And in Mark 14, we're going to read from verse 32 to verse 42.
Let's hear and read together in God's Word.
And they went to a place called Gethsemane.
And he said to his disciples, sit here while I pray.
And he took with them Peter and James and John
and began to be greatly distressed and troubled.
And he said to them, my soul is very sorrowful, even to death.
Remain here and watch.
And going a little farther, he fell on the ground
and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.
And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.
Remove this cup from me.
Yet not what I will, but what you will.
And he came and found them sleeping.
And he said to Peter, Simon, are you asleep?
Could you not watch one hour?
Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.
The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
And again, he went away and prayed, saying the same words.
And again, he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy.
And they did not know what to answer him.
And he came the third time and said to them, are you still sleeping and taking your rest?
It is enough.
The hour has come.
The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.
Rise.
Let us be going.
See, my betrayer is at hand.
Says the word of God.
And to his name be the praise and the glory.
All right.
Well, the B team was chosen tonight after Ryan wasn't able to be here suddenly this evening.
And I, as you well know, that well-prepared sermons are short and very unprepared sermons
get quite long.
So I'll try my best to stick to my notes so that it doesn't become unwieldy.
And we're here an hour later, still trying to figure out Mark 14.
I was thinking this afternoon, what am I going to preach on tonight?
And I thought, let's look at questions Jesus asks, because that is the series we're doing.
And Ryan had chosen one question in our passage tonight.
There are three questions, which is a great passage to choose for that reason alone.
But then also something that fit with preparing our hearts for the Lord's Supper, because
we're about to partake in communion.
And also, this text actually fits very well with what we saw this morning in Psalm 91
and the emotions that we express in prayer, prayers of rest and deliverance, and how God
provides us psalms to pray.
And here in this passage, we've got a text about the emotional life of our Lord.
And it is very parallel to what we saw in Psalm 91.
So I chose it for that reason as well, on very short notice.
So here we are.
Let's think about it.
This is the Garden of Gethsemane, very famous, probably one of the most, if not the most
important night in world history.
And Jesus is here in a garden he loved to visit.
The text says it was his custom to come to this place regularly.
And he has just come from partaking in the Lord's Supper, instituting the Lord's Supper
in the upper room.
And they probably ate that meal from sunset all the way to around midnight.
So he's arriving at the Garden of Gethsemane very late.
It's maybe even the start of the next day, the day he will be crucified.
And so Jesus never goes to sleep from the Lord's, instituting the Lord's Supper to his
betrayal, to his execution and death.
He stays up all night.
And here they've walked about a mile away through the Kidron Valley, as was the normal
custom.
Every night in Jesus's Passion Week, he never stayed in the city.
So instead he would leave, he would go up back about a mile away towards Bethany.
And here he goes about a mile away through the Kidron Valley, up the Mount of Olives,
east of Jerusalem.
And somewhere on the slope of the Mount of Olives, there is a garden, and it's called
Gethsemane.
Gethsemane means house of olives.
Sorry, excuse me, olive press, I should say.
And that probably means that Gethsemane is an olive garden.
So there's a lush olive garden all around him.
And in this moment, we get the emotional life of our Lord, and we get the full meaning of
salvation.
I mean, this is a moment that is so important for all of world history and for us, of course,
as well.
So what happens here?
What happens in this place?
Jesus normally loved to visit.
It was his custom to come here and pray.
But on this night, so let's think about first the fact of Gethsemane, secondly, the deeper
meaning of Gethsemane, and then lastly, the model that Gethsemane shows us for what to
do with our emotions.
So first, the fact of Gethsemane.
Now, tonight's question, there are three questions in the text.
There's one in verse 37, sorry, two, I should say.
Simon, are you asleep?
Could you not watch just one hour?
And then there's one in verse 41, are you still sleeping?
Are you taking your rest?
And so those are an anchor for us tonight.
We'll come to those in just a minute.
