Rise and Pray

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family. 

It’s just so cool to see this. I don’t see this very much first. Just like people getting together. This is awesome. I love that. I love that. Really quick, before we get started, Mike.

It feels really loud. You all okay? Good. My name is Spencer Sipe. I’m currently working for RUF as an administrative fellow there. I’m in full-time seminary.

So I’m really thankful that Mike, who I’ve known for a long, long time, has given me a chance to come and preach and just get some reps in. So bear with me. I hope I don’t say anything heretical.

And if I do, you can come tell me. It’s okay. I can take it. Promise.

It’ll be fine. We are going to be in Luke, chapter 22, verses 39 to 53. I’m going to read this for us, and then I’ll pray, and then we’ll jump in. This is the Word of the Lord. And He came out and went, as was His custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed Him. And when He came to the place He said to them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw and knelt down and prayed, Saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.

Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. And there appeared to Him an angel from heaven strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when He rose from prayer, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow.

And He said to them, Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation. And while He was still speaking, there came a crowd, and the man called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. And He drew near to Jesus to kiss Him. But Jesus said to Him, Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss? And when those who were around Him saw what would follow, they said, Lord, shall we strike with the sword? And one of them struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, No more of this. And He touched his ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests and the officers of the temple and elders who had come out against Him, have you come out against a robber with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour and the power of darkness.

Let’s pray. Lord, this is a passage that feels heavy and weighty knowing that you are reaching the end of your time on earth before you would be captured and taken. Lord, it’s difficult. But we know, Lord, that this is through your redemptive plan that these things work out. So would you be with us today as we read this to understand it, comprehend it, and to have a love and appreciation for your word? Praise things in your name.

Amen. When Mike asked me to preach, I was really excited about the opportunity of preaching. And then he told me that this was the passage I’d be preaching on. And I was like, man, that is a lot of stuff to get through in just 14 verses. So bear with me.

There’s a lot that’s here that’s really, really important and really exciting. But to give some survey of where you’ve been, Jesus has administered the Lord’s supper earlier in this chapter. He’s spoken with Peter about his future denial. He’s spoken that there’s somebody who’s going to betray him. And now it’s happening. Here comes the moment where this is leading up to this very scene.

And so Jesus is now going up to the Mount of Olives to take time to pray before his arrest. And it’s intense from this point on. It’s pretty intense. We see him going off to pray to have the Father’s cup to be passed off from him to sweating blood from his intense grief to the disciples failing Jesus by sleeping while he’s off praying. The one thing he asked them not to do. And then he’s betrayed. And then one of the disciples gets sword happy, which is really crazy, and cuts the high priest’s servant’s ear off. And he heals it. And then Jesus accepts his fate of being captured.

It’s a lot that happens in 14 verses. And it feels pretty absurd. It’s a little bit like if you’ve seen everything everywhere all at once, that’s kind of how this feels right now.

Each element moves so fast. And Jesus’ betrayal comes really abruptly. And all the while, Jesus is patient. He grieves really deeply, but he is patient. He prays and he forgives and he heals all the way to the end, which is his character.

It’s his nature. So we’re going to look at this passage in three points. First is our misunderstood and misaligned will. Second is our prideful overcompensation for our misaligned will. And lastly, so what do we do with it?

What’s the point? So first, our misunderstood will. Let’s go back to verse 40. And when he came to the place he said to them, Pray that you may not enter temptation. This seems like a pretty simple thing that Jesus asks.

It doesn’t seem particularly difficult or super heady. And you’re not just pray that you may not enter temptation. And he’s going off to do the same thing. Jesus isn’t just saying this to them and then he’s just going to go take a break. He’s doing the same thing.

And he’s not just doing that. He’s praying to the Father, not my will, but yours be done. This is the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. And here comes Jesus. He’s coming back down. He’s done praying this.

He comes back and here are the disciples after he’s just been grieving so heavily and they’re asleep. There’s this human temptation. And I’m not sure if any of you know what this is like, but when we’re told to do something, we really like to do the exact opposite of that thing almost immediately and even more so if it seems like an authority figure we really know well.

So we see this a lot in everyone, but especially in children. We tell them not to do something that might be difficult or dangerous or whatever it is to them. They like to look at you and just stick their hand out. They just want to go do it anyway.

