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Welcome to Gospel and Life. We all know there's a big difference between knowing about God and actually knowing God personally. To know anyone, you have to spend time with them. If you're a Christian, prayer is essential to have a deep relationship with God. You won't be able to know yourself, know God, or grow in your relationship with him without prayer. Join us today as Tim Keller teaches on why prayer is such an essential part of life with Christ.

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Our scripture is From Matthew, chapter 26, verses 36 through 46. Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to them, sit here while I go over there and pray. He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him and. And he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me. Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, my Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me yet not as I will, but as you will. Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. Couldn't you men keep watch with me for one hour? He asked Peter, watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He went away a second time and prayed, my Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done. When he came back, he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy. So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time saying the same thing. Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise. Let us go. Here comes my betrayer. This is the word of the Lord.

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So this fall, we're looking at the subject of prayer. And huge percentages of people around the world say they pray and say they'd like to learn more about how to pray. Of course, Jesus instruction for the human race on prayer is found in the Lord's Prayer. He was asked, how do you pray or teach us to pray? And he gave us the Lord's Prayer. But the Lord's Prayer is of not much help to us if you don't understand what all the phrases mean. Every part of the Lord's Prayer, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, assumes a lot of knowledge about what the Bible teaches about that phrase or about that thing. What does it mean to pray? Thy kingdom come. What does it mean to pray? Hallowed be thy name. Unless you understand huge swaths of biblical teaching, you don't understand how to use the model. But if you would understand what all those phrases mean, then your prayer would be infinitely enabled and empowered. So what we're doing each week is we're taking one phrase from the Lord's Prayer and going to some other place in the Bible, not to Matthew 6 where we actually find the Lord's Prayer, but to some other place in the Bible that it helps us understand that particular phrase. And today we're going to look at what it means to pray. Thy will be done. Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. We have, this is the only place, I mean this phrase is the only phrase that we have, an example from Jesus own life to help us understand what it means to pray. This, this is the one part of the Lord's Prayer that we actually see Jesus praying in his Life. See verse 42, May your will be done. Or in the old King James, Thy will be done. And we're gonna need every bit of help we can to learn how to pray. Thy will be done. Because we're going right into the teeth of our culture. Alan Ehrenholt, a very noted writer, in one of his books he says this, he says, most of us in America believe a few simple propositions. Choice is a good thing and the more we have of it, the happier we'll be. Authority is inherently suspect. No one should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave. Now that's right. He says we in America have certain maxim slogans that we use. We get them out. These are self evident truths. Everybody knows this. And what are they? That the more free we are to decide what is right or wrong for ourselves and have no one else tell us how to live our lives, the happier we'll be. That's the essence of American culture. And Jesus Christ says every time you pray to God, you need to say to him, thy will be done. Which means we're going right into the teeth of our own culture, right into the teeth of everything. Probably you've been taught if you've grown up here. And so what does it mean to understand that? We look at Jesus own prayer, Thy will be done. And we need to see that he prays it in the midst of terrible agony. And what we're going to do is we're going to first reflect on the magnitude of that agony and then the immediacy of that agony and then see how that helps us understand what it means to pray. Thy will be done in a life transforming way. We're going to reflect on the magnitude of the agony and the immediacy of the agony and then apply it to how that helps us pray. Thy will be done in a life transforming way. So first of all, this passage about the garden of Gethsemane and the agony he's in. Let's take a look at it. First of all, I want you to see the magnitude of his agony. What do we mean by that? Well, it says in verse 37, 36 and 37, Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, the garden. And he said to them, sit here while I go over there and pray. And as he was on his way to pray, it says verse 37, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground. Now what's going on here? It's, it's surprising. We're told that as he was beginning to pray, verse 37, he began to be sorrowful. And the word sorrowful means in agony. And the word troubled means