But just like we saw this morning, how God in the Psalms has given us a way to express
our emotions back to him in prayer, tonight we see this passage is so famous and important,
partly because of the emotions that Jesus expresses.
And lots of people have pointed this out before me.
There's nothing new here.
It's a routine argument, but it's an argument for good reason to say that the Garden of Gethsemane
first shows us the historicity of Jesus Christ.
So the way that Jesus expresses emotion in this passage is an argument for why we must believe
in the fact of Jesus Christ in history, that he's historically real, that this is true,
that this ultimately really happened.
And you can see that if you look down at verse 33 and 34, you get three emotion words that
are expressed.
He takes with him Peter, James, and John to the garden.
And it says there are these emotional words.
He was greatly distressed and then troubled.
And then in verse 34, right after that, my soul is very sorrowful, even unto death.
And then just after that, in verse 35, it says that he falls upon the ground in prayer.
So he actually falls face first upon the ground in deep emotion.
He's undone.
He's spent.
He's very sorrowful.
He's greatly distressed.
He's troubled.
If you read the commentators, they'll take those Greek words, some of them nouns and verbs,
and they'll say, here's some parallel words, some synonyms to help us really see and wrestle
with the emotions he's expressing here.
So the words that get used by the commentators are things like alarm, agonizing grief, and
terror.
So we saw this morning in Psalm 91, this promise, you will not fear the terrors of the night.
And then when you come to the garden of Gethsemane, he is fearing the terrors of the night.
He's experiencing terror in this great night.
And this, I think it's hard to convey.
It's impossible to convey the emotional pain that's being expressed here.
So the only parallel we probably have to the way Christ's agony is being described here
is when you think about the worst phone call you've ever received.
And if you haven't had a tragedy yet in your life, a major tragedy, you won't yet know the
emotional agony that's being expressed here.
But if you think about the dark night of the soul, whatever that has been for you in your
life, this is the emotional agony that's being expressed to us in these words.
He's so distressed, it says he felt like he was going to die.
And Luke, some of the earliest manuscripts we have of Luke's gospel tell us, you'll probably
well know that he was in such agony in this moment that he sweated blood.
Blood started dripping out from him.
And so here's what one very helpful commentator, James Edwards, who's probably the best writer,
I think, on Mark's gospel.
This is what he says.
Very short, very stark statement, but he says, the grim realism of Gethsemane is a guarantee
of its historicity.
The grim realism of Gethsemane is a guarantee of its historicity.
Why?
Let me give you just a couple reasons.
Because the Jewish mind, Jewish theology at the time did not have any category for a God
who could suffer, for a God who could express himself in emotional agony, for the Messiah,
not even the Messiah, the hero of the faith.
There was no expectation that the Messiah would come and face any emotional torment like this.
So people certainly do in the Old Testament.
They do in the Psalms.
They experience emotional torment.
But for Judaism in the first century, this was not true of the Messiah, certainly not true
of God.
And so you would never choose this to be persuasive to a Jewish audience if you were just trying
to write a legend.
It wouldn't work.
The second reason is that the dominant philosophy of the day, and the Greek philosophy that had
passed on in the Greco-Roman society that they lived in, was a Socratic, Platonic philosophy,
but also that had given way to Stoicism.
And Stoicism, many of us will know Stoicism because it's come back, famously.
Um, Marcus Aurelius' meditations are selling like hotcakes apparently at Waterstones these
days.
And there's lots of people calling for a renewal of Stoicism.
And Stoicism in this tradition, well, listen to what James Edwards says.
Did not Socrates greet death as a friend and as a liberator to a better life?
Did not the Stoics preach serene resignation to fate?
Why does Jesus, who has foreseen his death and marched resolutely to Jerusalem to meet it,
now quail before it?
As it comes.
And so in the day, the Greek philosophy, you were to face death with serenity, with peace,
with calmness.
And yet here is Jesus falling on his face in emotional agony.
