Go

Contact Us

  • Phone: (509) 747-3007
  • Email:
  • Mosaic Address:
    606 West 3rd Ave., Spokane, WA 99201

Service Times

  • Sunday:  8:30 am, 10 am, 11:30 am
  • Infant through 5th grade Sunday School classes available
  • FREE Parking!

Sermons

FILTER BY:

Back To List

Jun 12, 2016

Praying When It Hurts, Prayer 401

Praying When It Hurts, Prayer 401

Passage: Mark 14:32-42

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Master Class: Prayer

Category: Prayer

Keywords: crisis, crucifixion, crucifixión, jesus christ, pain, prayer, suffering

Summary:

This last message in the Prayer's of Jesus series looks at the prayers of Christ in the last 24 hours of his life when he was in the greatest physical, emotional, relational and spiritual pain of his life. What did Jesus do? What did he pray? And what does that have to teach us about prayer when life is particularly painful and troubling?

Detail:

Praying Until While It Hurts

Prayer 401

Series: Praying with Jesus—June 12, 2016

 

What has been the most painful time in your life? 

            It may have been years ago when you were a child.  It may be right now.  It may have lasted for a few days…or a few years. Or it may feel like it’s been a lifetime.  Just what was it that made that time so painful?

As a pastor, I see people in pain all the time.  There are the obvious times like…

  • In the hospital.
  • At the funeral home or graveside.
  • In court…or in prison.

Then there are the not-so-obvious or non-public times:

  • In counseling sessions trying to salvage a marriage.
  • Listening to the loneliness of a man who lost his wife of 57 years over 5 years ago.
  • Helping a wife who’s been watching her husband’s health slowly decline for 15 years.
  • Having coffee with the businessman whose company just laid him off after 28 years of working for them.
  • Helping parents come to terms with a daughter who left home and hasn’t been heard of for 2 years.

Pain comes in all sorts of packages.  And when we’re in pain…or wrestling with life that is causing us pain…it can be very difficult to know HOW to talk with God…or even IF you do want to talk with Him. 

What was arguably the most difficult time in Jesus’ life? We’d probably all agree that it was his betrayal by one of his closest friends, his abandonment by his closest friends and family, his sham of a trial, the unjust and inhumane beatings, the barbaric flogging, the torturous and absolutely humiliating crucifixion-- naked before the jeering people he had loved and healed and rescued.  Then there were the final hours when God the Father turned away from God the Son and poured out on him all the divine hatred and wrath due to us and our sin which Jesus bore in his own body on the cross. 

            To say those 24 hours for Jesus were “difficult” is a cosmic understatement of massive proportions.  But if you read the Gospel accounts of that night and day, something that jumps out at you is how FULL of prayer…conversation with the Father…those hours were.  We have more recorded prayers and more specific content—both the longest and some of the shortest—in these 24 hours of Jesus life than any other.  From the chapter-long prayer in John 17 that we’ve been meditating on for three weeks to the dying gasps of “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” recorded in Luke 23, Jesus’ praying during THE most painful period of his life has quite a bit to teach us and help us to pray during our painful periods of life.

So let’s begin this morning by PRAYING.  [PRAY]

One of the most instructive prayers that painful night in Jesus’ life was His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and abandoned or denied by the rest of the disciples.  Turn to Mark 14:32ff. 

32 They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” 33 He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. 34 “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”

35 Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed….”

            This is no minor pain.  This is not pain caused by personal sin or failure.  Jesus, the only perfect person to ever walk this earth, experienced a level of personal anguish that threatened to literally take his life.  “Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” and “deeply distressed and troubled” is how both Mark and Jesus himself described the pain he was in just hours before the excruciating physical pain of the cross. 

            Let’s get one thing clear.  Pain in life is not always due to our own sin.  Sometimes it is just due to the nature of life in a fallen world.  Sometimes it is due to obedience to God in a fallen world.  Sometimes it is due to other people’s sins.  And sometimes it is due to our own sin.