They’re just watching you wait and see your reaction. That’s kind of how this feels from the disciples. It’s kind of just been built into our nature since we’ve been born to be sinful, to go the opposite direction of anything we’ve been told. We’re constantly bent towards doing the opposite of what our authority commands us to do.

And it’s not new. We like to do this all the time. The narrative of choosing to do what we want to do. It’s the narrative behind every athlete you see today, whatever school they decide to do. They have the decision day and they put the hat on and they’re making their choices. The music we listen to, the media we consume, everything praises your own path being made.

Whatever decision seems like what is best for you, do it. Even Fleetwood Mac, the well-known song, you can go your own way. It has been around since 1976 and it’s been around a lot longer before than two. It’s all the same. We all think we know better. And what I think is more shocking here is the disciples who were walking with Jesus through his ministry, who witnessed his miracles, who saw the way he performed, the way he did everything. They heard so much about the ways that he loved and cared for people and the things that he was asking them to do. They’re still willing to be stubborn and they’re in proximity to him.

It doesn’t matter that he’s there. They’ll still do the exact opposite thing. But this brings up another question. When Jesus says, he says, pray that you may not fall into temptation. Why is it so hard to pray? What is it about this command that seems so difficult? Because prayer seems to have this tendency to make us feel out of control.

To be required to do so means that you’re having to admit that you are needy. When Jesus asks the disciples to pray, the disciples end up succumbing to their own desires because they didn’t do that exact thing. It should have been very simple. And yet, because they couldn’t do the simple thing that they needed, they end up doing the opposite of what Jesus says. They needed to continue to be vigilant in their efforts to pray, which is, let me say something briefly, I’m not saying that your faith is tied to constant prayer. We hear lots of commands throughout Scripture that we should pray without ceasing.

And that feels really impossible at times. But prayer is not the proof of whether or not you’re a Christian. I’m not saying that you have to be doing this constantly to be able to make sure you live up.

That’s not what I’m saying. But I am regularly reminded of a quote from a pastor and an author named Michael Reeves. And he has a book that’s called, Enjoy Your Prayer Life. If you haven’t read it, it’s about that big. It seems like 20 pages. You’ll read it in like 20 minutes.

Great book. But he restates John Calvin, one of the church reformers in the 17th century, saying that the chief exercise of faith is prayer. And then Reeves would go on to say that prayerlessness then is practical atheism, which feels really heavy. Like that makes me kind of like, I don’t like that. I don’t like that feeling.

That’s really not, I don’t like that. But the point of him saying that is that Jesus is not asking much of the disciples. What he’s doing is he’s reminding us to have to acknowledge our neediness.

If we don’t acknowledge that we’re needy, that means that we’re not praying, which means that we don’t need anyone else. You’re good. I’ve got it. We have to be told over and over again to pray because we’ll be prone to forget it all the time. And our sinful nature does a great job of keeping us from seeing our need for it. And not only that, it also wants us to make up for our mistakes and wants us to overcompensate, which brings us to our second point.

Our prideful overcompensation. When Jesus and the disciples are back from the Mount of Olives after they’ve just been corrected by Jesus for their lack of prayer, here come the chief priests and their whole crew to arrest Jesus. The super elites, the chief priests against the outcasts, the disciples and Jesus. The powerhouse team versus the underdog.

We’ve seen this a million times. And as they approach, the disciples are ready to fight. They’re ready to go. They realize after Judas is betrayal that they’re completely surrounded and they’ve got nowhere else to go. So you’ve got to admit, if you’re in their shoes, imagine you’ve got all these people that suddenly surround you and you’re like, what’s going on?

I don’t understand this. You’re probably going to be pretty frightened and freaked out too. You’re outmatched in the person that you’ve been following as being arrested. The guy that you’re like, he’s been teaching so many things and I’ve watched him do all this and you’re going to take him away. What’s happening?

Why is this happening? And why would Judas, of all people, why? So of course our desire is to protect what we have to the bitter end. And the question though isn’t, it’s understandable. The things that you value and love we want to protect. It’s how far are you willing to go for it?

