were all saved and they all did great things for Jesus and the church, but some of them did more. And God used some more than others. We have already seen how that Jesus Himself called Peter the Protoss. Which meant that Peter was the head of the apostles. He was the first. So Peter was the first among equals. And believing that doesn't make you Catholic. It makes you biblical. Because that's what the Bible says. So according to Luke six there were three groups of four men each and the first group was comprised of two sets of natural brothers Peter and Andrew and James and John who were also called the sons of Zebedee and they didn't get that name because they were timid and laid back and nonchalant people they were violent and angry I have no idea why people think John was a doe faced effeminate looking skinny man that was looking like a woman in Michelangelo's portrait which he did great damage to the gospel account because it wasn't like that anyway. John was a fisherman his hands were gnarled from working the fishing lines he was a violent brute who lived in in in black and white terminology. If you read First John you need to get away from it for a few minutes and read something a little bit easier like Paul's epistle to the Corinthians or something because you're going to think you're not even saved after you get through reading John because John was black and white. You're either all the way in or you're not in at all. And you go wow. So then I don't know Paul wrote a whole chapter on love I have no idea why John in a few verses was called the apostle of love and I'm not saying they weren't loving but this is just tradition that messes us up and not biblical so they were called the sons of Zebedee they were fighters when you know what happened when fishermen aren't fight or aren't fishing when fishermen are not fishing they're fighting a man that's a fact and they I used to hang around a lot of them and on Friday afternoon they'd get off work and they'd soak their hands in pickle brine. They'd stick their hands down in vats of pickle brine so their hands would get strong enough to hit and not feel it. Because they planned to do some damage that night. That's fishermen. And see you and I are called to be fishermen of men. And when we're not busy fishing for men we're fighting. That's why there's problems in churches. They're not busy in the work of the Lord. So, these four men made up the first group of apostles, and yet back in Luke 9, when Jesus was going to be transfigured, He only brought three of the four men of this first group. For some reason, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was left out. I have no idea why. Now we can speculate as to why Jesus did this, but the scripture doesn't tell us, and I'm very reluctant. to teach something that the Bible doesn't say. Andrew wasn't with them in the Mount of Transfiguration. That's a fact. And now here again, as Jesus is being grieved and distressed over becoming sin for us, and of God withdrawing His presence from Jesus, once again Jesus confides with these three men, Peter, James, and John, and leaves Andrew at the outskirts of the garden. So here's how it all went down. All eleven of the remaining apostles went with Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane. All eleven saw that Jesus was beginning to be filled with grief and distress. And at the edge of the garden, Jesus says to all eleven of them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. So all of them were told to pray. But not just any prayer. Look, Jesus told all of them to pray that they would not enter into temptation. Now why did He say that? Notice He didn't tell them to pray that they wouldn't enter into sin. But so they wouldn't enter into temptation. So Jesus went into the garden to pray, but now He commands His closest followers to pray that they would not enter into temptation. Not sin, but temptation. So Jesus was not asking them to pray about not committing adultery or of not coveting or breaking the Sabbath or idolatry. He was telling them to pray about not being overwhelmed by the temptation that was just about to happen. But then as Jesus says this, He leaves 8 of the 11 at the edge of the garden. And only Peter, James, and John go into the garden with Jesus. And at some distance into the garden, I don't know how big it was, Jesus stops and He turns and tells these three guys, My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death. Remain here and keep watch with Me. Pray for Me. So this is an even deeper level of grief that He had at the edge of the garden. So from this we know that Jesus' grief was progressive. It was getting worse and worse. It was getting heavier and heavier. It was becoming so all-consuming that if it were possible, it would kill Him. Jesus was getting ready to be the sacrifice for the sins of every single elected sinner throughout all time. Everything He had said and done up to this moment was now coming to a crescendo. And so the pressure and the tension must have been incredible. Now, to keep watch here meant to pray and not sleep, or to pray without stopping, or to pray without any interruptions during the time of the watch. They divided the nighttime into watches back then. And you had to keep watch. You meant you prayed fervently or watched fervently throughout your entire time. Now, look at the last two words that Jesus spoke to them. He said, Jesus is asking these men to keep watch with him now there was not background music playing right now as the movies do he wasn't he didn't have a good hair his hair wasn't styled properly he wasn't he wasn't. standing