            Regardless of the cause, there are times when the best of people may feel completely overwhelmed with sorrow or grief or pain.  The amazing thing is, we have a God…a Savior…who has felt that same pain.  Even before the cross, Jesus felt as if the pain of his soul was squeezing the life out of him. It completely flooded his heart and mind. 

APP:  Many of you know what that feels like.  When you feel that depth of pain, the source doesn’t really matter.  What matters is our RESPONSE.  Life and death, suffering and pain, will sometimes hit us so hard that we may despair of life itself.  But in those moments, never listen to the lie that God doesn’t care or that He doesn’t know what it feels like.  He not only cares; He’s felt that pain more deeply than we can possibly imagine.  And, He showed us what to do when that happens.  PRAY!

I’d like to talk for a moment about the CHALLENGE of praying when your soul is in PAIN. 

Pain is a curious thing.  It can help us to pray more…and more fervently OR… it can make praying harder and tempt us to stop praying altogether. That’s been the experience of God’s people through the centuries. 

  • It was the pain of slavery that caused the Hebrews to cry out to God in Egypt and eventually claim the Promised Land given to Abraham.
  • It was the pain of encroaching pagan people that caused the Judges to cry out to God and led the nation back to God.
  • It was the pain of personal refining and sometimes of sin and disobedience that led David to write many of the Psalms (sung prayers) of lament or desperation. In fact, a full 25 of the 150 Psalms are either completely consumed with the pain of the author or contain significant prayers prompted by pain. 
  • It was the pain of captivity that caused the Jews to cry out in captivity and to return to the Promised Land in preparation for the coming of Christ.
  • It is the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings that have nudged both God’s kids and God-haters either closer to Him or farther from Him.

ILL:  Friday night, Sandy and I watched a movie about Mother Teresa entitle The Letters.  It isn’t a particularly well done movie.  But it is built around an amazingly well-lived life.  Much of the inspiration for this movie came her life and the over 6,000 letters she wrote to her spiritual advisor during the nearly seven decades of her ministry life. 

            Mother Teresa was, of course, a deeply devout woman.  But she was also a woman of much prayer.  But her type of prayer may not be what we think of when we talk about prayer.  One of her definitions of prayer reads like this: “Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.” [Found at https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa]
            In 1942, Mother Teresa made a vow not to refuse Jesus anything. Starting in 1946, she experienced several mystical encounters with Jesus, whom she called "the Voice," asking her to serve "the poorest of the poor."

But then there was also “the darkness.” The "darkness" was her term for feelings of loneliness and abandonment. No sooner did Mother Teresa start her work in the slums of Calcutta than she began to feel the intense absence of Jesus—a state that lasted until her death, according to her letters. 

Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, who directs The Mother Teresa Center from Tijuana, Mexico, says, "The paradox is that for her to be a light, she was to be in darkness."  

Isn’t that what pain feels like—darkness?

In a letter believed to be from 1961, Mother Teresa wrote: "Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason—the place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me—when the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God. … The torture and pain I can't explain."

Over time, her spiritual advisor, the Rev. Joseph Neuner, helped Mother Teresa realize her feelings of abandonment actually increased her understanding of the people she helped. Ultimately, she identified her suffering with that of Jesus, which helped her to accept those feelings.

We serve a God who entered into the pain of our humanness.  He identifies with us.  But it is in the moments of pain we experience that He invites us to identify with Him…with His suffering.  Which may be why Satan wants to use pain to separate us from God.  He may understand in some way better than we do that pain in life is a place, an experience in which Christ-followers will actually become more like Jesus.

            Jesus showed us WHAT TO DO in those times of pain as He prayed that last day before His death.  Here’s what he did that should inform what we do.

1.) Go where you usually go to meet with God and His people.  For Jesus, Gethsemane was a place he would often go to spend time with his disciples and His Father (John 18:2).  So on the worst night of his life…when He was in the most pain of his life…He went to where he knew He could meet with God the Father and be with his disciples. 

ILL:  A good friend and fellow-pastor who was on my staff team in another church, had the horrible experience of watching his oldest son killed in a boating accident 10 years ago next month.  It was the darkest and most painful experience any parent can imagine. 

