Lessons from Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–46) | Hearts Aflame (Part 6)

Transcript

MO 34
PAUL’S PRAYER FOR POWER
MATTHEW 26:36–46
5/17/2026
MICHAEL OTAZU

This evening we’re back in our Hearts Aflame series. We’re working through some of the most profound prayers in Scripture. If this is your first time hearing about this series, don’t worry. It’s probably many people’s first-time hearing about this series because we haven’t had an installation or an installment in this series in quite a while. It’s sort of like one of those series that just comes up every time I get the chance to be up here in the evening pulpit. That’s what we are doing here. So, it’s one of those intermittent sorts of series. We add a new passage and a new prayer into this series every time I get the chance to be up here in the evening service. We’ve gone through five prayers so far in this Hearts Aflame series. Each time we make another installment in this series, we pick a different prayer that’s found in the Bible, and we try to study it as best we can and pull out for ourselves some practical truths about prayer that we can then apply to our own prayer lives.

We started out the series last summer actually with Hannah’s prayer of praise when the Lord granted her a child back in I Samuel 2. We also studied Paul’s prayer for divine help to grow in sanctification in Ephesians 1. Then we studied David’s prayer of confession and repentance after he committed egregious sins, in Psalm 51. Then we traced Moses’ intercessory prayer to the Lord in Exodus 32 which was really fascinating for me in the study. Moses stepped between the sinning Israelites and God and begged God to show mercy to them even though what they deserved was nothing but His wrath. Then we went to Ephesians 3 to see the Apostle Paul pray a prayer for God’s power to be brought down and used to strengthen the saints in Ephesus so they would learn to love each other better and to live in harmony with each other more.

Now tonight, we’ll add another prayer to this list. I’d like us to turn to a prayer that is one that is immensely profound because it gives us a window into Jesus’ mind. It gives us a window into the relationship even between the Son and the Father. An intra-trinitarian window into how that works. It’s sort of mind bending. We had a taste of it when we went through our eyes to heaven series in John 17. It was a completely different context there and a different prayer, but we got a glimpse of it. So tonight I kind of want to double down on that and get into what it looks like for Jesus to pray and pull out some application for us. So, it will be a bit more applicational in that sense. We’re searching for principles that we can take out and put within our own prayer lives.

The passage I want to look at, the prayer I want to look at comes out of Matthew 26, and we’ll start in verse 36, that’s where this passage begins. This is a passage which really helps us see much of how it ought to look when we approach God in our prayers and I think that it’s both going to encourage us and convict us as we work through it. This is the account in the Gospel of Matthew wherein Jesus prays to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night when He was betrayed and arrested. That very night. It’s one of those narrative texts that really show us the humanity of Jesus and the realness of His emotions and sorrow. In this passage, we see the whole spectrum of attitudes about prayer, both from Jesus as well as His Disciples. We see divine strategies for prayer here. We see inner dispositions revealed by prayer. We see the proper response when the answer isn’t what was requested in the prayer. There’s really is a lot to be gained from considering a prayer like this and I’d like to get into it together here and see what we can come up with as we work through it.

So read it with me all the way through. We’ll take the whole thing at once and then we’ll come back, start from the top and I’ll break it up and show you how I want to work through it in outline format. First let’s just read it and soak in this prayer, this scene in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night Jesus was betrayed. Matthew 26:36-46 “Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His Disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be grieved and distressed. Then He said to them, ‘My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.’ And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.’ And He came to the Disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done.’ And again, He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. And He left them again, and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more. Then He came to the Disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. “Get up, let us go; behold, the one who betrays Me is at hand!”

There’s a lot to take out of a passage like this. There’s a lot of places we could focus on. What I’d like to do is to call out and construct for ourselves another list of Jesus’ dispositions toward prayer. Jesus’ exemplifications if you will toward prayer. We’re going to see six points here, Jesus’ Intentionality, His Sorrow, His Supplication, His Devotion, His Submission and ultimately His Obedience. We’re going to pull out each one of those in order as we work through the passage starting in verse 36, under the first heading Jesus’ Intentionality. That’s what we see here at the very beginning. I think that in order to really appreciate the intentionality of Jesus here, we need to really understand what led up to this scene. The prayer which we’re going to study here this evening occurred at the end of what were the longest days of Jesus’ life.

Back up with me, if you would just to the beginning of this chapter, Matthew 26, and we’re going to see the last two days unfold, the last 48 hours take place here in Jesus’ life. Matthew begins chapter 26 with the scene of the chief priests and the elders of the people plotting to kill Jesus. It says “Now it happened that when Jesus had finished all these words, He said to His Disciples, 2 “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, (He’s speaking of the night that we’re going to be looking at here at the end of the chapter) and the Son of Man is to be delivered over for crucifixion. 3 Then the chief priests and the elders of the people were gathered together in the court of the high priest, named Caiaphas; 4 and they plotted together to seize Jesus by stealth and kill Him. 5 But they were saying, “Not during the festival, lest a riot occur among the people.”

