Matthew 26.36-46

I wonder what you pray when things are looking tough and the future appears to be rather a gloomy one. Or when you’re in trouble and everything’s going wrong.

If you’re anything like me, and like, I’m sure most of the rest of the population, our prayers when we’re up against it go something like this:

Dear God, please help me. Please take away the pain. Don’t let this bad thing happen to me, and so on. Give me strength.

The human inclination naturally wants us to avoid hardship and difficulty. But I’m always struck by Jesus and his example. We heard earlier some of his prayer. How different from many of our own. And, yet, how alike too.

In the run-up to the crucifixion, I think we see the humanity of Jesus, and the vulnerability of the human Jesus, perhaps in a way that we don’t elsewhere. We see the Jesus who asks his Father to take away the cup of suffering that he is undergoing.

Jesus is praying just before his betrayal and arrest. Judas’s betrayal has been foretold, and Jesus has some idea of what he is to do. He has also just told Peter that he will deny him three times. What must it be like to know that your friends are going to desert and betray you, right at the hour of your greatest need?

Jesus is clearly suffering heavily – we’re told that his prayer is agitated and that he is deeply grieved (check translation), that he has thrown himself on the ground to pray, and that the friends who were with him have fallen asleep. The abandonment that he faces on the cross when they all run away has already begun.

But where Jesus differs from many of our prayers is that he doesn’t continue to focus on his suffering but then moves his thoughts and focus on to doing God’s will. He follows his plea for an end to suffering with those haunting and powerful words: “Yet not my will, but yours (check translation).” And then his prayers continue – “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”

God’s will at this point involves Jesus’s great suffering. It’s one of the paradoxes of the Christian Gospel that the loving, compassionate God allows his Son to suffer so greatly, indeed needs that suffering to take place in order for his plan to be fulfilled.

And Jesus could have walked away. But he didn’t because he always put God’s will before his own human desires.

He was the man who is God – a God who limits himself in order to become human and experience the life we do, and much worse, in order for the resurrection to take place and for our salvation.

We pray frequently in the Lord’s Prayer – Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

But our prayer can only really be a true one, if as well as saying the words, we live it out in our actions. Our Lent Group was talking last Monday about how we discern what is God’s will, for if we are to do God’s will, we need to know first what it is. And at heart that comes back to our relationship with God.

We only get to know someone by spending time with them, by listening to what they think and feel.

It takes time to build up strong friendships with people – and it’s only those whom we know really well about whom we can ever say we know what they’re thinking about something.

It’s a bit the same with God. We discover God’s will by spending time with God, through reading Scripture and spending time in prayer.

Of course many of the things we wrestle with our not talked about explicitly in the Bible, but there are patterns and principles we can find there which can help us make decisions about God’s will. We know, through Jesus’s teaching what the values of the kingdom of heaven are. Those are God’s values.

We see those values in the example of Jesus and how he lived his life and the people he enjoyed spending time with.

And, of course, once we know what God’s values are, we then have to put into practice living according to his will, so that we can, with Jesus, say about everything we do – yet not my will but yours.

There’s a story of an elderly Scottish woman – I don’t think her being Scottish is particularly significant – who is making her way through the countryside.

Each time she comes to a crossroads, she tosses a stick into the air. Whichever way the stick comes down is the road that she takes. At one intersection, however, an elderly man saw her toss her stick into the air not once but three times before resuming her journey.

He was curious. “Why are you throwing your stick like that?” he asked.

“She looked at him and replied: “I’m letting God direct my journey by using this stick.”

“Then why did you throw it three times?” asked the curious man.

“Because,” the woman replied, “the first two times God was pointing me in the wrong direction.”

Sometimes where we want to go and what we want to do is not the same as God wants. I wonder if you are aware of times when God has been prompting you in one direction but you’ve constantly tried to go the other way or to make God’s plan fit in with yours.

We need always to ask ourselves: is my life following God’s will, or not? Or do I make compromises? Do I long for honour for myself? Do I shut my mind to things that seem too hard or too big even though I know them to be God’s way because the sacrifice seems too great?