            I watched as he and his wife worked through that dark night of their souls. At one point in their journey with grief, knowing that going to church can be one of the hardest things to do every week when you are in grief, I thanked him for continuing to reach out to people and not giving up on God.  His response was insightful:  “I’m not here because I believe right now; I’m here because I need to be around people who are believing for me.”

            While Jesus never doubted the presence or the goodness of His father, he still understood that, as a human being, he needed to be around others who believed. 

APP:  Far too often I see the opposite response in people.  When they encounter life at its most painful, they pull away.  They isolate.  They stop talking to their spiritual family.  They stop attending our weekly family get-togethers/worship and meal/Communion.  And they just sort of STOP spiritually. 

Pain is not the time to isolate; it is the time to engage others and God himself. Don’t run from other God-seekers when grief and pain hit. Go after them.  Ask them to accompany you on the journey.  Be around other Christ-followers who will believe for you, pray for you and hope for a less painful future for you. 

            And by the way, when other Christ-followers fail you in the very time you need them the most (just as the disciples of Jesus did that very night), don’t get all offended or indignant or critical and write them off.  Recognize that people will fail you…sometimes at the time you need them most.  But be like Jesus:  keep coming back and asking for their help…and praying for God to strengthen them.  Pain is not an excuse to not be like Jesus; it’s an opportunity to become more truly like Jesus.

2.) Go to God for your pain-meds. 

ILL:  Imagine you’ve just come out of surgery and every fiber of your body seems to be screaming at you in pain.  When the doctor comes into your room, do you think it’s a good idea to yell at her to leave?  Wouldn’t it be wiser…a better idea… to realize that she can prescribe the very best “pain relievers” you need and that you should probably talk with her about it…even if you sound angry and upset at the moment?   

Jesus understood that he needed to be talking with the Father… even though the pain he was about to go through would come to him because of what the Father was asking him to do. APP:  Even if you think God is the source of your pain, don’t cut the lines of communication with Him; build new lines!

Jesus never cut the communication with the Father.  Instead, he drilled down into that relationship even more. He gave up sleep on the night he probably needed it most to cry out to the Father who He needed more.

ILL:  I remember the first few years we were in Madrid doing church planting.  I was in agony of soul.  I was depressed, angry, and resentful of what was happening…and not happening. For an achievement-oriented person like me, it was agony.

There were many a night I would be so angry and knotted-up about it all that I would leave the apartment at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and go walk off some of my frustration in the streets of the city.  I’d be telling God off, arguing with Him, sometimes yelling at him.  I’m not particularly proud of who I was or what I was saying at the time.  But at least we were at least still communicating!  (I could have used this message about then! J)  I still somehow had enough sense to know that God was the only one who could provide the right pan meds for my crisis.

So during seasons of pain, we must hang out with God and with His people…even when both might seem to be failing us.

Next let’s talk about the CONTENT of what we should be processing/communicating with God when we’re in pain.  Look at what Mark 14:35-36—Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. 36) “Abba, Father,” he said, “Everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

            First, our thoughts and prayers about God and about our situation should be filled with affirmations of our relationships with our heavenly Father.  Reaffirm God’s relationship to you. 

            Jesus kept crying out to his Heavenly Daddy—his Abba—in the midst of life’s pain. 

ILL:  I don’t know about you, but when I was younger, I never worried about what to say when I was hanging out with Dad.  He was a man of few words.  But we spent hours together working in the garage…or the garden…or hiking together…or playing at the lake.  It wasn’t always about what we had to talk about.  In fact, it rarely was.  It was about just being in each other’s presence…doing life…sometimes just watching the beach fire die down and the Milky Way Galaxy fill the night sky. 

APP:  What IS your relationship to the Father? 

  • Have you come to embrace God as your Father through embracing Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord? (Call to peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ.) 
  • Have you come to just enjoy being in His presence?

It’s interesting what Jesus reaffirms about the Father in his prayer:  “Everything is possible for you.”

Secondly, Jesus reaffirms the Father’s relationship to life—He’s sovereign.

