Navigating Our Gethsemane
Easter Sunday
CCCAG April 4th, 2021
Scripture: Luke 22:39-44
Today I was going to finish the Created for Significance series but actually as I was bringing the message last Sunday, I felt that God told me to go in a little bit of a different direction and bring a more Easter related message to you.
The leading I got from God reminded me of one of my favorite quotes you may have heard me say before- The great evangelist Dwight Moody once said that the most effective preacher preachers with a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in another.
In other words, if you are going to preach the word, make it relevant for the times you are living in today.
So on this Easter Sunday we're going to look at what Jesus went through in the Garden of Gethsemane and see how they can bring us encouragement for the times we live in today.
To set the stage-
Jesus has just had the Last Supper with the disciples
Judas has left to go and start his betrayal of Jesus
Jesus and the disciples are taking a late night walk an end up at the Garden of Gethsemane just to the East of Jerusalem.
Jesus knows what's coming. He knows in a matter of hours that he is going to be beaten to the point of almost being unrecognizable. The flesh is going to be largely stripped from his back and then a wooden cross beam is going to be laid across his shoulders that to be carried up the side of a small mountain where he will be crucified and hang in agony for six hours.
This is the culmination of the plan of salvation.
It’s almost done- Jesus is on the home stretch.
But the home stretch is going to be the worst 16 hours of His life.
This is where Jesus is right now- getting ready to take the plunge.
He knows the next day or so is going to be very difficult. He will face an incredible physical test, and a multiplied worst spiritual test.
And in His humanity, he is terrified.
As we read Luke’s Account, I want you to put yourself in HIS place. Knowing you are about to literally plunge into the worst pain, worst torment, and literally go through the worse hell anyone has ever experienced.
Scripture-
Luke 22:39-44
39 Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. 40 On reaching the place, he said to them, "Pray that you will not fall into temptation." 41 He withdrew about a stone's throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, 42 "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." 43 An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. 44 And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
Prayer
We live in very trying times.
Many of us are deeply concerned about
-the government coming in and stripping away freedoms.
- direction the COVID virus is going next.
-the moral and spiritual climate of our nation.
Many of us have that sense of dark anticipation- What’s coming next?
We are waiting for the shoe to drop that will change everything.
When I was a teenager I worked at Six Flags great America and I worked on the roller coasters. One of them took you up a large Hill and then you went into a tunnel were you then dropped several stories Into Darkness.
That's kind of what living today feels like
It feels like we are at the top of the roller coaster, waiting for it to crest the hill, and drive us downward into an uncertain future.
Living in 2021 feels like the Valley of the shadow of death.
Jesus is experiencing these same kind of feelings X 10 in the garden.
How did Jesus deal with these feelings?
How did Jesus drum up the courage to continue?
How did Jesus finally bend to God’s will when everything inside of his humanity screamed at HIM to run?
By studying Jesus’ actions here, we will learn how to deal with our times in the Garden of Gethsemane, and learn to navigate it as Jesus did.
What is the first thing we can we learn from Jesus in the Garden?
I. Acknowledge your fear, and give it to God
Sometimes as Christians, we are afraid of letting people see how we really feel.
Particularly when it comes to fear, depression, feeling overwhelmed- those emotions that we think if we show them, others will judge us as being weak in the faith.
Has anyone ever felt like that?
You're too afraid of other people's opinions of you that you can't drop the church face for fear of being made to feel less of a Christian than someone else?
I think most if not everyone here has experienced that at some point in their lives.
Let me ask you a question-
Was Jesus weak in the garden of Gethsemane?
After all, verse 44 it says that Jesus was so freaked out here that he was sweating blood.
Now that is an anxiety attack!
That’s a medical condition called hema-ti-dro’-sis. It means you are so scared that your blood pressure and pulse rate rise to the point where not only your plasma- the watery portion of your blood, but your red blood cells start leaking out the pores in your skins.
It fairly rare because most people just have a massive stroke and die before this happens- one of the major blood vessels in the brain blows up, and you’re dead.
But this is where Jesus is right now. Stressed beyond human ability to deal with it, and His human body is having a severe reaction to it- sweating blood.
What did he do-
The first thing- Asked his friends to pray with him
That’s step one in acknowledging your fear- humble yourself by asking for help, and then go to pray.