Now, one of the questions I have for you tonight is, have you ever really looked closely at the
emotional life of your Lord?
Have you ever really considered in depth the agony that Jesus experienced on the night that
he was betrayed?
And I think it's side note, but we're far more stoic than he ever was.
And when you look at this closely, one of the things that you realize is that if you
were trying to create a following around this man in the first century, in the Jewish context,
in the Greco-Roman context, you don't put the Garden of Gethsemane into the story unless it actually
happened.
That's the only reason you would do it, because it wouldn't be persuasive.
It's not a category that the Jewish audience or the Greco-Roman audience ever expected.
It's too surprising to be false, James Edwards says.
And so even here in verse 37, when we do get to the question, when he comes back and says,
Simon, are you asleep?
Could you not even watch for one hour?
See, it's not just rhetoric.
He is turning to Simon, a man that he loves, and saying, I needed my friends in this hour.
Jesus Christ is our Messiah and our Lord and our Savior, and a man who is in such agony in
this moment, he needs his friends.
And that beckons the very question that he asked them.
It's real.
Now, secondly, the deeper meaning of Gethsemane.
Now, why is Gethsemane happening?
Why is Jesus in such emotional agony in this story?
And we see this, of course, in verse 33 and 34 and 5, the way he's expressing himself.
But it's got to be something more than the execution of the cross.
It's got to be something more than the physical suffering he's about to go through, which, of
course, is going to be agony.
But we know, we all know that thousands of people were crucified.
The Romans crucified thousands upon thousands of people.
Jesus was far from the first to be murdered in such a brutal way.
And, of course, two other men will be crucified next to him.
The agony he's experiencing in the garden.
And, you know, James Edwards asked, in the face of Socrates, in the face of Stoicism, why
does Jesus quail in this moment?
It's got to be something more than the physical, mere physical agony of the cross.
And I think the answer is found when we think about the fulfillment he's talked to us about
as he's quoted throughout the gospel, places like Isaiah 53.
And you remember in Isaiah 53 when it said, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our
sorrows.
Now, there it is.
He came to carry our sorrows.
And so the issue here is not so much the physical agony.
It's not the brutality of crucifixion that he's about to face because, of course, so many
people have faced that.
But it's something deeper than that.
And I think it's fair to say it like this.
There has never been a human being who has faced the emotional anguish that Jesus Christ
faced on this night because there has never been a human being who has carried the burden
that Jesus Christ carried this night.
And what is that burden?
And here's the deeper meaning.
It's found in verse 35.
In verse 35, it says, when he falls on the ground and he prays, he says this, if it's
possible, I pray that the hour might pass from me.
So many of us will know that the word hour throughout the gospels is a reference that Jesus
uses throughout his ministry for his crucifixion, his death that was to come.
But in a couple of the other gospels, Luke, for example, in this statement, when he prays,
we're also told he didn't just say, let this hour pass from me.
He also said, let this cup pass from me.
And so the hour, what is the hour?
What is the hour of his agony?
What is the hour of his crucifixion really about?
It's the hour, the moment where the cup has filled up all the way.
It's the moment where he has to drink from the cup fully.
The cup has become full.
You see, in the Old Testament, the cup is this metaphor for two different things.
Sometimes in the Old Testament, the cup is used as a metaphor for festival joy.
The cup of wine that gets passed around and festival joy, marriage suppers, wedding banquets,
the great feast days.
But in other times, the cup is used as a metaphor for the spilling over of God's wrath in the face
of injustice in this world.
And so you got this sense throughout the Old Testament that drip, drip, drip, drip,
the cup is filling up in the midst of human injustice, human sin.
And this moment, when he says the hour has come, the hour of the cup,
Lord, if there's any way, let the cup, let the hour pass from me.
It's because the cup has been filled.
And what is that cup?
It's the cup of God's wrath.
The cup of God's wrath is about to runneth over on him.