It’s just a statement of fact.  God the Father already knows that.  So does God the Son.  But apparently some sleepy disciples would need to be reminded of it so their prayers would be filled with truth.  So Jesus spoke it out:  “Everything is possible for you.” 

            This is a critically important truth to hang onto when you’re in pain.  Could God change the pain in an instant?  Yes, that’s possible for Him to do.

            So when He doesn’t, what does that say about the ongoing pain?  [Congregational answers.]

  • It must have some purpose greater than our comfort and satisfaction.
  • Taking that pain away is not God’s best for us or others or God.

[What would have happened to us, others and Christ if the Father had answered Jesus’ prayer by “taking this cup from Him” at that point? 

  • Us—never experienced salvation and life eternal.
  • Others—still lost in darkness.
  • Jesus—less glory and honor; a diminished heaven, etc.]

Thirdly, Jesus makes his request with a submissive heart.  Vs 35--“Take this cup from me.  Yet not what I will, but what you will.” 

            There is nothing wrong with honest asking from God.  Jesus very directly and clearly asked for something very specific in regards to what was causing His pain.  “Take this cup from me.”  Left there, this would be the one prayer of Jesus that God the Father would not answer.

            But that was not the end of Jesus’ connection that night with God the Father.  He apparently stayed in that solitary, quiet place until he could say from his heart, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”  Here is THE BEST CONTENT of any genuine communication with God. 

  • “As hard as your will is, I want that rather than what looks best to me right now.”
  • “As painful as this process is, I want You and your heart for my life right now rather than what I think my heart needs right now.”

Only when we get to that place…that change of our own heart in our own praying…will be ever find the grace we need to endure the pain that remains.  To get there, we will probably need to do what Jesus did: pray like that over and over and over again…take an extended journey with God in order to bring our wills in line with His. 

APP:  Is there anything you or I are having difficulty accepting and embracing as God’s best for us and those around us?  Anything that we really want to change but also need to submit to the Father’s will that may be different than ours right now?

[Silent prayer.]

Jesus’ three last prayers were from the cross itself and very short. 

The first appears to come early in the crucifixion process as Jesus was pierced with the nails and hung in the hot Judean sun to suffer.  We find it in Luke 23:33-34.

  33 When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. 34 Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

            Many times the pain we are experiencing is the direct result of the actions of others.  Jesus’ certainly was.  The actions of hateful, jealous, outright evil people were causing the worst pain of his life. 

Yet Jesus, rather than praying for their judgment, prays for their forgiveness. 

Rather than praying for justice for himself, he pleads for mercy…for them.

Rather than listing a hundred reasons why they should be struck dead and condemned to hell, Jesus finds the only reason they could possibly not be culpable—ignorance. 

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  But

            This is certainly the one prayer that Christians have prayed around the world in every culture and under the worst persecution imaginable that no other religion can duplicate:  “Father, forgive them!”  Jesus didn’t need to pray that prayer like we do so that bitterness doesn’t swallow us up in the end.  He prayed that prayer because that IS His heart—to forgive every person of every sin.  That’s what He was doing dying on that cross—forgiving us and a world of sinners of our sins before we ever recognized we needed forgiving. 

            Most people in this world will reject that forgiveness.  They will deny that they need it, deny that they sin against their Creator, deny that the wage sin pays is eternal death but that the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rm. 6:23).  But they will not miss eternal life and heaven because there is not forgiveness.  Jesus took care of that on the cross…while he hung there…in His prayer. 

APP:  If we would join Jesus in praying, we must join him in forgiveness of the worst possible offenses sinful people have committed against us.  If we are to escape the swamp of bitterness, we must drink of the spring of forgiveness over and over and over again. 

            That doesn’t mean we should allow people to abuse us over and over and over again when it is in our power to stop the abuse.  But it does mean our heart before God must continually seek to our last breath that God would not only forgive our tormentors but lead them to repentance and salvation from their sins before they die. 