What we see here is a strategy to try to take down Jesus. This is a sort of assassination plot and that’s how the last 48 hours began for Jesus. Then in verse 6 and following we see a woman come to Jesus while He’s with His Disciples at Simon the leper’s house and she comes to him with an alabaster jar of very costly perfume and she pours it on Him as He was reclining at the table. Then there’s some objections there about why is this being wasted of course from Judas.

Then Jesus tells them “why are you bothering this woman,” verse 10, “for she has done a good work to Me. For you always have the poor with you; but you do not always have Me.” He’s talking about what’s about to happen in about one and a half days. We’re not quite sure about the exact timeline. It’s talking about what’s about to occur soon. He says 12” For when she poured this perfume on My body, she did it to prepare Me for burial.  Again, pointing His Disciples, reminding the people around Him, that his death is coming. 13 Truly I say to you, wherever this Gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, this woman has done this thing, prepared me for burial, she will also be spoken of in memory.” Then the scene shifts in verse 14 to Judas as he is going and finding those high priests and those elders of the people and he’s inserting himself into their assassination plot or their plot to betray Jesus. To arrest Him and take Him to take Him before the court and to find a way to kill Him. And so Judas of course, you know the story, he agrees to deliver over Jesus to betray Him. They come up with a sign and then the money is exchanged or at least promised here in this context and then the scene shifts to the Passover meal.

It says there in Matthe 26:17, “Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the Disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?”  And Jesus then responds, well I’ve already prepared it in my sovereignty, and they go and they find the place where he has prepared. There is someone waiting with an open upper room ready for the Disciples to come in and to observe the Passover meal together that night. We also see in that context Jesus give to the Disciples the Lord’s Supper. The commands that they remember Jesus’ death by taking the bread and taking the wine. And calling them whenever they drink it and so often as they do so, to remember Jesus’ death, His body, His blood which of course again is coming soon.

So, you’re seeing the trend here. It’s all coming soon. And then at the end of the longest couple of days of His life, He sees the leader of His Disciples argue with Him. Peter tells Jesus I will never deny you and Jesus corrects him and says no, but you will, and you’re going to do it not far off from now. In fact, He says that when the rooster crows, I say to you verse 34, I say to you that this very night, before a rooster crows, you will deny Me three times. So, it’s becoming more and more imminent. The pressure is mounting. Jesus is constantly thinking about what is coming. What’s about to hit Him.

That’s the context in which we parachute into, verse 36. It’s after all this has occurred, after they’ve walked a long distance, after they’ve been to Simon the leper’s house and that whole ordeal about the woman with the costly perfume, and after Judas has snuck off to go and plan his betrayal of Christ with the chief priest, and after they’ve located, prepared even a large Passover meal full with the institution of the Lord’s Supper. Some really awkward supper time conversations about betrayal and denial.

And after all of that, what do you think they did next? What was Jesus’ next move? If it were just any other night, He probably would have found a place in the corner of that house that they just eaten the Passover meal at and probably made Himself as comfortable as could be and try to give rest to His weary body.

That’s what we would be expecting as we read this narrative in Matthew 26. Jesus, in His humanity, was undoubtedly tired. He was undoubtedly exhausted and in need of some rest for His body.

But here in Matthew 26:36, we see that Jesus does again what He so often did during His ministry over the previous three years. He makes a point of denying His bodily urge to rest and He removes Himself from the busyness of His environment and He finds a secluded place to meet with His Father in concentrated prayer.

It says here in verse 36, Then (An indicator of time and chronology) “Then after the fullness of the day’s events, Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His Disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He takes His Disciples and He takes them away from the house where they had just observed the Passover and where they were probably expecting to get some sleep that night, and He finds a place of quiet and privacy. And this garden, this place called Gethsemane was probably a friend’s property, where in Jesus had permission to go and seclude Himself and to pray with His Father. This was probably a practice that He did quite often and so it wouldn’t have totally been out of the ordinary for the Disciples to experience this night but man, were they tired. And they would have expected Jesus to be tired as well and yet He says, round up the boys, we’re going to Gethsemane. I have business to do with my Father. He takes these men out to this grove of olive trees, and He tells them to sit down at the gate and wait for Him while He goes in and prays. Some commentators think that He left the Disciples at the gate of the garden in order to guard against anything that might distract Him in His prayers. That might be true, but we can’t know for sure. What we DO know is that He left a number of them there and took only Peter, James, and John into the trees with Him.

Matthew 26:37, “And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be grieved and distressed. Then He said to them, My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.” So, He walks off into the darkness of the olive trees, finds a place for just Himself at this point now to truly focus without concern for others seeing Him and questioning Him or even distracting Him from what He meant to do. And that was to pray. To commune with His Father in intimate conversation, intimate prayer. To communicate directly with the God of the Universe who holds the ultimate authority over all that occurs in His creation and with His creatures. Now of course Jesus isn’t one of those creatures. We know that Jesus has always existed, uncreated and fully God Himself. But in a very real way, Jesus is experiencing the sharp end of God’s sovereign plan for His creation in this moment. Here, in this context with this burden upon His shoulders, that He has been foreshadowing for the last 48 hours, we see Jesus, the Son of God, who is God Himself, prioritize the practice of prayer.