You know, what happens to him in this moment is that terror strikes him, the terror of the night,
because he knows that this is not about the agony of his physical pain on the cross.
This is the agony of the spiritual pain, the cup of wrath that he's about to drink,
because the judgment of God is very near unto him.
It's time.
The judgment of God is about to be unleashed on him.
Now, how can we convey the depths of what he means when he says,
let the cup pass from me, let the hour pass from me.
When he's wrestling with the judgment of God that's about to fall on him.
Let me try in 90 seconds in just a couple of ways.
What does it mean to say that he's going to bear the judgment of the sins of humanity?
It's mysterious.
There's so much we don't know about what it means.
But what is this burden like?
Think about it this way.
Number one, he is holy and he is righteous and he is good fully.
But he's about to become the sin bearer.
So the righteous one is about to become the sin bearer.
And so he's going, and here's the key little preposition.
He's going to be treated as if he is most evil.
As if the holy one is going to be treated as if he is most unholy, most unrighteous.
And what do we say about that?
We say what Paul said in his epistles.
Paul didn't know what to say.
So he used this Greek word, anemia, lawlessness.
That's what he called it.
He said, it is lawlessness.
It shouldn't be that the most holy would be treated as if he were the most unholy,
as if he were the most evil.
And here when he says, Father, let this cup pass from me, let this hour pass from me.
You see, the reason that he can cry out that way, you say, is this prayer righteous?
Yes.
Why?
Because he is innocent.
He doesn't deserve to go to the cross.
He can say, if there's any other way, let this cup pass from me because I don't deserve
to be treated as the most evil.
Now, the second thing to say is, have you, you know, have you ever had those moments where
you say the wrong thing to somebody and you text the wrong thing to somebody?
You do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
You sin and it hurts somebody else.
And you carry the weight of that and a little bit of guilt in that.
And it kind of sticks with you all day long.
And you're still laying in bed at night and you're thinking about it and thinking, if only
I wouldn't have said that.
I just wish I could go back and not have said that.
So we all know what it's like to carry sorrows and to carry sorrows that are born by way of
guilt that we feel in our lives.
I'm a minister, as you know, and many of you minister to people all the time and I do too.
And in different ways, all of us have felt this in different seasons of life.
But sometimes you get called in to carry the weight of other people's burdens and other
people's guilt.
And it's not easy all the time.
And all of you have experienced that.
As modern people, sometimes maybe we go to work and our neighbor, our colleague at work is an
overshare.
And our colleague at work, you know, says everything and you think, you overshare.
Eventually you get bold enough to say it.
You know, you overshare.
You tell me too much.
I don't want to know all that.
I've got my own problems.
I can't carry all of your problems.
I can't.
I'm weighed down by my issues.
I can't deal with your issues.
And imagine when we as modern people say, you know, I can barely deal with my own guilt
and my own problems and my own issues.
What it means to say that in this moment, Jesus has realized he's carrying, he's about to carry
the weight and shame of the sins of the whole world.
What does it mean?
I don't know what it means.
Thirdly, because of that, he will bear the wrath of God fully.
The punishment that we deserve.
And so what he's agonizing over in the garden is that what every injustice in all of world
history has ever deserved, whatever act of rebellion against God deserves, that will be
his to bear in the early hours of the next morning.
What does it mean?
To say it in brief, I think you take all the descriptions of hell, all the descriptions of
hell and different metaphors and different ways that the Bible uses phrases to describe
what being separated from God is like, and that will come down upon Jesus and more.
He will go to hell at the cross.
He will bear the full agony of God's wrath.
And the Bible doesn't tell us all it means.
Now, this is where so many people in our city will say, you know, I, okay, I'm open to a God
of love, but to talk about him saying, my father, would this cup of wrath,
passed by me, but the God of wrath, you know, if you're, if you're saying tonight, theologically
that Jesus is about to be in an agony, we cannot imagine because of the wrath of his father,
that seems unnecessary.
If God is love.
