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Luke 22:39-44
39 And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him.
40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that you enter not into temptation.
41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed,
42 Saying, Father, if you be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done.
43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
39 And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him.
40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that you enter not into temptation.
41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed,
42 Saying, Father, if you be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done.
43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
Throughout the NT, the Christian believer is enjoined to a life of humble submission and service to God. As John the Baptist declared, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). The believer is to yield him(her)self a bond-servant of righteousness to God (Romans 6:13-22); he is to be led of the Spirit (Romans 8:14); he is to be a living sacrifice to God (Romans 12:1); he is to submit himself to God (Romans 4:7) and humble himself under God’s mighty hand (1 Peter 5:6). In this condition in which Christ is Lord and Master and we his “vessel meet for his use” (2 Timothy 2:21), in which the believer is an entirely-dependent “branch in the Vine” (John 15:4-5), in which we are children to our Heavenly Father and sheep to the Good Shepherd (John 10), the Holy Spirit is able to transform us, unhindered, into the “image of Christ” (Romans 8:29).
As our perfect example, Christ illustrated what this life of submission and service looked like. In particular, the occasion of his surrender to the will of God in the Garden of Gethsemane offers some potent, sobering revelations.
1.) In the face of the terrible challenge of the cross, Jesus did not stand to his feet, stick out his chest, and roar in manly defiance of it, refusing to be bested by the horrendous ordeal shortly to come. He did not rouse within himself some fleshly, overcoming spirit of masculine heroism. No, he submitted to God, instead.
2.) In surrendering to the Father’s will, Jesus was not immediately filled with an overpowering sense of peace and power. A ministering angel appeared to him, but Jesus continued to wrestle horribly with the awful task set before him. His surrender did not instantly suspend all inner struggle with the difficulty of his course.
3.) Jesus did not wait to feel like his desire (in the flesh) was perfectly aligned with God’s will before he surrendered to it. As a man, Jesus recoiled from the enormous, horrific, painful sacrifice he would have to make in atonement for our sin, though, as God incarnate, he was perfectly steadfast in his pursuit of the Father’s will. Jesus did not first overcome his powerful, fleshly instincts to avoid pain and to preserve his physical life, settling emotionally into comfortable agreement with the Father’s will, before he yielded himself to it. No, it was in the midst of a terrible contest of desire that Jesus subjected his will to the Father’s will.
4.) Jesus consciously, explicitly, out-loud in prayer declared his submission to the will of the Father. Why? Surely, his communion with the Father was such that no declaration was necessary. Nonetheless, in prayer Jesus formally yielded himself to his Father’s will, expressly placing his human, fleshly interests under the interests of the Father.
5.) Surrender to the Father moved Jesus deeper into hardship and pain. It’s been said that “there is no safer place than in the center of the will of God.” Jesus, would, I suspect, beg to differ. His perfect obedience to the Father’s will led, not to safety and peace, but to suffering and death. Many Christian martyrs over the millenia since Calvary could also attest to this reality. God’s will does not guarantee safety (of a physical kind, anyway).
What was it that carried Christ forward against the rebellion of every fiber of his physical, fleshly being to the suffering of the cross? Why didn’t the “sweating as it were great drops of blood” provoke him to follow the will of his flesh, of his natural, human desire for self-preservation, and flee?
Hebrews 12:1-2
1 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
The writer of Hebrews indicated that joy carried Christ through the torments of the cross to save us. The joy of doing the will of the Father and doing it perfectly, the joy of saving you and I and reconciling us to God as His children, the joy of His Father well-pleased.
Does such joy infuse and provoke your submission and obedience to God? Do you thrill at the prospect of pleasing your Heavenly Father, of doing His will excellently? Does the thought of being His hands and heart to others, of serving the Father by serving them – even when it really costs you – lift your heart in joy?
Christ’s overriding desire to serve the Father arose out of his intimate, loving, holy communion with the Father. The former was entirely predicated upon the latter. So, too, for you and I. Our intimate, loving, holy fellowship with God is supposed to be the joyful, overriding provocation for our submission and service to Him. In fact, if it isn’t, all we might do in the name of Christ is rendered useless:
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
In my decades-long work as a discipler of men, it’s been my experience that men don’t typically surrender to a God they don’t know and don’t love. They might give pious, hypocritical lip-service to doing so, but where joyful fellowship with God is absent in a believer’s life, so, too, is joyful sacrificial surrender to His will.
There is a sort of feedback loop in which surrender to God and love for Him work together in deepening one’s fellowship with Him. They are both vital to such fellowship, intimately inter-related. Submission opens one’s life to the Person and work of the Holy Spirit who expands in the life of the believer, filling them with his love, peace, grace, joy and power that he is (Romans 5:5; Galatians 5:22-23). As the believer experiences the Spirit in this filling and are transformed by him, their desire for more of him (love), of God, expands. This desire, in turn, provokes further yielding, the necessary means to being increasingly filled by the Spirit. On and on this cycle goes, surrender and love provoking one another in the life of the believer, by the Spirit’s transformation of them, making them servants of God willing even to give up their lives for Him.
Is this you? Are you such a person, provoked by love and joy, through surrender to God changed and empowered by Him and thus willing (and able) to lay down your life for Him? This is the normal Christian life.
John 5:30
30 I can of myself do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not my own will, but the will of the Father who has sent me.
John 6:38
38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.
Philippians 3:7-10
7 But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.
8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,
9 And be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:
10 That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
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