What damage will it make along the way? Because when the disciples are in fear, their first instinct is their response in verse 49, which is, Lord, shall we strike with the sword? To make a note here, in the Gospel of John, it’s made clear that the servant that strikes the ear is Peter, right? And Peter has a tendency, we’ve seen him throughout Scripture, that he has a tendency to be really impulsive.

Just does things kind of haphazardly, which gets him into trouble a lot. And I kind of imagine this moment as if Peter’s actually already just like halfway drawing the sword as they’re saying it, right? Like they’re about to say, should we get him? And he’s like, no, I’m already ready.

I’m good, we got him. And yet again, here we are with the disciples doing something else they weren’t supposed to do. After being told, they’ve seen it. They know. They’ve just been told you haven’t been praying, you’re sleeping, that’s not good. I’m about to get captured.

Now you’re literally attacking people. What is going on? The disciples have not only had a misaligned will and independent attitude about what they feel like is best for them. Now, Peter is executing what he believes to be a proper defense of Jesus, which is through violence.

We try to overcompensate for when we make mistakes and errors. When Jesus has just corrected Peter, Peter’s like, well, I’m thinking he’s probably like, man, I feel bad that I did that. I need to make sure that he knows that I’m a faithful follower. I’m faithful. Except for the fact that Peter’s attack on the servant has no similarity to anything Jesus has done throughout his ministry.

Jesus was never violent, but Peter really thought this was a justified act. If we’re going down, I’m going down swinging. I’m going to do it. We really do this. We really do this. We will fight tooth and nail for the things that we love and value to a harmful point. We might not be swinging swords. It might not be the same way, but we choose methods of being hurtful to others all the time. Whether that’s by speaking slander or deceit against the people that we love and we know or the people we don’t, we don’t love, the people we would prefer not to and run from by choosing to neglect or ignore those people that are nearest.

By doing so, we diminish those people to being less than being made in the image of God, the dignity of being an image bearer. We would rather do that. We love to defend what we’ve got. So much so that it will leave damage everywhere we go because we’re sinners.

That’s what we do. What’s really amazing is that Jesus’ response with being surrounded by these guys that are arresting him, is it to make a scene or approach his enemies with a sense of fear? Instead, he restores people. Even with the servant of the chief priest, he goes over to him and he heals his ear. Like you understand, Peter just committed assault. He is going to jail for attacking the chief priest’s servant. And Jesus is like, I’m going to make sure that that doesn’t happen. I’m actually not going to just going to restore him and heal him.

I’m going to restore your good name to make sure that you don’t have to be punished for this. Even though Peter is really taking the savior mentality, I can do this. I can do it. It’s about me.

I can do it. It’s wrong. Jesus, even to the end, is still showing his love for people and how important it is that they see his healing work and how he restores people. So what? What does it matter?

Either way you try to follow Jesus, it seems like you can’t get it right. We’re a self-interested people. We tend to come to our defense quicker than we care to admit in our mistakes. And we like our methods of living more so than what Jesus commands us to do with our lives. It seems like it’s just a rock and a hard place. There’s nowhere else to go. What am I going to do all the time?

It feels like it’s this weird tension, right? And I think that’s the Christian life. Either way you spin it, it always comes back to the same place which is you’ve got to trust that Jesus knows better than you do. Which means you have to give up the things that you think are better than what you have currently, that Jesus actually has a better way than you do.

We have to pursue Jesus and be dependent and needy on Him. There’s this really incredible and brutally sad movie. I really love sad movies. If you come talk to me, I probably will just tell you all the sad movies that I love and it’s probably not okay.

I think I’m okay, but you might just say it. But the movie follows a father who is trying to help his son who is struggling with a difficult addiction. Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet, so maybe that will pique the interest if you haven’t seen it.

It’s great. The son, played by Timothy Chalamet, has come back to his father over and over and over again asking for help or going to rehab and he can’t seem to shake his addiction. The father, Steve Carell, who is steeped in his grief for his son, he’s reached the point that he decides that he’s going to get himself involved in the same addiction as his son so that he can relate to him, so he can understand him. The son over and over again, time and time again, comes back to his father saying, I don’t want to struggle with this anymore and yet he can’t live without it.

It seems like he just can’t ever shake it. And the father, flip side, is overcompensating. That he feels like he has to fix it all. He can do everything because he’s got his son and his daughter and his wife to also take care of, right?