This is not mere theoretical religious mumbo-jumbo.  We live in a world where many of our brothers and sisters must choose to hate or forgive people who will maim them, torture them, inflict untold anguish on them and possibly kill them.  We live in a world where many of us may someday have to make that choice:  pray for the forgiveness of those who inflict pain on us…or live our last years or days or moments in bitter hatred of people whom Jesus has already forgiven. 

APP: Who has caused pain in your life for whom you need to pray this prayer?  Will you join Jesus in this prayer from the cross of suffering…or will you sink deeper into the mire of anger, resentment and bitterness.  Granting forgiveness must be a significant part of our prayer life if we are to know Jesus in this life.

The next short prayer seems to be the one found in Mark 15:33-34-- 33 At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

            It is a very common experience in pain to believe that God has abandoned us, that he doesn’t take notice of our suffering.  I don’t think Jesus is just “feeling our pain” here, pardon the pun.  I think he really was, as we never shall be, abandoned by the Father in some very real way.  In that moment in time, the eternal Godhead experienced the eternal pain of relational separation… yes, abandonment… between the two divine persons of the Godhead who had never experienced anything but face-to-face fellowship and harmony.  Bearing our sins brought to Jesus in his humanity the experience of being rejected by the One who had only loved Him from eternity past. 

            I think we’ll have to wait until heaven to see how this really happened and what it really meant for God to turn away from His eternal and holy love for himself in order to bear our sins.  But let us never succumb in suffering to the lie that God has somehow abandoned us.  Yes, we can state that it feels that way.  Yes we can cry out that we need grace not to believe that lie.  But that is one prayer we need not join Jesus in.  For God himself promised us, “Never will I leave you; Never will I forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). 

Now to the final prayer found in Luke 23:46-- 46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

            If we are going to follow Jesus into his experience of prayer, it will mean entrusting our soul…our life… and ultimately the timing of our death…to the Father.  Whether we…

  • die of old age in the comfort of our own homes, surrounded by the people we have loved for a lifetime…
  • or whether we die in a fiery bomb blast because we are the object of religious hatred…
  • or a million different ways our bodies can give up their spirit at any day, any age,

our walk and talk with God is to be a continual giving over of our lives—body, soul and spirit—to God. If every day we commit ourselves to the Father’s hands, then whenever that final day comes, it will be but a very small step from here to heaven.

            Jesus knew he had come for this very moment—to walk through life in such a way that His death in this moment would bring life to a whole world of sinners.  While our death will, for most of us simply be the next step in our ongoing journey with God, Jesus’ death actually accomplished what no other human death could have:  the reconciliation of a sinful world to the holy God.  And it did so “at just the right time” in His life and in our world.

APP:   So are we in the habit of committing our lives—body, soul and spirit—into God’s hands?  If we are, then the demands for continual dying to self that suffering bring will be for us simply the practical outworking of daily surrender.  We won’t feel slighted or insulted by mistreatment from others.  We’ll simply learn to rest in the Father’s will as Jesus did.  We won’t need to seek revenge or even the score card.  Instead, the very people who cause us suffering will, perhaps after our death, marvel at the way we lived and died and find themselves seeing the face of Christ in us.

APP:  This should also free us to live full-throttle for the Kingdom of Christ.  If God calls us to a part of the world…or a part of the city…that could be potentially life-taking, we will know that we are a people who are invincible, indestructible, protected by the very power of God until the moment God has already written in His book when He wants us to come home.  That knowledge will free us from both a life of fear and a lifetime of playing it safe.  Since we, as Colossians 2:20 says, have already “died with Christ,” death is not our greatest enemy.  Mediocrity, failing to lose our life in Christ, and a host of other things this world and our culture lives for are our enemy.  But not surrendering our lives for the sake of Christ and the Gospel.  God’s hands are the best place in the universe to be, especially when the moment comes for us to “breath our last.”

APP:  Are we playing life too “safe”?  Are we always weighing the risks, measuring the dangers and looking for the safest route to the finish line?  If that’s the case, we need to join Jesus in this simple yet life-altering little prayer:  “Father, into your hands I commit my body, my soul and my spirit.” And when that final day comes, that prayer will be as natural to us as breathing has been our entire life.    

APP: Pray for those in suffering/pain.