And so, so many people in our city, and maybe some of us tonight will wrestle with that.
If God is love, then why does it have to be this way?
Why can't he just, why can't he just forgive us and not have the agony of the garden, the
agony of the cross, the cup poured out upon him?
Do we have to say that God gets angry over sin and pours out his cup of wrath on Jesus?
Now, for lack of more time to prepare, let me quote for you from Tim Keller and what he
says to help us, because this is such a helpful statement.
He says, look, if you want, don't create a false dichotomy.
If you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God.
Because just think for a second, loving people, loving people, people who love people, they
get angry, not in spite of the fact that they're loving, but because they're loving.
In fact, the more people you love and the more deeply you love people, the angrier you
will get in life.
Why?
When you see people who are ravaged by something.
In fact, if you see people who are ravaging themselves, you get mad.
You get mad because you love them.
And we're told in Psalm 145 that God loves everything he's made.
And the reason he is angry is because of what's going on down here.
Therefore, with all due respect, Keller writes, it is foolish to say, I don't want a wrathful
God or an angry God.
I want a loving God.
If he's loving, he has to be angry, very angry at evil.
He has to do something about it.
And so what we're seeing in this moment is Christ bowed over by the agony of facing
what has to be done about it.
And in this moment, he's realizing, I will do something about it.
I must do something about it.
You see what this means when he says this, the agony is because he wants to do something
about it for you.
And what it means is that injustice and sin against God is really real on the one hand.
And on the other hand, what it means is that God's love for you is really real.
And so in this moment, the reason that this has to take place, you see, it's because he's
saying, I must be crushed.
Thy will be done.
Lord, if there's any other way, but thy will be done because he's saying, I find you that
valuable.
I will not let you die in the midst of your injustice.
I will not let you go to hell.
I will go to hell for you.
You see what he's saying?
And this moment is this is how valuable he finds you.
This is how much he loves you.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that you would not perish,
but instead that you could have everlasting life.
And this is the moment.
This is the cost.
He must be crushed.
And here in the garden, he's showing us by his emotional agony that he is to be crushed.
Now, look, this is where the question, questions Jesus asked our series, where it really comes
in because he turns then to the disciples because he had asked them to watch and pray with him.
And so you'll see in verse 34, how he had said to them, my soul is so sorrowful to death.
Remain here and watch.
Now, in Luke's gospel and the synoptics, you have a little bit more text.
And what he tells them is that in the passage just before this, especially you're going to face temptation like I am.
So in other words, what he's, it's can be a little bit difficult to understand.
But when he says to them in this short phrase, remain here and watch, he's saying, remain here and pray to watch yourself.
Because you're about to face a temptation like I am.
He was being tempted in this moment, the agony of facing God's wrath to forsake the mission.
And he never would.
But he's saying, you're also going to be tempted tonight.
And what were they tempted to do?
They were tempted to betray him.
And so when he comes back and he finds them asleep, he finds Simon Peter asleep.
What's happening here is that he gets off of his face in verse 35.
He had been praying on his face in agony before his God.
And all of a sudden he gets up.
He goes over to where Simon Peter is and he's doing a pastoral check-in.
You know, this is a pastoral visit.
And he's saying, I left you here to watch and to pray for yourself because you're about to face a temptation to betray me.
And so he goes and he checks in.
He's, you see, he can't help but be Christ, the heart of mercy, the heart of the pastor for his people.
And he comes here and he checks in on Simon Peter.
And you know, you know, like when, when I want to really get the attention of my children, I don't just talk to them.
I say their name.
You remember that they, your parents, they don't just say, they don't just say some random old command.
They say, Corey.
And here Jesus turns to Simon Peter when he comes to the question in verse 37.
And he says, Simon, are you sleeping?
Could you not watch for me one hour?
So in the two questions, you've got first the statement in plain fact and of his name, Simon, are you sleeping?
Is this the fact I've left you here to pray?
And then secondly, the failure.