upright, this man, our Savior, is now bent over. Our Savior is now in a grief and a distress that was going to kill Him. He is deeply disturbed. You see this on His face. You see it in His mannerism. And He's telling these men with this desperation, pray with Me. Pray with Me. Do not fall asleep. Not now! So Jesus is asking these men to keep watch with Him, or in other words, to faithfully pray with Him or for Him. There's no record that He asked the others to pray for Him. Jesus told the eight to pray about not entering into temptation. But here, for the first time, the incarnate God is asking these three frail and sinful men, who evidently were His closest men, to pray with Him through this unbelievably difficult time, and to not fail to pray for Him. Now look again at Luke 22, verse 41. And He withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and He knelt down and began to pray. So Dr. Luke tells us that Jesus went about a stone's throw away from these three men and Jesus knelt down and began to pray. Now stone's throw is the distance that a normal person can throw an average rock which is about 50 or 60 feet. Now normally this would not be valuable because everything that could be done 50 feet away still is seemingly close by. But evidently the trees in this garden were closely packed together and so going even 50 feet away provided some measure of seclusion. Now this is one of the rare moments in the entire Bible where Jesus actually knelt down to pray. We usually think about somebody praying when they're on their knees and with their eyes closed. The reality is that this posture is rare and reserved for intense times like this. The majority of instances of prayer in the Bible were done while standing up with eyes open, many times with hands raised up. So the raising of hands was done primarily in the Bible as one would pray. Not when singing or worshiping. And I'm not saying it's wrong to raise your hands when you're singing. I do that. I'm just trying to worship Jesus. That's all that's in my mind. Now posture in eyes closed or open hands or raised or down is all mostly irrelevant. The issue is prayer and what you're praying about, not what your posture is. However, there are times when it seems appropriate to kneel down as a sign of humility. With eyes closed as a sign of reverence. I love to kneel down. In fact, when I was first saved, I had injured both of my knees playing football and it was impossible for me to kneel. And I would kneel and go into intense pain so much I would be sweating and I would be in severe pain. And I begged God to heal my knees to allow me to pray on my knees. And I can walk on my knees now on concrete. And God moved and answered that prayer. And I'm grateful for that. I love to bow before my Savior. I also believe very strongly that there are seasons of prayer when God begins to burden your heart to spend long, protracted times in prayer, usually accompanied with fasting, where most of that time is spent prostrate on the floor or ground with your face in the dust. I value those times with God. I have also spent all night in prayer, just slowly walking and pacing back and forth. But however you are led to pray, the issue is prayer and not necessarily what position you get in. But here, this phrase would be better understood as Jesus collapsing to the ground, falling on His knees due to the intense anguish He is under. So eight of the eleven were left at the edge of the garden and told to pray and they would not enter into temptation. Then three of the eleven were taken some ways into the garden and given additional and more intimate information and then told to keep watch and pray with Jesus. And then Jesus himself goes about another stone's throw deeper into the garden and he falls to the ground on his knees. And he prays. Now, once again, Levi's account is helpful. Because Matthew 26.39, the Apostle says, And he went a little beyond them and fell on his face and prayed, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not as I will, but as You will. And again, this is not We don't get the impact of the moment just reading these words. He's crying to God. Father! Father! That's how Jesus is praying right now. This is earnestness at the height. So Levi tells us that the grief and distress was so overwhelming on Jesus at this point that He went about 50 or 60 feet further into the garden, away from these three men, and He literally fell on His knees with His face to the ground and He prayed. Now this is the prayer of agony. This is intense spiritual warfare against everything Satan has thrown at him. But look how Jesus is praying. My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me, yet not as I will, but as You will. Again, there's no reason to assume that Jesus was afraid or that He's reluctant to be beaten. or having second thoughts about dying. None of that was what was bothering Him. In order to fulfill His Father's will, all of the sins of all of God's elect had to be placed on Him. And at that moment, God the Father and God the Son would be separated for the first time. And that was almost more than Jesus could bear. God is so holy and sin so repugnant that God cannot even be near it. And throughout all of eternity, God the Father had enjoyed perfect unity and harmony and fellowship and love with God the Son. And now that was going to be interrupted. But not merely a separation. No, not just a separation. Our sins on Jesus was going to cause the full fury of God's wrath to be poured out on Him as He hung on that cross. And all of our sins would be forever damned because Jesus paid for them, which allows God