This recording is from Christ Kingdom Church in Waterford Lakes, East Orlando. Visit us online at christkingum.org for our calendar, driving directions, and more audio recordings.
Simon, he said to Peter, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The Spirit is willing but the body is weak. Once more he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy. They didn't know what to say to him. Returning the third time he said to them, are you still sleeping and resting enough? The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man has betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go. Here comes my betrayer. This is the word of the Lord. At this point the third to fifth graders can be dismissed.
Well good morning. It's good to be with you on this Sabbath morning. As we come to our text this morning we find Jesus in between the last supper with his disciples, the last intimate gathering with his disciples and between the place of that and the place in time when he would find himself hung on a cross. From the beginning of his ministry, Christ has set out with his face set towards the cross, moving towards the cross and we find kind of a turn in the story, not so much a turn in the story but the beginning of the climax as we come to the Garden of Gethsemane. I think that I've shared with you maybe before the illustration of as a counsellor, as a counselling student, one of the amazing honors that I get as I sit with people and as they talk about really heavy and hard difficult things in their lives is over time I get to kind of have a bird's eye view of the ways that people are changing and the ways that people are growing, which is really such an amazing honor. And there are often times in counselling where my job is to point out and say you have changed and grown so much in the past you wouldn't have lived like this. You're becoming a better man, you're becoming a better woman but don't stop, don't stop there just because you're growing some, don't stop, keep pressing on. And I think that this morning that God, if me as a broken sinful man can see change and growth in someone's life and celebrate it but say don't stop, keep going. How much more must God have a vision for who it is that he is making us to be? And it strikes me that as we follow Christ, if we are to follow him faithfully, we will often find ourselves in similar places that he finds himself in. Recently I have been reading through the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the second or third time of my life and just as I've been a student in school, I've just found it's really important to read stories. I read enough school books and textbooks that it's important I think for just me to survive the season of school to read stories. And so I've just finished the two towers and I've started the return of the king. And if you've not read or seen the movies, essentially what's happening is there's one magic ring that the great bad guy has created to rule all of middle earth. And Frodo and Sam are these little hobbit guys that are taking it to destroy and mount doom. Okay we can all put on our door catch for just one minute. It's okay we can all do that for one minute this morning. And so as they're going the journey gets harder and harder and they find themselves in darker and more difficult circumstances. And they hit this point where they have to choose will I press on or will I just call it a quits. And Frodo who is just who's the ring bear who is carrying the weight of this difficult journey and feels very defeated and he's talking about the country that they're in and he says to Sam I don't like anything here at all. Step or stone, breath or bone, earth, air and water they all seem to curse. But so our path is laid. Yes that so said Sam and we shouldn't be here at all if we had known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs Mr. Frodo adventures as I used to call them. I used to think that there were things that the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for because they wanted them because they were exciting and life was a bit dull. A kind of sport as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered or the ones that stay in the mind in the heart. Folks seem to have just been landed in them. Usually their paths were laid that way as you put it. But I expect that they had lots of chances like us of turning back only they didn't. And if they had we shouldn't know because they wouldn't because they would have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on and not all to a good end mind you. At least not to what folks inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know coming home and finding things all right they're not quite the same like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear though they might be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of tale we have fallen into. And as we approach the passage of Gethsemane it strikes me. Jesus knew what sort of tale he was wandering into. And he chose it anyway. And we this morning have the same choice. We have the same choice whether we will follow Christ into the Garden of Gethsemane. And it's a weighty choice. It's a choice that we can choose to run and flee from. Or it's one that we can choose to engage and move into. And so what does that even mean? So Jesus and His disciples that go to Gethsemane. And I'll just note very briefly Gethsemane was a somewhat familiar place for Jesus and His disciples. At least in two other passages we find Jesus and His disciples going to Gethsemane. And so it just strikes me that what we do and how we live in the normalness and the familiar places of our lives determines what we'll do in the big moments of our lives. And as we engage the familiar day-to-dayness of our lives ultimately that's shaping what kind of lives, what kind of store we are living into. And any dealer says how we spend our days and our hours is ultimately how we spend our lives. So what you do in the familiar places of life are very important. What we do in the valley, Gethsemane was this garden kind of in a valley. What we do in the valley shapes and determines what we do on the hillside. Jesus interestingly enough goes from the valley of Gethsemane in the garden to trial but then that leads to Him being crucified on the hill. The decisions that we make in the valleys determine what we do on the hilltop. And ultimately what we find in this passage is that in the normalness of our lives and the familiar places suffering will find us. As Jesus goes into the garden it says that He is deeply distressed and troubled and then He says to my to His disciples, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch. Tim Keller in his book The Kings Cross describes suffering as the difference and the chasm between the circumstances of our lives and the desires of our hearts. Just a really maybe simplistic illustration of that. When I was 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, embarrassingly enough, the embarrassing part is that I is not that I played baseball. I played sports all my life growing