And you move down just a little bit longer.
And we realize how this is sometimes veiled in the text and it's so important for us to see that when he says, watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.
Then he says, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
And do you see what he's saying?
You see what he's saying?
He's saying, I've come back.
He comes back twice.
He asked them the question three times.
Are you still sleeping?
Why?
Because he's saying, I want you to watch and pray for yourself because I know how weak you are.
And when he comes back and he finds them sleeping again, he says, I know you want to want to pray, but you're weak.
And then he says, it's enough.
And he turns his face to the cross.
Do you see what drove Jesus to say, I will go to the cross.
I will bear the agony of the sins of the whole world.
It's because he went and he found Simon Peter and the other disciples sleeping.
And he said, look, I know you're trying, but you're so weak.
I've got to do this for you.
It's the shepherd's heart for you is to say, I know that you cannot help, but be indifferent.
I know that your heart is so sinful.
Can you imagine Jesus Christ asking you, can you just stay awake on the night of my crucifixion and pray for me?
You think right now in this moment, boy, I would, I would do it.
I would never let Jesus go into such agony, Jesus Christ, and not be for him and with him and pray for him.
But he's saying, no, you're, you want to, you want to want to, you want to care.
You want to fight your indifference as a Christian.
You want to not be bored with the faith.
You want to care about the gospel.
You want to evangelize.
You want all these things, but you're weak.
Therefore, it's enough.
I've seen enough.
I must go to the cross.
I must take the wrath of God for this one and for all of us.
You see how much of a pastor's heart he has as he, this question, what it really means.
He doesn't give up on them and he doesn't give up on you.
And really, when he asked Simon Peter, could you not simply watch one single hour?
He's not really asking about 60 minutes of prayer.
He's asking you, do you struggle with sleeping on Christ?
Do you struggle with indifference to him?
Do you struggle with boredom with the gospel, with the fact of him?
Have you abandoned him?
Have you betrayed him?
Have you sinned against him?
Have you rejected him?
Have you walked away from him?
That's the question he was asking.
And what was being said in this moment is, though I sleep on him, he does not sleep on us.
He will not.
He will go all the way for you in this moment.
If you don't see the weight and the reality of God's wrath, the justice that had to be poured out upon him,
on the one hand, you're not recognizing your own sleepiness and struggle with indifference.
On the other hand, you're not recognizing how valuable he finds you.
You're denying both those things if you don't see that God must be angry with sin and must pour wrath upon his only begotten son if we're ever to be forgiven.
He carried our griefs and our sorrows and our sins into hell itself so that we would not have to.
That's his pastor's heart for us in this question.
So finally, this gives us, there's so much more in this passage we could look at, but let me finish with this.
There's a model for dealing in this with our own emotional pain until we see our Lord, until Christ comes again.
And so what is it?
Look, you too, we saw in the Psalms this morning, and we can say tonight, we all have weeping and grieving and sorrow in our lives.
You have a weeping and grieving Savior.
No other religion can say that, that they have a weeping and grieving Savior, a Savior that would take the weight of such emotional agony for them.
He knows what it's like.
And even more than that, let me finish by asking, what do you do with your emotions, your terrors in the night, your grief, your sorrow, your agonies?
How does Jesus here, after he goes to the cross for you, he faces such spiritual agony for you, how does he model for you what to do with the inevitable disappointments and pains of your life?
That's a big discussion.
Let me give you a few things to walk away with.
First, if you are struck or surprised by Jesus's emotions in this passage, and we should be, we should be, it is because our emotions are cultured.
Now, what I mean by that is not that our emotions, you know, go to the orchestra and go out to high afternoon tea.
They're not cultured.
They don't visit the modern art museum, our emotions.
What I mean by cultured is all of our emotions are conditioned by our environment.
So, our emotions in our lives are trained.
They're conditioned by an environment.
And typically, it's fair to say, I think, that we are more stoic than Jesus Christ ever was.