He shows us here that prayer is needed. It’s an essential element of living. It’s as vital to the soul as breathing is to the body. The great reformer Martin Luther, has been quoted often as applying this truth to church-age Believers, saying, “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.” The American puritan, Jonathan Edwards, echoed Luther a few centuries later, “Prayer is as natural an expression of faith as breathing is of life.” But really, both of those men were just mere echoes of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Believers in Thessalonica when he exhorted them to pray without ceasing. And so herein lies a nugget of application for our hearts this evening. We should pray. So obvious, I know, but so needed so often. We should pray. We should do it because we must do it. We ought to pray because we realize that it’s such an integral part of our daily functioning that we can’t help but pray. We should pray because we know of no other way to spiritually process the pressures under which we find ourselves.

Flip over with me, if you would, to Philippians. I want us to see Paul’s exhortation to the Believers in Philippi on the topic of prayer. This is the passage that I read not long ago as our Scripture reading to get us focused on this topic. It’s a passage that we’ll turn to again, at least I’ll quote it again in the sermon. It’s so foundational to the way we think about the role of prayer, even the context of pressures around us in this world. Philippians 4:6,7, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” You see anxiety is a tough subject. This is a subject that is difficult to explain with clarity because it’s not really a Biblical word. It’s more of a modern word that we’ve superimposed back onto the text. The Greek word here for anxiety or anxiousness or anxious is merimnao. If you happen to listen to Sound Words podcast and Pastor Jesse, Pastor Aaron and I just recently this past week just released an episode where we really dissect this whole topic of anxiety and we think through whether or not it can be sinful in certain contexts and whether or not it can be righteous in other contexts. News flash, there’s such a thing as righteous anxiety. Paul has anxiety for the churches. It’s the same word when he says I have concern, daily concern for the churches. That’s the same word merimnao. We don’t say anxiety. Somehow, we’ve labeled this sinfulness to the word anxiety, but rather what it is, is just pressure. It’s just external pressure that comes onto us in certain situations. I can’t from up here diagnosis whether or not your merimnao, your anxiety, your pressure, your concern is sinful or not. What I can say is that the antidote to sinful anxiety is prayer. The antidote to sinful anxiety is prayer.

That’s what Paul says right here. He says be anxious for nothing, but in everything, how do you be anxious for nothing? Well in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving let your requests be made know to God. And then what happens if you commit yourself to this prayerfulness? Well, the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. That is what Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane was trying to get to. That’s where Jesus was headed. He felt the pressure. He knew what was about to occur to Him. Of course He’s omniscient. He knows He’s about to be betrayed. He knows that he’s about to be experiencing extreme pain. And that pressure wore on Him. He is a human after all. Obviously, Philippians wasn’t written yet but the truth existed. So, he goes to the Father. He’s seeking to be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let His requests be made know to the Father. He wanted the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension.

Back to Matthew 26. Look again at how Matthew opens up this passage here in verse 36. He says, “Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His Disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.” Prayer takes intentionality. That should be natural to us because it’s the lifeblood of the Believer, like we just talked about. It is the week-by-week, day-by-day, moment-by-moment rhythm of a child of God. We pray because we love our Father and because we’re burdened with the pressures in this life. We pray because we MUST. That’s what Jesus is modeling for us here as we trace His steps on that dark night in Gethsemane. Jesus exemplified an intentionality in prayer that can only point us to the reality that we too must pray with premeditation and deliberateness. Jesus breaks off from the main group at the Passover meal. He finds a quiet place. He does it so that He can process what He’s going through personally with His Father in heaven. This is a Man Who knows the value of prayer. And He knows that intentionality is required in its practice. I think the implications here are just somewhat obvious for us today, right? I don’t have to work too hard to get us to see this. The applicational question we could ask ourselves is do we do this? Do we follow Christ’s example of intentionality in prayer. Do we understand what Jesus understood? Do we know that sometimes, the spiritual turmoil in which we find ourselves calls for the spiritual maturity and mental fortitude to carve out time and to carve out a place so that we can commune with the Father? Do we know that? Do we treat the practice of prayer like the lifeline to sanity that it is? Do we realize that without the anchor of prayer between us and the bedrock of the Father, we drift in the currents of our circumstances? Without the tether of prayer between us and the Father, we drift like a kite in the wind with no tether.

The question we need to stop and ask ourselves here as we begin to see Jesus’ valuation of prayer, is do we rightly value prayer too? Do we esteem prayer in its rightful place in the Christian life? Or do we sometimes treat it like a mere box to check at the end of reading a few verses in the morning? Maybe we even just ignore it altogether.

