Teach Me to Pray - Week #31: Christ the Sacrifice

"'Abba, Father,' he said, 'everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.'" Mark 14:36

In the previous chapter we saw Jesus as Intercessor; here we see Him as Sacrifice in the Garden of Gethsemane as He anticipates His death. In a matter of a few hours, His quiet words, "Father, the hour has come..." has changed into His agonizing cry, "Abba, Father!...Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will..."

Murray says, "Because of the entire surrender of His will in Gethsemane, the High Priest on the throne had the power to ask what He would. He has the right to let His people share in that power also and ask what they will."

Jesus' authority in intercession comes from His willingness to give up His own will, and it is in His not obtaining what He asks for ("take this cup from me") that we have the right to ask "whatever you wish" in prayer.

"To understand the prayer, let us note the infinite difference between what our Lord prayed a little while ago as a royal High Priest and what He begs here in His weakness. There He prayed for the glorifying of the Father and the glorifying of Himself and His people as the fulfillment of distinct promises that had been given Him. What He asked He knew to be according to the word and the will of the Father...Here He prays for something in regard to which the Father's will is not yet clear to Him. As far as He knows, it is the Father's will that he should drink the cup...(but) When the unutterable agony of soul burst upon Him as the power of darkness came over Him and he began to taste the first drops of death as the wrath of God against sin, His human nature shuddered in the presence of the awful reality of being made a curse."

Jesus' plea to be spared this "cup" was made in the context of a phrase repeated 3 times: "Yet not what I will." He was asking for something that He didn't have certainty about and so He made the request in the context of a will surrendered to the Father's will. Murray points out several mysteries related to Gethsemane:
1. The Father offers His beloved Son the cup of wrath.
2. The Son, always obedient, shrinks back and begs to not have to drink it.
3. The Father doesn't grant His Son's request but rather gives the cup to Him.
4. The Son yields to the Father's will.

"In Gethsemane I see that my Lord can give me unlimited assurance of an answer to my prayers. He won the privilege for me by His consent to have His petition unanswered. This is in harmony with the whole scheme of redemption. Our Lord always wins for us the opposite of what he suffered...Here in Gethsemane the word 'if you abide in me' acquires new force and depth. Christ is our Head, who stands in our place and bears what we must have borne forever."

I find this an intriguing and wonderful truth related to our prayer life in Jesus - we sinners deserve to have God turn a deaf ear to our prayers, but because Jesus suffered under the burden of this unanswered prayer and went to death as a result, His merit has won for me the answer to every prayer if I abide in Him!

Does this mean that I can expect answers to prayers that are selfish and outside of the Father's will? No, because the very meaning of abiding in Him suggests that "my will dies in Him, in Him to be made alive again. He breathes into it a renewed and quickened will, a holy insight into God's perfect will, a holy joy in yielding itself to be an instrument of that will..."

"The more deeply I enter into the prayer 'Not what I will' of Gethsemane, and abide in Him who spoke it, the fuller is my spiritual access into the power of His 'But what you will'...Being of one mind and spirit with Him in His giving up everything to God's will, living as He did in obedience and surrender to the Father - this is abiding in Him. This is the secret of power in prayer."

"Lamb of God, I would follow You to Gethsemane...With You, through You, in You, I yield my will in absolute and entire surrender to the will of the Father. I claim in faith the power of Your victory, conscious of my own weakness and the secret power with which my self-will would assert itself...In Your death I would daily live. In Your life I would daily die...With my whole soul I say with you, 'Father...not what I will, but what you will'...Lord Jesus, teach me to pray. Amen."