And in Hebrews 5, 7, we have a parallel passage to this that says,
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears.
He wept and he cried out in prayer, not just in the Garden of Gethsemane, but throughout his life, throughout his ministry.
And so, one of the questions we have to ask tonight is,
In what ways does my culture and my experiences condition my emotions?
That's not a bad thing.
It's a necessary thing.
But we have to ask the second question is,
Do I allow the Bible to shape my emotional life as much as anything else?
We say, I want the Bible to shape my ethical life.
I want the Bible to shape my intellectual life.
But does the Bible also shape your emotional life?
And you can read the Psalms, Psalm 91, and you can come to the emotional life of our Lord and see the way that it drives us.
We have a reference point for the truth of what our emotional life can and should look like all across the scriptures.
Secondly, when you face emotional agony and pain, Jesus says, remember this, Jesus says with a pastoral heart tonight to you,
Your soul is willing, but your flesh is weak.
And so, I want my emotions and my desires to align with what the Bible teaches and align with my faith.
I want to want Christ.
I want to want an hour of prayer with him.
I want to want, but when I sit down for the hour of prayer, I get distracted by the amount of dust that is sitting on the windowsill in the manse, you know?
And so do all of us.
We struggle like Simon Peter.
And it's just important to hear tonight him say, I know that you want, because I've revealed myself to you.
I know that you want to want me, but your flesh is weak.
And Christ has a pastor's heart for you when he goes to the cross.
Thirdly, what can we do?
Very simple from this passage.
He teaches us here.
He shows the disciples here.
He says, well, go and fall on your face and pray.
So it says, as was his custom, he went to the Garden of Gethsemane.
He had a place.
He goes to his place to pray.
He goes to pour out his soul to God on his face.
And so he's got a place.
He's got a set rhythm of prayer.
And he wants the disciples to have that too.
And he prays his emotions.
He wears his emotions before the Lord.
Do you do that?
Do you pray with an honesty of soul?
Do you use posture and prayer on your knees, before your face, before the Lord in the quiet place?
And we see a model for that, that you can say in Psalm 42, with Psalm 42,
my soul is downcast and dejected before thee, O God.
People are saying to me, where is your God?
So I come today to pour out my soul on my face before you.
Have you practiced postures of prayer in the same way?
We see a model here.
And then lastly, ultimately, how do you face agony?
Where do you go?
Where do you go in the moments of your life, like we saw this morning,
where you say, danger is all about me.
The dark forest have come upon me.
Why?
Why me?
Why this?
And here's what you say.
You look at the Garden of Gethsemane.
You look at the Christ of the cross.
And you say, I do not know all that God is doing in this world through the pain of suffering
and the pain of the emotional agony that I've experienced in my life.
But here's what I do know.
My Savior faced an emotional, spiritual agony that became hell itself for me.
I know my Savior has faced an emotional, spiritual, and physical agony that became hell itself for me.
And so what do you do?
You behold Him.
You look at Him.
And you say, I look at what He bore for me.
I know that He knows what it's like, what I'm going through today.
He's a man of sorrows.
He's acquainted with so much grief.
And you've got to allow that to lift up your soul and say, as we saw this morning,
He covers me under His wings at the cross.
The cup of wrath He drank on that morning has become for us and one day will fully become for us the cup of festival wine.
That's our future.
And so let's share in the sign of that cup, that feast now.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank You for the emotional life of our Lord.
We thank You, Jesus, for the way You were willing to endure such agony for us.
And we come now tonight in all sorts of emotional spaces and places in our lives.
And we ask now that as we come to the table, come to the cup, come to the bread broken,
that represents and signs forth Your body.
We know that we dwell with You now by the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit.
So we ask that You would meet with us and condition our emotions.
Teach us, Lord, how to bow ourselves fully unto You,
all because You already have represented us at the cross.
And so we pray that as we sing, and we pray it in Jesus' name.
Amen.