And I know that when we’re comparing ourselves to Jesus, there’s really never a way that we look good. I get that. We’re fighting a losing battle here comparing ourselves to Christ. There’s really no option; there’s no outcome in which we feel good about ourselves when we consider our practices as we try to mimic His. But His example needs to be motivating for us. We should see His intentionality in prayer, and we should feel the prick of conviction that comes with realizing that we fall short of attaining this standard exemplified by Him. We should see His intentionality and His prayerfulness in times of pressure and in pain and we should seek to develop that same practice in ourselves. Our guttural reaction, our intuitive reaction to pressure and pain and trouble and hardship and trial, should be Jesus’ reaction. I need time to pray. I need space to pray. I need to process what I’m feeling right now in prayer. Just think of how often we shrink away from prayer when our circumstances get tough. That’s the natural tendency for many of us that when life presses in on us, we resort to compartmentalization and we revert to the lowest common denominator of doing only those things which have immediate, observable benefit in our situation. We cut out prayers because it doesn’t meet the subconscious criteria of helpfulness in a tough situation. If it isn’t going to benefit me right now, then it must go. I don’t have the bandwidth for it in this season.

It’s easy for us to identify that as foolishness, when we just sit here on a Sunday night and study a passage about prayer, Christ praying no less. But how many of us have thought this way? If you’re like me, you’re so dense that you only realize that you’ve been thinking this way a few days after you’ve been thinking this way. We triage prayer, at least I do. I triage it out from my habits when times get tough. We all do this. This is our natural propensity in our flesh. It’s like when your mom tells you on a hot summer day to drink a lot of water, because the moment you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. That’s what I was told. Once you feel like you’re thirsty, it’s already too late, you’re already dehydrated. I don’t know much about the science of hydration health so I really can’t speak to whether or not that’s true, judging by your responses. Probably not true. But I can speak to the science of spiritual health! It may not be a hot summer day, but in a tough trail that’s putting you through the ringer, once you realize that you’ve not been praying, it’s too late so to speak, you’ve already become spiritually dehydrated. You’ve already missed out on the prayers that would have kept you more tethered to the Lord. Like the old Luther quote goes, I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer. I don’t know if he actually did that but that’s the sediment we ought to cultivate.

I’m so pressured by what’s going on that I need prayer. I crave prayer. I must have time to pray. It doesn’t get more intense than knowing that you’re going to be betrayed in a matter of hours and that you’re going to be questioned and tortured and made to carry your own cross and then nailed up on that cross to die a death more painful than any of us could imagine. It doesn’t get more intense than that. That’s what Jesus had filling His thoughts on this night recorded in our passage in Matthew 26. In His omniscience, He knew every painful detail which was to come. He knew how many lashes He would endure. He knew that they were already fashioning a thorn crown for Him. He knew how far they were going to push it into His forehead. He knew all of these details. And so, He prayed. He modeled extreme intentionality in His prayerfulness.

That’s our first point on this list, pulled from verse 36. Jesus’ Intentionality. Now let’s look at verses 37 and 38 and let’s see Jesus’ Sorrow. Matthew 26:37-38, “And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be grieved and distressed. Then He said to them, My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.” We’ve already talked a little bit about this sorrow that Jesus felt but just look at how it’s described here in these two verses. He began to be grieved and distressed. To add to the intensity of the description here, He says, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death.” If anyone ever tells you, God doesn’t understand my pain, take them to this passage and show them the depth of the pain that Christ experienced on this night in Gethsemane. I don’t think I’m out on a limb here when I say that there had not been up until this night, and has not been since this night, a human being who has ever experienced more grief, more sorrow than Christ did here in Matthew 26. He was stricken with grief, such intense grief that He Himself described it as being deeply grieved, to the point of death. It doesn’t get more grievous than that. This is no small statement. These are no small emotions. This was an intense sorrow, as intense as any human could bear and He bore it. He didn’t just bear it and triage away His commitment to prayer like any of us might have done. No, He doubled down on prayer and threw Himself at the feet of His Father and let His emotions be known.

We see in Hebrews 5:7 that “Christ, in the days of His flesh, offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears (that’s how it’s described in Hebrews 5:7) to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence.” Jesus prayed out His grief to the Father and it involved loud crying and tears. Here’s an implication. It’s okay to show emotion in prayer. In fact, that’s what prayer is for. To help us process emotions. To bottle them up or to not think about them or not talk about these emotions, that’s where we get into trouble right? Or to vent them maybe. That’s even a bad way and there are two extremes, there’s two ditches on the side of the road right? You can bottle it up on one side or you can think venting your frustration and your anger and your emotions toward anyone who will listen to you complain about it, is also a good options. Neither are. Rather we take our emotions to the Father. Just as Jesus exemplified for us here.

Psalm 62:8, “Trust in Him at all times, O people; Pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us.” You can pour out your heart before the Lord. He wants to hear it. He instituted this practice of prayer so that we could process our emotions with Him in a respectful honorable submissive way. Jesus exemplifies that for us here as we look on into verse 39. Verse 39 and we’ll put it under the heading, Jesus’ Supplication. We’ve seen His intentionality, His Sorrow and now in verse 39 we see His Supplication. Matthew 26:39, “And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.”