Do I tell just a little white lie because I’m afraid to be honest with someone? Do I end up being rude to someone because I’m in a bad mood? Do I end up being less than polite because I’m in a hurry?

There are all sorts of ways in which our lives reflect a lack of God’s will, often without us even realising it.

It’s not always easy to know what God’s plan is, and often we only discover later when we can look back and see the direction in which God has taken us, sometimes against our will.

Sometimes we will get no clear signals and will have to rely on God to close seemingly open doors.

Sometimes we just have to step out in faith and trust that God will lead us to do the right thing or go the right way.

At other times we will feel as if we’re floundering around not knowing where we’re going or what we’re doing. In my own life, I’ve had several times where I’ve not really known what God was playing at, and it’s only been in looking back that I’ve seen how God’s hand was guiding me. But that’s not made it any easier at the time. Sometimes we just have to say to God, we don’t understand where you are leading, help us to trust in your will.

So it’s not easy, but it is something that each one of us is called to do, to be aware of God’s guidance, to fit our will with God’s and not try to make God’s will fit in with ours. And it’s important for the little decisions involved in the way we live our lives, as much as for the big life-changing decisions: how we use our money, what time we make for God and for other people, how we rate the needs of others compared with our own.

I find it endlessly interesting to see what people nowadays consider essential for life, with many getting in to debt because of things they feel they can’t live without – the new television, the exotic holiday, the expensive party or wedding. Of course, all these things are nice to have, but compared with the basic essentials of life – shelter, food, clean water, medicine, love – not really a high priority.

But God is not like the mother of three notoriously unruly teenagers who was asked whether or not she’d choose to have children if she could live her life all over again. “Oh, yes,” she replied. “Just not the same ones.”

That’s not God’s attitude towards us. We’re told in John 3.16 that God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but have eternal life.

We’re not told that God gives up on the children who misbehave or who are not able to put his will first in everything. We’re told that in spite of that, God keeps trying to call us back.

God doesn’t send us back when we don’t meet the standards. God continues to love us. And our response to that love matters.

I suspect that where many of us struggle is in receiving God’s love. We make that initial response of faith. We strive to be good Christians. We beat ourselves up when we go wrong. We feel desperately guilty – or some people go the opposite way and make excuses – for their lack of prayer or service. We haven’t got time is a constant cry.

We need to allow ourselves the time and space to discover what it really means to be loved by God. We need to allow that to sink deeply within us.

If we know truly what God’s love means, we will have a sense that we are valued and worthwhile, because we are created and loved by God. I know more Christians who struggle with issues of worth than those who don’t. And when we know deep down that we are loved by God, then it become easier to do God’s will in everything.

When our security is found in God and not in the good opinion of others or in material things, then it becomes easier to do the will of God. Sometimes it will mean standing out against the world, or against those whom we love, or against possibly even our fellow Christians. That’s not easy.

In order to do that we sometimes need to let our defences down. We need to accept time and time again that it is God not us who is at the centre of the universe. That God loves us in spite of our imperfections.

That is so hard for most of us – because it goes against our natural inclination to want a good life for ourselves. It goes against much of the flow of our society which lives by a Gospel of what I want I will get. It’s hard for children in this day and age, who live with those messages, to learn to accept the boundaries. I know too many parents, with whom I have sympathy because no one enjoys putting up with whining and moaning children, who admit to giving in to their children’s demands just because it’s easier to do that.

A young police officer was taking his final exams at Hendon Police College in north London. He was faced with this question:

“You are in patrol in outer London when an explosion occurs in a gas main in a nearby street.

On investigation, you find that a large hole has been blown in the footpath, and there is an overturned van lying nearby. Inside the van is a strong smell of alcohol. Both occupants – a man and a woman – are injured.

“You recognise the woman as the wife of your Divisional Commander, who is away in the United States. A passing motorist stops to offer you assistance and you realise that he is someone currently wanted for armed robbery. Suddenly a man runs out of a nearby house, shouting that his wife is expecting a baby, and that the shock of the explosion has made her go into labour. Another man is crying for help – he’s been blasted into the canal but cannot swim.”

