“SUBMISSION IN PRAYER”
Midweek Lenten Worship V
March 25, 2015
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
Going a little farther, [Jesus] fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”
Matthew 26:39 (ESV)
Assuming that we pray the Lord’s Prayer every day, every day we say to God: “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10 KJV). But, as is the case with anything that is so familiar to us that we have it committed to memory and can rattle it off without any effort, we need to pay closer attention to what we are saying. Do we really mean “Thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10 KJV) or do we mean instead “Thy will be done as long as it’s the same as my will” or “Thy will be done as long it doesn’t inconvenience me too much” or “Thy will be done as long as I can make some sense of it”? The truth of the matter is that we come to God with our cares and concerns, asking Him to deal with them according to His will, but then when things don’t work out quite the way that we would like them to, we start complaining that God either hasn’t answered our prayer or hasn’t dealt with us fairly and lovingly, even though we are well aware of the fact that we have qualified all of our requests with the phrase: “Thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10 KJV).
Tonight, as we consider Jesus’ prayer to His heavenly Father in the garden of Gethsemane, we see the very real and serious implications and consequences of that little phrase that we repeat so often and so effortlessly. At this point in time the Savior is beginning to feel the burden of the collective guilt of all sinful humanity for all time. The guilt of every offense ever committed by every sinner who ever lived or ever will live rests squarely on His shoulders. The full reality of Jesus’ human nature becomes apparent as we see Him struggling with the temptation to bail out, if you will, of His mission to make atonement for the sin of mankind. But unlike the first Adam, who struggled with temptation in a garden and was overcome by it, the Second Adam struggles with temptation in a garden and He overcomes it. In an effort to gain knowledge and strength from this prayer experience of our Savior, we will examine tonight how Jesus comes to His Father in prayer with a certain boldness but also with humility and in submission.
There is a boldness with which Jesus approaches His Father in prayer. He addresses God with the Hebrew word aba (Abba), which is a much more intimate form of the normal Hebrew word for “father,” ba (Av). This is not unlike you or me addressing our earthly father as “Dad” or “Daddy.” It suggests a certain familiarity and intimacy--not that Jesus is any way showing disrespect toward His Father but rather that He is communicating a confidence that the One to whom He is speaking is One who He can trust because He knows that He loves Him and is able to provide for Him. More than that, it expresses the Savior’s confidence that His Father is the All-Wise One who knows what is best. Jesus knows what He desires but, at the same time, He trusts God so much that He is willing to subject His own desires to God’s will and to receive whatever God in His wisdom chooses to send. Jesus is willing to submit to the will of His Father not out of fear but out of unwavering trust and confidence.
Because of what Christ has done for us in His perfect life and His innocent suffering and death, we can have the same kind of boldness when we approach God that Jesus had. In his Small Catechism Martin Luther gives this explanation to the introduction of the Lord’s Prayer: “With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and that we are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father” (Small Catechism, introduction of The Lord’s Prayer). We are to fear God in the sense that we know that He is infinitely greater than we are but we have absolutely no reason to be afraid of Him. The boldness with which we come to God in prayer is like the boldness of Jesus: We know that the God to whom we are praying is our loving Father, who is able to give us anything and do anything for us and who is also wise enough to know what to give us and do for us.
Despite the boldness and confidence with which Jesus approached His God and Father, He also demonstrated great humility, for Matthew tells us that Jesus “fell on His face and prayed.” There are many different postures that people assume when they are praying. Some prefer to pray in a standing position, others kneeling, still others sitting, and perhaps even a few lying down. But I doubt very seriously that any of us pray in a prostrate position like Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane. This posture in prayer is a demonstration of the utmost humility--the evidence that the One who is praying is literally throwing Himself at the Lord’s feet, pleading with Him to respond with fatherly love and compassion. In the garden the Savior was under extreme stress, looking to His heavenly Father for a resolution to the dilemma that confronted Him. He was bearing the sin and guilt of the whole world for all time and He was earnestly seeking a way to appease the righteous judgment of God that would make His sacrificial and atoning suffering and death unnecessary.
But no matter what He desired, the Son of God was willing to submit to the will of His Father. He prays: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” He knows that the will of the Father is always just and right, no matter what His will may be. Here we see the struggle between the divine and human natures in Christ being resolved as Jesus’ will is perfectly harmonized with the will of His Father. The Savior has His own desires, to be sure, but He is willing to subject those desires to the perfect will of His Father in heaven. Even as He pleads for His very life, He knows that the will of God is just and right. He is so committed to the will of the Father and to the salvation of sinners that He is willing to subject His will to that of the God and Judge of all. If God’s righteousness and justice require that Jesus shed His blood and die to make atonement for the sin of the world, so be it. God’s will must be done at all costs, because His will is always right and just.
The key to submitting to the Lord’s will in prayer is having the confidence of knowing that He alone knows what is best and that He will bring it about. That confidence is ours, not because we are so trusting, but because He has shown us over and over again that His almighty power, His abiding love, and His infinite wisdom are always working not only for our good but for the good of all. He has shown us this most clearly in our salvation, purchased for us by the shedding of the innocent blood of the Son of God--something that makes absolutely no sense to us according to our human view of justice. And yet this is God’s way: “Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the Righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). It is in His name--the name of the crucified and risen Christ--that our prayers are heard and answered, conforming our will to the good and gracious will of our heavenly Father.
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a life of repentance and trust. May He also be glorified in the lives of you, His people. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.