There’s a lot packed into this verse. We’ll think a little bit more about Jesus’ submission to the Father’s will in a little bit here when we get further down in the passage, but right here, we need to make note of the fact that Jesus wasn’t afraid to ask the Father for what He wanted. That’s what I want us to see here in verse 39. Jesus wasn’t afraid to ask for what He desired. This is the mind-bending part of this. Jesus is omniscient, right. He knows the plan. He’s fully aware of the providential blueprints which include His arrest, His torture, His death. He knows what’s coming and yet, He asks the Father for a way out. He asks that the Father would consider alternative options despite knowing that there are no other ways for this to play out. This has stretched the minds of many students of Scripture for centuries, so if you’re feeling that way too, you’re in good company.

But if you want to know my opinion about what’s happening here, I think that we’re getting a very intentional glimpse into intratrinitarian relationships. We’re getting a glimpse to what it looks like to be three persons and one God. To be three persons and one essence. This is intratrinitarian doctrine. It’s hard to make sense of it. It pushes our minds to the limits. We know that the Son is ultimately submissive to the Father. He says as much right here, and we’ll see it again further down in the passage. So, Jesus isn’t bucking against the plan. He’s not trying to wriggle out of what He knows He needs to do. That’s not what’s happening. What He’s doing here I think is simply showing us, in a way that we can understand as emotional beings, that good prayer involves a level of raw honesty about one’s desires. That’s what good prayer entails. A raw honesty about what you want. About what you’re feeling. There’s something good about bringing our deeply personal desires to the Lord in prayer. Prayer is no place for secrets. It’s no place for embarrassment about asking for that which you want. There’re caveats to that, of course. There’re limits to this. You can’t just ask God for something sinful and selfish and assume that it’s all good because you have some sort of amnesty as though God’s jurisdiction doesn’t reach into the prayer closet. That’s not what’s happening here. That would be misunderstanding this text, and it would be butchering many other texts as well. The principle that I think we should see here in Matthew 26 as Jesus takes His humble requests to the Father, is that it’s okay to bring to the throne your thoughts and your desires and to ask Him to help you make sense of it all. But that last part is important. You’re bringing these desires to the Lord in a posture of extreme humility and submission. God, this is what I’m feeling. Help me make sense of it. Help me bring myself in alignment with what you want me to do. Make me feel right about this. Make me feel Biblical about this. I’m a little confused in the fog of emotion right now. Help me sort this out please.

A few chapters before this in Matthew 7:7-11 we read “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who seek Him!” You see our Father, our God is one who desires to give us good gifts. That’s what Jesus says in Matthew 7. He desires to give us that which is good. The trouble is that what we want is not always good.

In the verse in Philippians 4:6, it says “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” There are caveats to this. Don’t be anxious, but in everything in prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. There’s always a submission. There is always a sense of humility and gratitude and a desire to do only that which God wants, only if you want this God, I’m just telling you that I desire it. If you don’t want me to want it, if you don’t want me to desire it, please help me see that. I think of I John 5. In fact, let’s turn to I John 5 for a minute. Let’s see this together. I John 5:14-15 we see this concept or parallel concept at least. The apostle John writes “And this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.” So, setting aside the details of Matthew 26 for a second and just zooming out to the broader principle of Christian prayer here, we can know from passages like this one here in I John 5 that God answers prayers. God is a God Who knows our needs and Who hears our requests and Who responds to those requests in accordance with His character. That’s the principle here. That’s the key. God answers the prayers of His people according to His own character.

We talked about this this morning a little bit. It’s a theological fact that God cannot act outside of His character and will. That means that if we ask Him to do something in accordance with His character and decreed will, He will do it 100% of the time. But if we ask Him to do something outside of His decreed will and His character, He won’t do it. He can’t do it. He’s unable to do it. Neither would you want Him to do it. That’s the part that we have trouble with. Notice how John here is careful to make this key point. He writes, “this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” And I think I’ve shared this quote in this pulpit before but I’m going to share it again because it’s just so helpful. D. Edmond Hiebert which is one of my favorite commentators on the epistles, he says that “Prayer is not a device for imposing our will upon God, rather the bending of our will to His in the desire that His good will may be done.” We don’t go to God in prayer to try to convince Him to do the things that we want to do if it’s not in His will. Rather it’s the inverse. We go to God in prayer with the whole presupposition, the whole intent of trying to conform ourselves to His will.

Psalm 37:4 says “Delight yourself in Yahweh; And He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to Yahweh, Trust in Him, and He will do it.” Commit your ways to the Lord. That’s a prerequisite to healthy prayer. That’s a prerequisite to healthy Christian living. I think too many people quote the second half of John 15:7 without the first half. They hear Jesus saying, “ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” They ignore that He says right before that, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, THEN ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” You see it takes an alignment of one’s human will with God’s expressed will for one to really unlock the wonders of praying supplications, of making requests of God. And Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane is engaging with the Father in an earnest attempt to process His unimaginably intense sorrow with what He knows is the Father’s will. And even more unique to this situation in Gethsemane is that Jesus knew the Father’s will. And that shows you the intensity of the emotions that He was feeling. He’s simply a human being. He’s feeling the pressure that comes with experiencing the hardships included in God’s divine plan. His decreed will. It made it even harder for Jesus I think because He knew what was coming.