Can I just be honest for a minute?
Drop the mask- honestly, most people are not very good at hiding their emotions, so you’re not fooling anyone anyway- most of us can see through it.
Don’t be afraid to ask a few trusted friends to sit and pray with you.
I say this over and over and over again- we as a church are a hospital of the spiritually sick, not a mausoleum of dead people remembering what God did yesterday.
We exist to help people through the valleys of the shadow of death.
Not just give a flippant- I’ll pray for you and promptly forget about it, but to honestly love and care for one another.
That’s what Jesus did- In other Gospel accounts it says that HE brought along 11 friends to help him, and then took his three closest friends in even deeper to witness just how in anguish he was.
Ask for help, and then pray
Step two here- pour out your heart to God.
Be like Jesus, and let yourself vent a little.
Tammie recently got an Insta-pot so I’m becoming familiar with pressure cookers.
It occurred to me that most of us are like little pressure cookers- full of steam and heat that can explode at a moment’s notice if the lid fails.
Last Wednesday I was doing clinical on the neurological floor at Marshfield hospital. I was teamed with a very experienced male nurse who is showing me nursing flow- which is how to take several different patients with varying degrees of complexity and treatments and medications and make sure everything gets done on time during your shift even when the unexpected happens.
This leads to a great deal of stress, and a lot of walking back and forth, delegating tasks, conferencing with other providers, meeting resistance from medical staff, saving the patients from the doctors in training.
All of it adds up to a very stressful working environment.
He told me something that helped him when he gets stressed out about things happening on the floor.
He goes into the boss’s office and vents. He said I probably look like a crazy man sometimes when I go in there and complain about everything under the sun. The manager Brian just sits there and listens and when I'm done he asks, “do you feel better now?”
Surprisingly I feel great. I know he's probably not going to do a thing with what I just told him he lets me get it off my chest anyway. He said it's very cathartic.
This idea of venting can be very healthy when it comes to your relationship with God. Venting is releasing the emotional pressure that comes from bad or challenging circumstances.
Let’s take that and apply it here- venting to God sounds a little sacrilegious doesn’t it? It sounds like it might even be disrespectful.
Bear with me for a moment-
God isn’t interested in your stiff upper lip.
He isn’t impressed with you holding it in and letting it cause havoc to your body and emotions.
He doesn’t want you to exist in a constant state of anxiety and fear.
He wants to hear it. He is FATHER God, not distant uninterested God.
Saying that, when it comes to venting, there are a few rules that we have to follow.
Spiritual Venting is something between you and God. Repeat
This is where many people mess up- they vent to each other- that causes all kinds of problems, gossip, ect.
If you need to vent- to let the negative emotions out- You always vent upward in you relationships
Very rarely horizontally to very close or trusted friends/spouses, and never downward.
In other words, you do not vent at subordinate or children about your adult problems.
Just a few guidelines because venting can cause problems if you do it wrong.
Saying that- sometimes we need to go before the throne of God and vent.
Again, for some, that’s difficult to hear. Maybe even a mental gasp when I say that-
“You mean you want me to vent to God?”
Yep.
Be like Jesus. Jesus was venting here in Gethsemane, and it’s not mistake that every Gospel writer records it.
I don't know how much of the Old Testament you have read, but particularly in the prophetic works, there are some very honest dialogues between the Old Testament heroes of the faith and God.
They even accused God of being cruel, evil, and deceptive-
Jeremiah vented to God
Jer 20:7 O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed.
That’s some venting going on there.
King David, the man after God’s own heart pretty regularly vented his honest emotions to God-
Ps 13:1-2
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Venting- expressing your honest, unfiltered emotion before God
Finally, Jesus here in the garden-
In Mark’s version of the events in the Garden, Jesus confesses this to his three best friends-
Mark 14:34 "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,"
Let me 21st century this statement-Jesus is saying- “I am so stressed out I feel like I want to die”
Then Jesus prays for God to change the entire plan of salvation that they had worked out before God said “Let there be light!”
Mark 14:36 Take this cup from me!
Venting
So I encourage you this morning-Be like Jesus. It’s how He handled that moment of darkness in His life.