He wants to do everything he can to get his son healthy, but it’s at the risk of his marriage and the relationship to his daughter as well. He wants to do it all. If I can do it, kind of the Bob the Builder mentality, I can, if, can he fix it? Yeah, he thinks, he really thinks he can.

He really thinks he can. And what’s funny is I think most of the time we want to put ourselves in the position that we are Steve Carell and we are not the son and we are. We’re both. We’re deeply flawed from our inability to make things right and trying so hard to fix everything by our own volition, which is why I think it’s really, really important that we look back to Jesus on the Mount of Olives because the cup that he speaks of, the one that he’s sweating blood over from how intense his grief is, his agony is, is the cup of suffering that you and I deserve. It’s all of the things that we feel like we are failing in that we would rather go and do or how we continue to try to be religious or make up for the stuff that we’ve done to overcompensate.

All of it is in that. It’s our mistakes, our issues, our sinful desires to be right, to think that we know better than God. This cup holds all of the wrath deserved for our sinfulness. And yet here’s Jesus. He’s fulfilling the prophecy of the Old Testament by being the suffering servant. And Jesus doesn’t pray, Lord, make this quick and painless that we can get this over with. He doesn’t say that. He prays the Lord’s prayer, the thing that he taught his disciples to pray. He’s doing the same thing.

Why? Because he’s trying to remind us of the same exact things we’re supposed to do. He’s doing it to demonstrate it for us. That it’s not my will, but yours will be done. For us, it’s having to say over and over again, my kingdom gone, your kingdom come.

Over and over again, we have to say this. Jesus submits to God’s redemptive plan knowing that his crucifixion is coming. He remains faithful even with his betrayal and the failure of the disciples. He’s praying for them, knowing what they do. He’s praying for them, knowing that Peter denies them. He’s praying for him.

He knows it. Jesus doesn’t give up on you. There isn’t another narrative in any other religion of a God who would condescend to his people and die for them. Jesus doesn’t look on us with anger or whole grudges towards us. He looks on us with grace and compassion. Jesus isn’t praying to have the cup passed. He’s praying for you. He knows what’s coming. He knows what’s coming. And his agony is rooted in his deep love for you. And it’s that kind of love that’s a transforming love. We don’t continue down the same misaligned understandings that we have of God and do what we want. It changes us. The apostle Paul talks about this in Romans that we should not sin so that grace may abound. We turn from it and pursue a relationship to the Father because that’s what he really wants.

He wants to eat. Not a strict spirituality or overly disciplined religious life, which is what we like to take Christianity and turn it into. It’s a set of rules. That’s what we follow.

That’s what we do. It’s all about him. He wants to consider what he wants.

A life that is dependent upon the Father and seeks to love others the ways that Jesus did. I’ll close with this. David Dixon has a quote that I think says it best. He says, And both our failures and our attempts to live up or run from the Lord Jesus is praying for those things.

And we’d go on to die for them so we no longer needed to fear if we would live up or not. Because his aligning to the Father’s will isn’t just for his own personal reminder. But it’s a way to teach us again and again what to pray in our times of grief and our failure and our success.

Probably pray for the world. What’s going on around us all the time, the things we tend to ignore. The neighbors that are right next door to you, especially with storms and damage and things that have happened in the last couple of days.

It’s crazy. My wife and I were literally talking to somebody who had their entire front yard flooded in water by feet. You could swim in it up to your front door, destroyed it.

Destroyed it. It makes us understand that we have to pray not just for ourselves but for others. It changes the way that we understand that when we say our kingdom go, it means that we believe that Jesus’ kingdom is better. And it’s better for everyone else around us.

Do you see Jesus as your realignment, a better response in times of hardship and joy, and he’s your mediator in all of those things? That’s the invitation. Let’s pray. Lord, thank you for the Sabbath and time to go to rest and reflect on the ways that you have blessed us, loved us, reminded us over and over again of how desperately we need you. Lord, we take today to be reminded of those things, to have the energy that we need to be able to go into the week to know how to love our neighbor well, to love our friends well, to love our families well, to be self-sacrificial, to love each other in ways that your ministry was carried out, would help us to rest in that today. Pray this things your name. Amen.