Bearing in mind the provisions of the Mental Health Act, describe in a few words what action you would take.”

The officer thought for a moment, picked up his pen and wrote: “I would take off my uniform and mingle with the crowd.”

Rick Warren in the Purpose Driven Life says this: “Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make. Your commitments can develop you or they can destroy you, but either way they will define you. Tell me what you are committed to, and I’ll tell you what you will be in twenty years. We are what we become committed to.”

It’s our decision whether we want to become more like Jesus, whether in 20 years’ time or even 20 days’ time, people will look at us and see that what is distinctive about us is our commitment to Jesus. If our commitment is to God’s will above all else, then that will shape and change us and transform us. Many people fear change, but I can assure you that any changes that come about because we seek to do God’s will will ultimately be for our benefit.

They might involve some opposition. They might involve others not understanding our position. Christians often get bad press because they are seen to be judgemental or to be always saying no to things that everyone else thinks are acceptable. But we are called to be different. We are called to live with different values. And it’s not only those outside the Christian community that need to take note of those values. Jesus’s fiercest criticism was reserved not for the sinners and prostitutes, the unclean and the outcast, but for the religious authorities.

Are we different? If so, what is it that is different about us? Is it our disapproval of the world around and our standing apart from it? Or is it our willingness to get involved with that and transform it? Jesus didn’t stand on ceremony. He didn’t avoid the people whom others thought might contaminate their pure lives. He was right in there, talking to them, building relationships with them.
He didn’t stand apart from the world – his whole life was given to seeking to transform the world, which led to the ultimate sacrifice of his life and an agonising death, both physically and emotionally and spiritually. Just think of that cry from the cross which echoes the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Do we, like the police officer in his exam take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, or do we always wear the armour of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes that make us ready to proclaim the Gospel wherever we go? Do we take with us the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit?

When our time comes and they write our obituary, what, I wonder, will they say about us? Obituaries often sum up where the commitment of a person lay.

God doesn’t expect us to be perfect – he knows so well that we are not. After all, it’s his world and his people that we sin against. But God does ask us to centre our lives around him and his will – the greatest commandment of all is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and being.

We don’t need to be perfect to stand out from the crowd, we need to be in tune with God, willing to be open to doing God’s will, seeking God’s help and recognising our dependence on God for everything we have, everything we do and everything we are.

Of course, we’ll get it wrong at times; of course we’ll go our own way.

But that’s why God sent Jesus, that’s why Jesus went through that agony in the garden – because we couldn’t make ourselves perfect, in spite of what Jesus said in Matthew 5.48 – be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Christians are people who are not perfect, just forgiven. And we see this lived out in Jesus’s trust of the disciples after the resurrection. The disciples who fail him. The disciples who fall asleep in the garden while he wrestles in prayer. The disciples who ran away when he was on the cross. The disciples who included Peter who denied Jesus three times. And yet, it was those very same people to whom Jesus entrusted his commission to go and make disciples of all nations.

So let’s sum up.

First we have Jesus’s example to follow – in great agony he was able to put the will of God first, but we can know that he knows our struggles to do just that, because he too was tempted.

Second, we need to know God’s will. That discernment comes from a life of prayer and a knowledge of Scripture. There is no one who cannot make either of those things part of daily life. Even people who cannot read can pray and nowadays the Bible is available on tapes and CDs and so on, so that all may listen to it read, even if they cannot read it themselves. There is always time to pray, even if it means getting up ten minutes earlier in the morning.

Thirdly, when we know God’s will, we need to do it. That’s not always easy, but God will help us, we have the support of other Christians, their encouragement and prayers, and best of all, we know that if we fail, we can trust in God and his forgiveness, we can trust in God’s love knowing that God will not reject us but help us to stand up when we fall, brush ourselves down, and start again.

Loving God, give us open hearts to you. Inspire our lives by your Holy Spirit. Increase our faith and trust in you, so that, with Jesus, our cry may always be: “Yet not my will, but yours.”

We give thanks for his example, that even when he was suffering the greatest agony, he was able to put your will first, and we pray for strength that we might always have the courage to follow his example.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Saviour. Amen.