Once the emotions are dealt with, then we can move onto the second thing we learn from Jesus in the Garden-
II. Surrender to God
I love combat sports. One of my dad's friends growing up was named Roger Sanderson and he was the US heavyweight karate champion in the late 1980s.
He was known as the Sandman because if you got in the ring with him you were going to sleep. He once held the record for the fastest and most consecutive knockouts in that division of karate. Roger was one of my sensei's growing up and he was known for having a very aggressive style of attack first, attack hard, and keep attacking until your enemy was unable to keep fighting you.
On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather was really into boxing in the military and had dreams of competing after the army but was severely injured in combat in WWII. That didn’t’ stop him from watching every Friday night fight and yell at the TV what they were doing wrong.
Now we have something called mixed martial arts in which wrestling, karate, jujitsu, kickboxing, judo and other martial arts are all combined and can be used by those in the sport.
In MMA you can definitely knock a person out with a punch or kick, but you can also grapple and wrestle. You have to be on guard not to fall victim to something called a rear naked choke. Basically you opponent manages to get behind you, lock their forearm around your neck cutting off the blood flow to your brain until you lose consciousness
Or you tap out saying you surrender before you go to sleep.
Sometimes God allows or send hard times because HE needs to put us in a rear naked choke to get us to tap and surrender to HIS will for our lives.
How does he do this-
He has to put us in or allow situations that are very uncomfortable.
After Jesus in the Garden, the best example of this is a man called Jacob. For years he has been doing things his own way- usually through cheating, lying, and deception. God has big plans for him and his family, but Jacob will not yield to Him.
So God sends his estranged big brother after him- the brother that is more powerful, stronger and a warrior. The brother that was Jacob’s first victim and was cheated out of his inheritance.
And by the way, wants Jacob dead.
Jacob has nowhere to turn to except God. God sends an angel (probably pre-incarnate Jesus in disguise) to wrestle with him. Jacob wrestles for hours, stubbornly not being willing to yield until the morning sun rises, and the angel puts a hip lock on Jacob and forces him to tap out and surrender to God’s will for his life.
Sometimes God needs you to tap out and surrender to HIM
Jesus in all of his venting, all of his struggle, all of His anxiety finally got to the point that these times of darkness are trying to accomplish-
Surrender.
Don’t always run from these times. We can spend our entire lives running from the difficult thing when the difficult thing is being sent by God to accomplish something wonderful in your life.
The Third lesson we learn from Jesus in the Garden is this-
Hold on to the vision or calling you have from God.
Heb 12:2 TLB
2 Keep your eyes on Jesus, our leader and instructor. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterwards, and now he sits in the place of honor by the throne of God.
When I was applying for ordination you have to take a written test and then sit down to a panel interview with the district Superintendent and the presbytery.
The licensing interview had been very trying and almost combative. That's intentional to see if you’ll lose your cool and react negatively. Basically, it's testing to see if you have the temperament for pastoring.
However, the ordination interview was very different. During the ordination interview , Larry Liebe was a district Superintendent, and he only had one question for me-
“Tell me about your calling”
After I finished telling the panel how God had called me, and how He had used me since then, Larry said this-
“I want you to hold on tight to what you just told us. Write it down, look at it once in awhile, because it’s that confession and vision of what God has given you that will help you through the dark times that can and will come as you pastor God’s people.”
It was some of the best ministry advice that I have ever gotten, and believe it or not, mirrors what the offer of Hebrews is saying about what got Jesus through his tough times.
Heb 12:2 TLB
2 Keep your eyes on Jesus, our leader and instructor. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterwards; and now he sits in the place of honor by the throne of God.
TLB
The vision of what God would do through Him that would save the world.
In other words, it might be Friday right now for you- darkness, doubt, fear
but Sunday is on the way.
We need to remember that as Christians- it may seem like our entire society is coming apart at the seems,
but Sunday is on the way
It might seems like the enemy is coming in like a flood,
but Sunday is on the way.
It might seem like the lights have gone out, and there is no hope
but Sunday is on the way.
Finally- it might seem like your trials, hardship, sickness, depression, fear, doubt and unbelief is going to overpower you
But my friend- Sunday is on the way for you
You too will someday have an empty tomb as the power of God lifts you from this earth to live eternally with HIM in heaven
And on that day, just like Jesus- your Resurrection will be your victory song.
All rise.
Altar Call