You can turn back to Matthew 26 now. Let’s look at verses 40 and 41 as we continue to add on to these lessons, these observations we’re making about Jesus and applying to ourselves. We’ve seen Jesus’ Intentionality, His Sorrow, His Supplication and now in verses 40 and 41 we see His Devotion. It’ says in verse 40, “And He came to the Disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? “Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The scene here is pretty sad. Jesus had just come back to where He left the Disciples after pouring His heart out in agony and sorrow before the Father and what does He find? He finds them asleep. He finds them having failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. He finds them triaging away prayer in a time when prayer was most needed.

I think it’s important for us to notice something about what we’re being told here about the Disciples. I’ve always read this part of the Gospel accounts with a little bit of sympathy for the Disciples. You know, it’s hard to stay awake after midnight, especially when you’ve had the exhausting kind of day that they had. They were told to come out to a quiet and dark place and then Jesus left them and it was peaceful and it was comfortable when they stretch out on the grass. Of course they fell asleep.

I think I had sympathy for the Disciples here because I remember as a kid, going to all-night prayer meetings at church. I don’t know if that’s a thing out here. I didn’t grow up at Indian Hills, I grew up in a different church on the West Coast, and we would do all night prayer meetings. We would all show up late at night, maybe 9 or 10 o’clock, and we would get into a room, set up a circle of chairs and we would pray all night long until the sun came up. Now I was a little kid at that point, and I remember just the impossibility of it as a little kid. Just not being able to stay in this somewhat dark warm room and keep awake while these people just talked and talked and talked in subtle quiet voices. I think of that when I think of the Disciples here. Jesus, did He just set them up for failure? Was He just setting them up for a situation in which they couldn’t stay awake? The trouble with the scene here in the Garden of Gethsemane is that the Disciples really should have understood the gravity of their situation. I don’t really think we need to have that much sympathy for them the way you should have had sympathy for me in those all-night prayer meetings. They shouldn’t have been in the dark, so to speak, about the fact that Jesus was about to be betrayed and crucified.

Jesus had just told them as little as two days ago that He was going to be betrayed with specificity He explained it. He even told them the night on which it was going to happen. Matthew 26:2, He says, “You know that after two days (that’s 48 hours from now) the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man is to be delivered over for crucifixion.” He told them this was about to happen. Even when it was about to happen. They should’ve known that the very betrayal was upon them in that moment in Gethsemane. They should have known that this betrayal which was going to be catastrophe for Jesus was also going to be catastrophic for their personal situations. Their personal circumstances. They had great cause to pray, and yet they didn’t. They had much to take before the Lord, and yet they lost perspective. They were in the most critical night of their lives. They should have known what was about to happen. By the way Judas is gone and they should have known Judas was the one that betrayed Him. This is like all lining up so they know what is about to happen. They’re not that dumb right? They knew all of these things.

I like the way John MacArthur describes this scene in the dark grove of Gethsemane. “The Disciples knew they were at a crisis point, and like their Lord, they should have seen it as a time for deep concern and fervent prayer. But there is no indication that they uttered a single breath of prayer, no hint that they called on the Father to strengthen them. In smug self-confidence, they still thought of themselves as loyal, dependable, and invincible. They foolishly mistook their good intentions for strength. The sinless Son of God felt a desperate need for communion with His heavenly Father, but His sinful, weak Disciples, as so often they do today, felt no desperation about their weakness and vulnerability.” A bit harsh but it’s spot on. Instead of just heaping criticism on the Disciples like we can so often do, I think we should take this opportunity for ourselves here. Do we do the same thing? Do we see the crisis point in our lives and triage away prayer? Do we realize the inner turmoil that’s going on between us in certain situations. And triage away prayer. Do we say sleep is more important right now? Or is getting work done is more important right now? Or going and talking to that one person to fix the issue is more important right now? Do we do the same thing as the Disciples do?

We talk about Bible reading and prayer as devotions. I don’t personally use that word too much but I’m ok with it as long as we are meaning what we mean. When we do our devotions in the morning or the evening or lunch or whenever you do them, are you really devoted to what it is you’re doing? Are you devoted? Is your whole mind focused on the thing that’s before you? Or are devotions more about the Latte that’s right next to the Bible and the cool music and a nice candle and the peaceful quiet house with the kids outside or in the basement? Is it about the environment or is it about being devoted to the thing. I think we need to put the devotion back into devotions if we’re going to call them devotions. Or else just don’t call them that. Christ’s devotion here is real devotion. Christ’s devotion to prayer is evident is it not? He exhorts the Disciples to muster the same sense of devotion He now modeled for them. He tells them, verse 41, “Keep watching and praying (this is devotion) that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He’s saying get your flesh into conformity with that which your spirit knows to be true. Realize the gravity of your situation. Behave according to the need of the moment. For the Disciples, the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. Jesus is trying to correct that here. He even shows them what devotion looks like. He’s modeling it for them and they don’t see it.

