OPEN: A minister noticed a young boy kneeling off to the side of the room after youth group and praying very fervently. As the preacher came within earshot of the boy, he was surprised to hear the boy saying: "Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo."
After the boy finished his praying the preacher approached him and said, "Son, I was very pleased to see you praying so devoutly, but I couldn’t help but overhear you saying something like ’Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo.’ What was that all about?"
The boy replied, "Well, I just finished taking my geography test in school, and I have been praying as hard as I can that God would make Tokyo the Capital of France."
APPLY: How many of you think that boy’s prayers will change the Capital of France to Tokyo?
Not going to happen is it?
Now I’m going to say something next that I find very uncomfortable, and so I want to say something before I get into the body of the sermon itself. I want to make it very clear that I’m a strong believer in prayer. I believe that prayer is one of the most powerful tools we have and that prayer can give us the power to change the circumstances of our lives.
I BELIEVE THAT.
I’VE SEEN THAT
And I KNOW THAT IT’S TRUE.
But I also know, there are going to be times when prayer will NOT change what’s going to happen. I mean, God can do whatever He wants to do, and He can change whatever He desires to change. But let’s face it, unless God really has a good reason to do otherwise: Tokyo will always be the capital of Japan… not France.
And so when I was pondering this text for the sermon this week, and I observed this prayer by Jesus that wasn’t going to be answered by the Father, I found myself asking the following three questions
1. What happens when God doesn’t answer my prayers the way I want them answered?
2. What do I do when God says no?
3. What good does it do for me to pray if I’m pretty sure those prayers may not change my circumstances all that much?
I. Here (in Luke 22) we have Jesus praying for God to take a “cup” from Him?
What does that mean? What is this cup?
I always thought I knew the answer to that question. But as I was looking at other sermons on the passage, I encountered a preacher that did a better job researching this topic than I’d ever thought to do. This man had looked back into the Old Testament and found that this image of the cup was not a new idea at all.
Isaiah 51:17 says “Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath, you who have drained to its dregs the goblet that makes men stagger.”
Jeremiah 25:15-16 says much the same thing: when it declares
“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it…’"
The “cup” Jesus asked be spared of was the cup… of God’s wrath
The reason Jesus came to earth…
The reason He took on the form of a man…
The reason He had preached and taught and healed the crowds for 3 years…
Was to come to this very point of His existence.
Jesus came to die for us.
He came to be our substitute.
He came to pay the price for our sins.
(pause…)
Jesus came to drink the cup of God’s wrath so we would not have to taste it for ourselves
That’s why He was born
That’s why He came
And That’s why He died on the cross
And now, just hours before the deed is about to be done, Jesus prays "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me..." Luke 22:42a
The Gospel of Matthew also tells us about this Garden prayer, but Matthew goes into greater detail, telling us that Jesus didn’t just pray this prayer once… He prayed 3 separate times saying pretty much the same thing every time: “Father, take this cup from me.”
(pause…)
Did Jesus think His prayer would change His destiny?
Did Jesus believe that there was some other way to get the job done?
I don’t think so…
So why pray the prayer?
If Jesus knew the Father was going to deny His request
If Jesus knew the Father was going to tell Him NO
If Jesus knew His prayer wasn’t going change His destiny on the cross
Why pray the prayer???
(pause…)
Because prayer isn’t ALWAYS about changing our circumstances and fixing our problems. Sometimes prayer is about laying hold of God…
o Laying hold of His strength
o Laying hold of His comfort
o Laying hold of His Will in our lives
II. Too often people see prayer as if it were a magic incantation
If say the right words, in the right way, at the right time – Abracadabra, presto chango, everything becomes better.
ILLUS: A couple of years ago, Isaac Bruce, a receiver for the St. Louis Rams, was talking to Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly about his game-winning catch in Super Bowl XXXIV. Speaking about that catch, Bruce said "That was all God. I knew I had to make an adjustment on the ball, and God did the rest."
Something about that answer troubled Reilly and he went on to ask Bruce about a recent car accident he’d had. Bruce’s vehicle had flipped several times, but he walked away unscathed because, as he claimed, he invoked Jesus’ name during the tumble.
Reilly then asked Bruce if another professed Christian - golfer Payne Stewart - would have survived his plane crash had he done the same thing.
Bruce replied, "Oh, definitely."
Reilly then asked him about another professed Christian athlete, Kansas City linebacker Derrick Thomas, who would (soon after) die from injuries sustained in a wreck, and about the Columbine High student who was shot after affirming her belief in God to the person who kill her.
Like a prosecuting attorney, Reilly probed and questioned until he had exposed the shallowness of Bruce’s understanding of prayer. A commentator at the American Family Association web site observed:
”… for Bruce to assume that yelling "Jesus!" was a surefire way for everyone to avoid tragedy was simply bad theology…. Athletes, like many infant Christians, believe God to be a cosmic convenience store where all the good things in life are readily available.”
Rick Reilly repeatedly faced Isaac Bruce with the obvious foolishness of the theology of viewing prayer as if it were a magic talisman… an incantation that would ward off evil.
III. So why pray?
If I can’t always get what I want when I pray
If I can’t always avoid danger or pain or sorrow or death
Why pray?
Well, the easiest answer is that sometimes prayer indeed does change our circumstances.
I’ve seen times when prayer has brought healing
I’ve seen times when prayer has brought people back from the brink of death
I’ve seen times when prayer has defied the belief that NOTHING will change
BUT I’ve also seen – and I’ve experienced – times when prayer has a different kind of purpose. A purpose that stands strong in the face of circumstances that MAY NOT change.
This “purpose” of prayer is best summed up by the following poem I once read
“Sometimes God stills the storms of the sea
At other times, He stills the storms within me.”