to be horrified and shocked. Something came down on him that shocked him. And his description of it from the inside is, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. I feel like I'm gonna die right here. So something began to happen and was just absolutely stunning to him. He began to be in horror. He starts to pray three times. Lord, I don't want to, Father, I don't want to do this now. It's absolutely right. The reason I use the word magnitude to talk about this aspect of his agony is it's perfectly fair to compare Jesus as he's going to his death to many of his followers as they went to their death. Many of you have been in Oxford in England. You know the, the college town there. You know that at the intersection of the big St. Giles street and Beaumont street there is a martyrs memorial. And the memorial is there because of people who were burned at the stake. There were nearby. And two of the people that were burned at the stake were Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. They were being burned to stake for their faith. And Hugh Latimer, as the flames were coming up, Hugh Latimer was heard to say, these are very famous words. He says, be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man. For we shall this day by God's Grace light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out. So there's lots of stories like that of Christians going to death, you know, serving their God cheerfully, not afraid. When death's cold sullen stream shall o'er me roll. We just sang that then. Savior, you know, take me, bear me a ransom soul. Lots and lots of other Christians have died. Better didn't have anything like the horror and the shock and all this. They had much more inner peace and tranquility, and they were much more poised. See, it's true that Jesus prayed three times. Thy will be done. But first he prayed three times. I don't want to do this. Is there any way out of this? I don't want to do this. And so he's talking about this over and over. I don't want to do it. Now, we have to keep in mind that Jesus is not actually surprised at the idea that he's going to die. He's been telling people this for over and over, right? Go back, go into the earlier part of the book of Matthew or Luke or Mark or John. He's always saying, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to. It's not like suddenly he says, oh, my word, I am going to die. Of course, he knew that it was something else that came down on him so amazing, so powerful, that it pushed him into the dust. The Son of God is reeling. What was it? What was it? So here's the question. Why was it that Jesus Christ was nowhere near as poised and peaceful in the face of death as many of his followers? And the answer is, none of his followers have ever faced a death like this. In fact, no human being ever faced a death like this. What was unique about this death? He tells you. The cup. The cup. Let this cup pass from me. Now, in ancient times, the term cup could mean simply a suffering, horrible ordeal. But in many cases, it meant judgment. Do you remember how Socrates died? You know, he was sentenced to death. So how did he die? He drank the cup. He drank the cup of poison, because the cup meant. It was a metaphor for judgment. It was a metaphor for fiery suffering judgment. And of course, that's also what it meant in the Old Testament, because all through the Old Testament, whenever the prophets talked about the cup, they meant God's judicial punishment and wrath on human evil. God's judicial punishment and wrath that human evil deserves. So, for example, in Ezekiel 23, it says, Ezekiel's telling that they have sinned against God. And it says, you shall drink the cup of ruin and desolation and tear your breasts. Isaiah 54. You will drink the cup of his fury and you will stagger. And that's what we see Jesus Christ doing staggering, see kind of tearing at his breasts. What's going on? Because the judicial wrath of God on human evil is beginning to come down on him now. And we'll get to what I mean by beginning. It's beginning to come down on him now, which means he's beginning to experience what he was gonna experience fully on the cross, which was the abandonment, rejection, God withdrawing his presence. Now, the reason why, almost certainly that's what's going on is because you notice in verse 36, it says, sit here while I go over there to pray. Now, as he was going to pray, he would have started praying. As he was going over to pray, he would have started praying, and that's when it hit him. And Bill Lane, who wrote a great commentary on Mark many years ago, tries to. In his commentary on Mark, not Matthew. But the same thing happens in the book of Mark and also in the book of Luke that tells about this. And Bill Lane, in his commentary on Mark, was trying to explain why is it that as Jesus Christ began to pray, horror came down on him. And here's what it says. He says, the dreadful sorrow and anxiety out of which. This is Bill Lane's commentary. The dreadful sorrow and anxiety out of which the prayer for the passing of the cup springs is not an expression of fear before a dark destiny, nor a shrinking from the prospect of physical suffering. It is rather the horror of one who lived wholly for the Father and who came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven open before him. See, Jesus Christ, the only perfect human being, would have known the joy of the Father's presence to a degree that none of us ever have experienced. You know, many people over the years have written accounts of what