“And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly…”
Luke 22:44
I grew up in a small, older house on a hill that had one unusual but useful feature: a sundeck. When things got especially stressful inside the house, which they often did, and I wanted to run away, I’d walk outside and up the stairs to my solitary place on the roof. There I sat alone and quiet, as far away from my troubles and the world as I could get, looking out over the valley below.
As I grew older and was able to get away from the house, without really realizing it, I carried my sundeck inside me. And when life got rough, which it often did, I’d run away by crawling inside myself, alone and quiet.
Even after Christ came into my heart, there have still been times when circumstances were so overwhelmingly painful that I did what I always did – withdrew inside myself, running away from the world, even from God.
There I’d sit, alone and quiet, where thoughts and anxiety replaced words.
But words are sometimes necessary for prayer. And without prayer I’d effectively shut God out of my circumstances, out of my pain, and out of my answers.
There can be no more painful trial than what Christ faced in the garden as He prayed about the speeding train that was coming straight for Him – arrest, rejection, torture, and death. Death on a cross.
A death that would cause Him, a perfect man who had never known the guilt and shame of sin, to feel more than an agonizing death, but the weight of every sin that had ever or would ever be committed.
If there were ever a darkness to descend on someone that could cause anxiety and a loss for words, this was it.
“And being in anguish…”
This was not just anxiety or worry. The Greek word for anguish is agonia, meaning agony, and it comes from another word agone, which is “a place of assembly (as if led), that is, a contest (held there); an effort or anxiety – conflict, contention, fight, race.”
Christ had withdrawn to the garden as He faced the darkest, bleakest time of His life, but not to shut out the world, to run to His Father. To pray, and not just any prayer. This was a fight.
He agonized with the conflict in His own humanity, asking His Father if it was His will that He would remove the suffering, and He fought against the enemy.
But the harder the prospect of deep suffering pressed in to Him and the anguish weighed on Him, the harder He pressed into the Father.
He prayed more earnestly.
The more He struggled the more intently and more fervently He prayed, so much that He sweat drops of blood falling to the ground.
By the time He left the garden of olive trees, He was strengthened in His Spirit, one with the Father, and resolute in His purpose. He was ready.
Because He turned to His Father, He went through the suffering and was victorious in accomplishing His will, for the joy set before Him…
Sometimes in our anguish we are tempted to turn to other things.
This world offers a million things and people and ways to get through our times of suffering.
But only one way will bring us through suffering even more strengthened, more courageous, and in the end victorious, and that is by pressing into God through prayer.
Sometimes all we have in prayer are groans, but even then the Holy Spirit knows our hearts and our minds and is able to interpret those groans and intercede to the Father on our behalf. He knows what we need even when we do not. All we need to do is show up.
Christ found victory in the garden through prayer before He ever saw the cross, and we’ll find victory, too, if we’ll show up in our garden, our sundeck, our closet, wherever we seek the Lord and His will and provision, and pray. Don’t mull, don’t pout, don’t feel sorry for ourselves, and don’t try to figure it out on our own.
Pray. With whatever faith we have, enter into the throne room of God by the blood of Christ and pray the boldest prayers we know how.
Prayer is the avenue that gives us His strength to keep believing in the darkest trials, to line up our will with God’s, to fill us with His peace, and to give us a vision of the joy set before us…
Christ showed us the way in the garden. And because He was victorious, in death and in life, so are we. His joy was to bring reconciliation and relationship between the Lord and us. His joy was to know us now and forever.
And our joy, if we’ll seek Him even in our darkest times, especially in our darkest times, is to be more than conquerors. To conquer our sins and our fears on the backs of those trials, and through it all to know Christ, our Redeemer, our Savior, our Friend, now and forever.
“Are your ears awake? Listen. Listen to the Wind Words, the Spirit blowing through the churches. I’m about to call each conqueror to dinner. I’m spreading a banquet of Tree-of-Life fruit, a supper plucked from God’s orchard.”
Revelation 2:7 The Message