Now in verses 42-44, we get another glimpse of Jesus’ disposition toward prayer. We see His submission. We’ve seen His Intentionality, Sorrow, Supplication, Devotion and now we see His Submission. Look at Matthew 26:42-44, “He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done. And again, He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. And He left them again, and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more.” This concept of Jesus’ submission is really close to the next point that we’re going to get at in the next couple of verses. But right here at least we need recognize and appreciate what had to have been one of the most difficult things Jesus ever said. In this context of prayer with His Father, He forced His temporal, human will into submission to the Father’s will. I mean just catch the profundity of these words. My Father if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done. Then He comes, sees the Disciples asleep, goes back and says it again. He’s reiterating His submission to the Father. He’s not telling the Father something the Father doesn’t know. By the way neither are we telling the Father anything He doesn’t know when we pray. Prayer is not really for Him. Prayer is for us. It’s this practice of continually forcing our temporal human wills into His divine perfect will. It’s cramming this mess of emotions and desires that we have all over the table and ordering them within God’s divine plan. His revealed will in His Scriptures. Lord, we submit to what it is you want from me. Lord, I want to want what you want. Help me want what you want. This is what I want but I’m not sure if it’s right. Help me want what you want. Tell me if this is wrong. Show me from your Word as I engage into devotional reading what it is you want me to do. Illuminate the Word before me. Help me to see what I’m not seeing. That’s prayer. That’s submissive prayer. That’s real prayer. All other kinds of prayers are usually just a waste of time.

Now as we look on into verses 45 and 46, the last two verses of this passage, we see Jesus’ obedience. Matthew 26:45-46, “Then He came to the Disciples and said to them, are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us go; behold, the one who betrays Me is at hand!”

This obedience was no doubt difficult. I think sometimes we can think of Jesus’ experience as a human being as maybe easier than ours in the sense that what He knew what He was supposed to do. Even had divine power within Him. He just did it. It is a lot harder for me because well you know I don’t know the future and I’m week and I’m a frail vessel on this planet and I’m just trying to stumble my way through life and I don’t have access to the things Jesus had access to and I don’t have the strength Jesus had. I think what Jesus did here is hard. I don’t think there was anything easy about it. I think it was quite difficult actually. He came to the Disciples and said to them are you still sleeping and resting? Behold the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man, I, am about to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. And what’s His response? Get up, let us go run away from this? No. Get up, let us go. Let us meet the one who is to betray me. He’s at hand. I mean my goodness, how difficult that must have been. To put one foot in front of the other, to call His men to His side and to go and greet Judas knowing that He was about to be taken into the most painful hours of His life. And He did it.

Philippians 2 describes it this way in verses 5-8, “Have this way of thinking in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although existing in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” When he says to the Disciples in Matthew 26:46, get up, let’s go, behold the one that is to betray Me is at hand, He is doing exactly what Paul said to the Philippians in Philippians 2:8, He did. He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. So difficult. Something that we can’t even imagine, and He did it prayed up, ready for it. I don’t doubt that that’s one of the reasons He was able to do it so well, so obediently.

Turn with me if you would to I John 2. I want us to see the implications of obedience even in our own lives here. I want to twist the screw here on applying these principles to our own hearts. I John 2:3-5, “And by this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, truly in him the love of God has been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.” There is a deep, intrinsic connection between love and obedience. To love God is to obey God. That’s what John is saying here. That word, “keep” in the middle of verse 4, it packs a lot of meaning into that small word. The formal definition of that Greek word is “to persist in obedience; keep, observe, to fulfill, to pay attention to.” The way it’s used here in I John 2:4 teaches us that keeping is the natural byproduct of loving. John is saying here that if you love God, if you really do have a saving relationship with God, if you’ve been given new life in Christ, if you’ve been liberated from your slavery to sin and enlisted as a soldier in His army, you will necessarily by definition, be characteristically obedient to His expressed desires for your actions. Will you be perfect? Of course not. But you will be characterized by a consuming desire to know His will for your life and to obey His will as it’s revealed to you in the pages of Scripture. Only if patterned, consistent, and characteristic obedience is present in someone’s life can that person rightly have assurance that they are saved. That is because we are called to live lives of consistency. We’re to live in accordance with our profession. You can flip back to Matthew 26 now.

With that in mind, can you imagine if Christ spent all that time praying to the Father, pouring out His grief before the Father, sorting out His temporal desires, through the process of prayer subjecting those desires to the Father’s desires, aligning His will with the Father’s will, can you imagine Him doing all of that, only to go on and fail to obey? That would be such a deviation from His character. It’s impossible. It would for one, render His deity fraudulent and worthless and shred apart the truth of the Gospel. But it would also show His Disciples and us by proxy that praying yourself into alignment with God’s will does not require the follow-though of obedience.

What a terrible thing it would be for us to pray earnestly and passionately and selflessly all for the end result of disobedience. We would be missing the whole point, wouldn’t we? We pray with an eye toward trying to obey. We pray so that we can know how to obey. We pray as a practice to prepare ourselves for the coming difficult decision. The betrayal that’s at hand, that we walk toward it, do we walk away from it. I’m stretching it here. We’re not going to be betrayed. You get the point. Do we actually pray so that we can obey? Or do we pray just so that we can get what we want. Jesus models it here. We see the whole spectrum. We pray to obey. It’s a wonderful example that Christ gave us here. It’s wonder that we have it recorded. Praise the Lord for it. It helps us to see the importance of our own prayer.