to show those who have trusted in Him only mercy. So Jesus is begging God for another way. Jesus is absolutely committed to carrying out God's will. But because of the horror that awaits Him in God being separated from Him, Jesus is seeking another way to fulfill God's plan. And so in this overwhelming grief and distress, Jesus cries out, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Is there another way I can obey You and yet not have to become sin and You leave me? May I find another way to honor Your will and yet not lose the contact that You and I have enjoyed since before the world was? Is there another way? Now it is very important that we understand the dynamic that is going on here. Why is Jesus seeking another way? What is going on that Jesus is begging God for another way? You see, as sinners, we struggle with temptation because of our sinful and unholy flesh. We are a new creation, incarcerated in unredeemed flesh. And so we are seduced by the remnants of our fallenness. So with us, our temptation has to do with us holding on to sin and not coming to righteousness. So we are tempted to hold on to the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. We struggle because the power of evil is so strong in us. We struggle because the power of sin is innate to us. Because the power of iniquity is intertwined in our being. So we have unholy impulses residing in us. Our battle is to fight against our innate attraction to sin. To fight against our fallenness. To strive to abandon it. And to embrace righteousness and holiness and purity. But this was not Christ's struggle. Jesus struggled with temptation in exactly the opposite way. He struggled because of His holy flesh. He struggled because He was totally devoted only to that which was pure and righteous and perfect. He struggled because the power of holiness was the only motive He had ever known in His eternal being. The only motive He had for every thought, every word, and for every act was absolute pure holiness. We struggle with three things. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. He struggled against three driving, dominant, all-consuming, all-pervading impulses. Holy, holy, holy. So for us, we're struggling to abandon sin and embrace holiness. But for Jesus, He was being tempted to abandon holiness and embrace sin. Our sin. on the cross. So it's just the opposite. And this is completely incomprehensible to him. This is repulsive and foreign to Jesus. Because He's not like us. He's not fighting against sinful impulses to be holy. He's fighting against holy impulses to be made sin. So Satan is tempting Jesus to cling to His holiness, just as he did when he tempted Him in the wilderness. Satan is tempting Jesus to cling to the right to be acknowledged as the Messiah, and to rule over all the kingdoms of this world, to remain pure and undefiled. But to do that, Jesus must avoid the cross. He must avoid being made sin for us. He must disobey His Father's will in order to maintain His perfect purity. So He is seeking another way. Jesus has no intention of disobeying His Father, but He is seeking to try to be fully obedient while not having to be made sin and having God separated from Him. So Jesus was having to fight against His own holy impulses. We have to fight against our own sinful impulses. We fight to hold on to God. He fights to let go of God. We fight to be joined to God. He fought against being separated from God. In the face of this immense, inconceivable conflict that we can't even fathom, Jesus is thinking while fully concentrating on this conflict. He is thinking about His own beloved apostles, whom He loves unto perfection, according to John 13, verse 1. And they are going to struggle that same night with their own temptations, and they're going to have to be ready. And Jesus makes Himself ready through prayer. He comes to the place of full submission to God through prayer. And He knows they need to do the very same thing. And the answer from God to the Son was no. There was no other way for Jesus to do this. All of the sins of all of God's elect was going to have to be placed on Jesus. And for the first time, God the Father and God the Son would be separated. And the righteousness of God would force God to adjudicate all of those sins by pouring out His fury upon His own Son. It pleased the Lord to crush Him. And so Jesus prayed the single most important prayer that could ever be prayed. Yet not as I will, but as you will. So Jesus humbled himself here more than anyone has ever humbled themselves. And his surrender to God's will was greater because Jesus had more to lose. In order to obey God, Jesus had to become sin. And yet right here, Jesus fully submitted Himself to His Father's plan, and He did that through prayer. Jesus came to the place where He was willing to become pure sin and have God the Father abandon Him while screaming in agony on the cross so we could be saved. He did all that through prayer. And so this is the single most important prayer that anyone could ever pray. Total surrender to God's will. So how do you get to that place? How do you and I get there? How do we get there? Well, through agonizing in prayer. Not as I will, but as you, God, will. This kind of prayer shows full reliance on God's sovereignty. It shows full trust in that which God has called you to do. And you arrive at that place through prayer. So I hope you can see how vitally important prayer was to Jesus and how important prayer is to us. But it didn't come easy. And we're going to look more at this amazing time with His apostles in the Garden, Lord willing, next week. Let's pray.