Personalized Inside Out
And so today, we find ourselves in a garden where a similar gift is being prepared.
36 Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ 37 He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’ Matthew 26:36-39
This scripture gives us a hint as to what Jesus was experiencing in the garden. However, too often I’ve focused on the sleepy disciples as that seems to be the role I play most easily. I’m distracted, I’m so unaware and often not present as to what is happening around me. And certainly, there is a message there for us.
But today, the described experience of Jesus is alive in my thoughts. I'm realizing that Jesus is monogramming my faith. He’s making it personal for me, these 2000 years later.
I see his vulnerability to the Father, his great sorrow as events began to unravel in his life. Through his words, I sense the pain that he is about to experience and even was experiencing as his community, those closest to him, could not stay awake with him in prayer, and in support. This emotional, mental strain that I see in Jesus, also lands on my doorstep.
For like most of us, I’ve cried out to God in sorrow, in disappointment, in happenings that I did not want in my life. I’ve asked Him to change the course of bad events, of hard situations, of sickness, and finally exhausted, and after many tears have turned to hope in his will for me and mine.
This struggle we see from Jesus is our monogram; it's an imprint that shows how deeply God understands us. He experienced for us the mental anguish of life, he pleaded with his Father to change the route he was on, he felt sorrow, he cried out, he experienced unimaginable emotion. He lived all our emotions; He looked to his Father for the strength to endure. And so can we. It’s truly an amazing, personalized gift. Our emotional pain was defeated and healed through the work, honesty and prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane. He showed us that the Easter crucifixion and resurrection is both a physical rebirth and a daily mental/emotional rebirth and resurrection.
He has monogrammed His victory over all our "sorrow and trouble." He offers us a life renewed from the inside.
You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you. Ephesians 4:21-22 The Message