Now zooming back out from this narrative in Matthew 26 and putting our attention back on our own prayer lives here in 2026, I think we need to acknowledge that for many of us, we’re somewhere in what I like to call, the squishy middle of the spectrum. We’re somewhere between complete devotion to praying without ceasing and praying with intense intentionality like Christ did here in Matthew 26, and then on the other end of the spectrum, praying rote, meaningless prayers or not even praying at all. Most of us are in the middle. Oscillating one way or the other as the seasons come and go.

Listen, we’ve all had times in which we’ve fall short of having a robust and healthy prayer life. Maybe you’re in the season right now. Not one of us here can claim perfection on this front. So, I think it’s helpful, even essential, to remind ourselves often of the fundamentals of prayer. The rudiments of communing with the Father. That’s why I started the series actually. I know it’s going to be a little bit repetitive. The blessing is that it doesn’t happen every single week. We have pastor Jesse up here going through Revelation and then Summer in the Systematics starting in two weeks. I’m just going to come up here every now and then and remind us of these same truths. We’ll pick a different prayer in the Bible but it’s going to be the same thing again. We all need these reminders constantly. We need to remind ourselves of the rudiments of communing with the Father. The rudimentary principles. The foundational stuff of prayer.

So, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to point out a few truths that might help us develop a more robust prayer life. First prayer is communication with God Himself. I know this is obvious. These are rudiments of prayer. If you ever want to get a good sense of the privilege it is that we can directly communicate with God, just sit down and read Leviticus. Read the Mosaic Law. Think of all of those laws and regulations surrounding the presence of God and communication with God. We are not Israel of course. We live in a different era and praise the Lord for that. We have direct access to God. But those people at that time, they could not just talk to God. They did not have God’s ear ready and prone and ready to listen. They had to go through all these checks and balances and procedures and traditions, and they had to do all these things to communicate with God. What a privilege it is that we now have access to God ourselves. We’re not under the Law and we don’t have to go through layers of procedures and restrictions to commune with God.

Hebrews 4:14-16 really helps us see this. Matthew 26 helps us bring it into focus. “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, (remember Matthew 26) but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” When we pray, we’re talking to God almighty. Just think about that. We’re not making a wish upon a star. We’re not wishing as we blow out birthday candles. We’re not writing a letter to Santa. We’re actually talking to God. This must be the starting point when we think about prayer. It’s communication with God Himself. We need to never lose sight of that privilege. So as communication with God, prayer is also our means of confessing our sins. I John 1:9 is a verse that I turn to often when I’m thinking about the ongoing confession of the Believer. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Biblical confession isn’t just admitting that you sinned or even admitting which sins you committed. It’s not the sort of like Romans Catholic confession. We need to get that idea of confession out of our minds. Biblical confession, the kind of confession John’s talking about here, isn’t just admitting sin. The concept isn’t as simple as just pleading guilty to sin charges levied against you. It’s deeper than that. Ryrie says to confess is “to say the same thing about sin that God does.” That is confession. The original Greek word that John uses there in I John 1:9 for confession means “to share a common view or be of common mind about a matter, or to agree.” So, to confess our sins is to see our sins the way God sees our sins. It’s more than just conceding facts. It’s more than just admitting fault. It’s agreeing with God in His assessment of our own sin. To confess one’s sin is to completely relinquish one’s pride and ego and to hate our sin just like God hates our sin.

Jesus of course, had no sin. So, we never see Him pray that way. We don’t get that example. Not in Matthew 26, nor anywhere else in Scripture. But when WE pray, we confess our sins by first making sure that we actually have the heart attitude of seeing our sin the way God sees it, and then we tell God in prayer just that. God, I messed up. I sinned against You. You’re holy and righteous and you chose to save me, but I really screwed up this time. I gave into temptation. I chose to love myself over honoring You. I wanted to please me more than I wanted to please You. I hate this sin just as much as You hate this sin. I want to root it out of my heart. I want to honor You. I want to not bring shame to Your name. I know you forgive me. Thank you. I intend to make real and substantial changes and combat this temptation. I intend to honor You next time. Thank You for saving me and for forgiving me and for being patient with me. I love you.

We could pray like that. That’s how most of our prayers should look. We have a lot of sin guys. Agree with God about your sin. Tell Him about it. Tell Him your heart about it. Tell Him your intentions to shape up. He would love to hear that. Your heart would love to be reminded of it. Prayer is at least in part, confessing your sins to the Lord. It’s agreeing with His assessment about your sins.

Those are just some of the things that prayer is. Those are some of the rudiments of prayer. Next time I’m up here and we are in this Hearts Aflame series, next time I have an evening slot, we’ll pick another prayer and we’ll go through it all over again. There are so many different nuances to the various prayers in Scripture. So many gems in these pages and I look forward to going through more of them with you. Let’s pray.