up. The embarrassing part is this, I was such a competitive young man. And I was pretty good at baseball. I was so competitive that if I ever made an out, I would go back to the dugout crying, so angry at myself for having made an out, so disappointed with myself for having made an out. For our team lost, I would, the whole rest of the day just be depressed or whatever that have, whatever that looks like for a 5, 6, 7 year old. And so in no ways is that suffering for the sake of righteousness is the disciples talk about later in the New Testament. But it's a very simplistic picture of suffering. My desires were that I would hit a home run every time. If not a home run, a trip or a double or a single, I would at least get on base every time that I hit. And my desires were that every game that we played, we would win. The circumstances of baseball are that even the best players get 3 out of 10 hits. And so that led to me suffering. There was a great chasm between the circumstances of my life and the desires of my heart. Suffering is something that leads to death. But in the paradox of the economy of the gospel, death leads us to life. And so where do we see that in this passage? We see Jesus beginning to press into the realities of the awareness of how difficult of a path that has been laid out before him is. As he chooses to continue walking on it, as he chooses to not leave from it, he stays on the path and is aware. I long to remain one with my father. I long to not have to suffer this affliction. But the chasm between my desires and the circumstances of what I know is coming are so huge that he finds himself in the garden overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. And so what does he do with this? What does he do with this suffering that's placed before him, this chasm that's placed before him? Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, the hour might pass from him. Abba, father, he said, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will but what you will. So what we see Jesus doing is bringing before his father a desire for changed circumstances. He asks God to change the realities of what he is expecting to come. And so as we as we suffer, I think that that would be an appropriate and safe place to start. I think that God is a father who delights in us bringing the cries and whispers of our hearts and souls. And so as we struggle, as we live in the chasm between our desire and our circumstances, I think that God would invite us to confess that to him, to ask that he would change the circumstances. But is so often the case, and is the case in the story, circumstances will not change. And I think that if we're honest with ourselves often in the light of that, we choose to kill desire. It's easier to face circumstances that we don't like if we don't desire deeply. We hate the desire. A wise man once told me that often we learn to hate the thirst rather than the desert. And so as we struggle, we kill desire and we turn away from it. Don't we all do this? Don't we all in our hearts and souls make vows when we are hurt when we struggle and we suffer? We make vows to change the way that we desire. And as many of you may know, if you can't hear to my voice, I'm a southern young man from Knoxville, Tennessee. And so that's where the little bit of the red neck may come into my voice. And when I moved here two years ago, I own a home in Knoxville and I put it on the market to sell and it didn't sell and so I rented it. And it's honestly just kind of been a nightmare for the last two years of renters moving in, breaking lease, moving out, repairs, etc. I mean normal home things that are really hard to deal with when you live 650 miles away. And so when my renters broke lease and moved out in February, I decided okay I know that I'm staying and living in Orlando. So I'm just going to go for broke. I'm going to put it on the market and just sell it and just hope and trust that it will sell sooner than later. And so as of last month, I had a contract on my home. Someone had made a bid, was excited about that, was hopeful for that. Just because of the housing market, I was selling it a little bit underwater. That's okay. I just need to be done with, I need to be rid of it. And so I've been moving towards a closing date at the end of May and I get an email from our realtor this week saying, the contract has been terminated and canceled. The buyer had a family member that was going to be giving them some money to help buy it and that family member has pulled that off the table. And so the buyer cannot buy it again, buy it anymore. And so I've had this contract is dead. I'm back at square one, which in a lot of ways kind of just feels like huh, that's really not surprising. That's kind of been all that's happened with this house and you can even hear in my voice a little tinge of bitterness and a little tinge of despair. That's what we do, that's what I do at least with my desires, with my suffering. I long to be rid of that house because I don't live there anymore. It was a good house, but it's time for me to be out of it. A long for that to happen, but the circumstances continue to stack up against that and there's a great chasm between the reality and what my desires are. And so it's easier to hate the thirst, to hate the desire, to turn off the desire, to despair. And yet that is nowhere what we see Christ doing. In this passage, Christ asks for a change of circumstances and realizes that's not what's going to happen. He says, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me, yet it's not what I will, but what you will. And so what we see Christ doing is submitting his desire, submitting before the Lord the reality that he will suffer. And so just really simply this morning, where are places in your life that you are suffering? Where are places in your life that you are called to suffer? Often that will take place in the context of relationship. I think that in his kind as God invites us to suffer because of what it does to us. So where are the places in your life where the circumstances of life and the desires of your heart don't match up? I think that God wants to meet us there. And if we are going to avoid suffering, if we are going to avoid suffering by killing desire, we will avoid life because it is in the gospel economy that death becomes life. To avoid suffering is to avoid the path that is laid before us. To avoid suffering is to avoid being like Christ. Paul talks repeatedly again and again that we are made like Christ in his sufferings. And maybe even a step further in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. I can think of no better response to our sufferings than to mourn and grieve them and owe what we miss from God by not being honest with our mourning and suffering. We miss his comfort. We miss what he asked to offer us in the midst of suffering which is himself. Jesus prays, take this cup from me. And so I just want to compare and contrast two cups. This morning as we come, we're drinking from one of two cups. The first cup that Jesus is referring to here would