That night in the Garden, Jesus felt a need for that kind of calmness.
One commentator observed that WHEN Luke 22:41 said Jesus “withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed” the Greek word for “withdrew” was in the “passive voice”. It literally says that He “was withdrawn”.
It was as if Jesus were drawn… physically pulled down on his knees to pray
He HAD to talk to His Father.
He HAD to share the anxiety of what was being laid upon Him.
Luke 22:44 tells us Jesus was “in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.”
ILLUS: One wise preacher observed:
“Where was it that Jesus’ sweat was like great drops of blood?
It wasn’t in Pilate’s hall.
And it wasn’t on his way to Golgotha.
It was in the Garden of Gethsemane.
There He "offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death" (Heb. 5:7).
If we had witnessed His struggle that night, we might have said, "If He is so broken up when all He is doing is praying, what will He do when He faces real crisis? Why can’t He approach this ordeal with the calmness and confidence of His 3 sleeping friends?"
And yet when the time for the test finally came, Jesus walked to the cross with the courage, and His 3 friends fell apart and ran away.”
What made the difference?
It was that time of prayer.
It was that time of prayer that gave Jesus His strength
It was that time of prayer that gave Jesus His courage…
It was that time of prayer that gave Jesus His power to face the pain, the humiliation and the horrors of the cross.
That’s the kind of prayer that we need to learn how to pray. It’s a type of prayer that can give us ability to face the hard tests of life.
And there were two key elements to that prayer that can help our prayers give us the strength and courage we need in the difficult times of our lives.
The first is element of Jesus prayer was His honesty.
When Jesus prayed in the Garden He was brutally honest. There were no religious platitudes, no sugar coating what He knew was about to occur.
Jesus prayed: "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me..." Luke 22:42
He knew what was about to happen
He knew what had to be done
But He still prayed three separate times essentially saying: “I don’t know if I really want to do this.”
There are people who believe that somehow they’ll offend God by being too honest with Him, by telling Him their fears and their disappointments. They’re afraid to be open with God about their questions and fears. I mean, life has already turned against them. The last thing they need is for God to turn His back on them.
ILLUS: A few years ago, The Washington Times carried the following article:
“When doctors removed the ulcer next to Bob Sorge’s vocal chord they permanently damaged his throat, leaving him with a remnant of a voice that hurts if he tries to ‘whisper’ more than an hour a day. A terrible tragedy for anyone, but the suffering was multiplied for Sorge. Because Bob Sorge is a preacher... How can a preacher preach without a voice? For years that followed, Sorge learned first hand about suffering. And how did he deal with that suffering?
Sorge explained ‘A lot of Christians will say, ’Don’t ask why.’ I am not in that camp. I am strong in asking why. Jesus asked why. King David asked why. The psalmists asked why. The Bible is full of people who had questions.’”
Oddly enough, Bob Sorge found his comfort from God by being honest with God. He realized that he couldn’t really deal with his problem by simply ignoring it.
Honesty in prayer is like a release valve.
Therapists understand the need for this, so they’ll often spend time in sessions with troubled patients trying to get them to be honest about their feelings and emotions.
ILLUS: I once had a friend, a preacher in another community, who was going through some rough times in several areas of his life. One day he went out into an isolated field… looked up into the sky, and he said (yell it) “GOD!!!!”
His was a pent up emotion and he knew that only God was big enough to bear the pain he was feeling. But my friend was wise enough to understand that simply being honest with God was not enough. Honestly by itself could be dangerous.
Honesty – by itself - can destroy the power that we really want to have in prayer. Why? Because honesty, left to itself, used all by itself, can become an expression of hidden bitterness and anger.
In order to be useful as a prayer tool that give us God’s strength this honesty must be coupled with the second half of Jesus’ prayer: "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; YET NOT MY WILL, BUT YOURS BE DONE." Luke 22:42
In that article in The Washington Times Bob Sorge said this:
"’Why?’ is a statement of faith not an expression of doubt. It presupposes that God exists, and that He loves us and is in control of our destiny.
"God is to be wrestled with." Sorge continues. "He has unfolded His purpose to me. He’s transformed the way I think, feel, everything about me. The crucible of suffering causes you to be desperate for God and to press into Him."
Jesus’ prayer was a prayer that “PRESSED INTO” the Father. His prayer had power to give Him strength because it hinged on accepting the Father’s Will.
The prayer that can transform our times of weakness into times of strength are the ones that are less concerned with moving God to our will…as they are in moving us toward God.
ILLUS: Billy Graham once wrote: “I watched the deck hands on the great liner United States as they docked that ship in New York Harbor. First they threw out a rope to the men on the dock Then, inside the boat the great motors went to work and pulled on the great cable. But, oddly enough, the pier wasn’t pulled out to the ship; but the ship was pulled snugly up to the pier. Prayer is the rope that pulls God and us together. But it doesn’t pull God down to us; it pulls us to God. We must learn to say with Christ, the master of the art of praying: ‘Not my will; but Thine be done.’”
CLOSE: We need to realize that Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane was not a prayer of hopelessness and defeat. It was a prayer of surrender to His Father’s Will. And in that surrender, Jesus found the strength to overcome.
It was when Jesus prayed that prayer that the Father reached down and comforted Him. Luke 22:43 tells us: “An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him.”
It’s that kind of supernatural strength from God that I want in my life. But first we must be willing to pray the way Jesus did.
ILLUS: A Sunday school teacher once asked her group of children if any of them could quote the ENTIRE 23rd Psalm. A little four-and-a-half-year-old girl raised her hand. But the teacher was a bit skeptical that this child could really quote the entire psalm. But she told her to go ahead and try: The little girl hesitated a moment and then said:
"The Lord is my shepherd, that’s all I want.