it's like just to get close into the presence of God and sometimes actually sense his love on our hearts. And there's some tremendous accounts in history. You know, Blaise Pascal, when they die, when he died, they found, sewed into the lining of his coat some experience he had of. For it took two hours just experiencing God's love. One night it totally changed his life. And he wrote it down what the experience was like, and he sewed it into the lining of his coat, the coat he always wore. And yet Jesus Christ would have known that kind of joy every time he prayed, that kind of joy that Kind of presence, that kind of love at degrees that we would not have known. And now guess what's happening. Why the horror? Why does he feel like I'm about to die? Why is he far, far, far in more, far more agony than any person who, any of his followers. Because God was withdrawing from them. Latimer and Ridley and people like that. They were dying with a sense of his presence. But Jesus Christ sensed God's absence and he was beginning to get a foretaste that was going to come down on him on the cross, which is essentially the experience of hell. Essentially experience of eternal and cosmic abandonment. We were built for the presence of God and Jesus Christ even more because he's the second person of the Trinity. And as he began to experience that being pulled away from him, he went into absolute agony. He was beginning to taste the wrath of God. He was beginning to taste it. That's the magnitude of his agony. That's why he is in such agony. Now, before moving on, let me just say something real quick, real quick. Do you believe in the wrath of God or are you a typical New Yorker who says, well, I don't like to talk about the wrath of God and hell and oh my goodness, I believe in a loving God. Now I want you to know, when I was a young man and I was more prone to irritation, one time after a service here at Redeemer, a woman came up to me and said that. She says, you know, I love a lot of what you say, but I tell you, I believe in a loving God, not a God who sends people to hell. And because I was in a more irritable mood, I talked to her. I said, you know, you really very seldom should you say to people in private what you can say rather winsomely to a big audience like this. The very same thing when you're standing in front of somebody in private is really probably at least ill mannered. And I said, well, let me ask you this. You have a God of love that doesn't send, doesn't get angry at people. What did it cost your God to love you? And she said, well, it didn't cost my God anything. I said, well, then that's not love, that's sentiment. The more you understand the wrath of God, the more you understand the love of God. Because the love of God according to the Bible was that he came and took that wrath himself. See, the deeper the grasp, your grasp of God's wrath on sin, the more wondrous is the cost that he bore in order to forgive us. And Save us. And therefore the more wondrous is love, the more angry a God at sin you've got, the more loving a God and gracious a God you have as you stand at the foot of the cross. And so here's the magnitude of Jesus agony. He's beginning to experience the wrath of God. Now the second thing I'd like to talk about before we get to prayer is I also want you to notice the immediacy of, of Jesus agony. Now many, many, many commentators and theologians over the years have brought out what I've already brought out, and that is that Jesus Christ died with far less inner peace than his followers. Why? Because he was taking the cup, he was sort of smelling the cup, maybe he was even getting the first taste of it. And it was just, it was just, he was staggered, it just knocked him into the ground. Luke says that as he was praying, blood came out of his pores, which is the mark of someone in chalk. And so that's the magnitude. But what about the question of the immediacy? Immediacy means why is God letting Jesus Christ experience this now? Why not wait for the cross? Now the only person I know who's really theologian of the past who addressed this was Jonathan Edwards, the great 18th century American philosopher and minister. And years ago I read a book, I read a sermon by him on this text, actually on Luke, the Lukean version of this text on Garden of Gethsemane, and it's called Christ's Agony. And I've never forgotten that sermon. In fact, every time I've ever preached on this subject, you're going to hear echoes of what Edward said. And Edward says, why was it that Jesus Christ experiences, gets a foretaste of this terrible thing now, why now? And the answer is, according to Edwards, the disciples are asleep. The guards aren't even here yet. You know, the Roman soldiers aren't here yet. He's completely alone, he's in the dark. Says, when you're on the cross and you're nailed and then the wrath of God comes down on you, well, there's nothing you can do about it, right? Say, oh my goodness, it's much worse than I thought. See, the Son of God in his human nature had never experienced anything like this. And that's why he's ugly, utterly shocked. And that's what throws him onto the ground. But if he had only experienced that on the cross, it would be too late for him to do anything about it. But you see everything, he is free to leave. The disciples are asleep. He could just slip away. The guards aren't there. This is God's way of making sure that what Jesus Christ does is absolutely voluntary, is absolutely his own action, is an absolute act of love, not an act of compulsion.