be I think the cup of God's wrath. And there are many places in the Old Testament where God's wrath is attributed to being like a cup that is poured out, that people are forced to drink. It's not just kind of poured out, but it's almost literally the picture of a mom and dad holding a child's nose, pouring the food and water down the child's mouth to make it go down. The cup of God's wrath is poured out and it's not just a choice, but it is forced down. And Jesus in his prayer is saying, God, please spare me from the cup of your wrath. And so what is that? What is God's cup of wrath? Well, I think one picture of this would be in Romans. Paul talks regularly about God's wrath being poured out, but interestingly enough, the way that it's poured out is by giving us over to our own sinful and selfish desires. I think that if you've spent enough time with children, you might have a little picture of this. I remember when I was six years old, my brother and I, a neighborhood kid wanted to build essentially a car that we could ride up and ride down the hills with. So not a gas powered thing, but just blocks of wood and wheels literally, too, as crazy as that sounds and as dangerous as that sounds, that sounds like what little boys do. And so we were trying to make cars that we could ride down the hills in our neighborhood with. And so I just, I got this idea and I presented this idea to them and they just told me that, you know, being older and wiser than me, they told me, that's not going to work. That's just really stupid. And in my stubbornness, I said, well, you know what? I'm going to do it on my own. I'm going to do what I want because this idea is going to work. And here's the idea. So you get, you get a base board. You get side panels. And then my dad, who had cut down some trees and made firewood, he had different, different, huge piles of firewood. And what I was going to do is I was going to use these, these logs, these firewood as the wheels. And the way that I was going to get them on there, of course, was by putting a nail through the log into the floorboard, which if you think about it, okay, here's the floorboard, here's the wheel that's supposed to be turning. But how can a wheel turn if there's a nail through it? Yeah, that doesn't work. And there was in my older brother and our friend in the neighborhood saw that. We're aware of that. Try to point it out. As a six-year-old boy, I was too stubborn. I believe too much of myself. And I think that if you've spent enough time with young children, you've experienced that the idea of seeing them, knowing their path is foolish and folly, offering them wisdom and still having them say, no, I'm going to do it my way. Haven't you, if you spent time with kids, haven't you experienced that? And interestingly enough, God's wrath is saying, you want to do it your way? Go ahead, because it's a path of foolishness and folly. And the consequences of your sin, of you choosing your own path is that you have chosen a path that is not going to work. You've chosen a path that is foolish and folly. And so God's wrath is poured out by giving us over to our sinful and selfish passions. And for Christ, God's wrath that was poured on him was in the form of forsaking and removing his presence from him. As Jesus breathed his last, he said, Father, why have you forsaken me? Jesus could find no comfort in Psalm 23 that though he walked through the valley of the shadow of death, the rod and staff, forever with him, Jesus for the first time, in eternity, experienced the absence of his Father. He experienced the forsakenness that we deserve, that it was our cup to bear. And so Jesus takes the cup of God's wrath and drinks it. He takes the consequences of our foolish and folly and our sinful choices. He takes the consequences of being forsaken and forgotten and left and abandoned by God, which makes me think if God's wrath is poured out in that way, that the very best thing for you and I this morning is more of God. If God's wrath is poured out and letting us go our own way, then God's grace is offering us more of himself. And so Christ asked for that cup to be removed. And as we know and present further into this story over the next upcoming weeks, we will continue to see the wrath of God poured out upon Christ. So this morning we are finding ourselves either drinking from the cup of God's wrath or the cup of the new covenant, the cup in which Jesus even in this passage before the passage which Scott mentioned and preached on last week, we drink from that cup, if not the cup of God's wrath. And the cup of the new covenant is the cup in which we are reestablished to right relationship with God. We are no longer separated. We are no longer forsaken. We are no longer abandoned by God.
We are called to repent of our selfish and sinful patterns that lead us into fully, to foolish and folly. And the cup of the new covenant is a constant reminder that we are to be restored to being one with the Father. As we come this morning and drink of his blood and eat of his flesh, we are reminded of the ways in which we have aired and strayed like lost sheep, but nonetheless the cup of wrath is not ours to drink. The cup that is ours to drink is right relationship with the Father. And we will see this even further as we look at the disciples.
And so going on into the story, Jesus returns to his disciples and he finds them asleep. And he says, Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch him pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The Spirit is willing but the body is weak. Real quick, I would submit if the purpose of Christ's suffering was to bring life and health and peace to those who no longer have to drink of the cup of God's wrath, the purpose of our suffering is to sanctify us. In Hebrews 11, the writer says this, therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and let the sin that so easily attangles and let us run with perseverance to the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus the author and perfect of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such oppression from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons. My son did not make light of the Lord's discipline. It did not lose heart when he rebukes you because the Lord disciplines those that he loves and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. So endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons for what son is not disciplined by his father. And so as we experience suffering as we experience God's discipline, God and his faithfulness won't leave us saying no, I do it my way. He cares far too much about to let us go down the path of foolishness. And we can see that in the disciples here. Peter, James and John are kind of the A team, the all star team of the disciples. Jesus, you know with his 12 disciples says stay here, wait, but not you Peter, James and John, I want you to come with me further and he takes them further into the garden. And he says sit here and pray, wait and pray. And Jesus goes and prays and comes back and finds that they have fallen asleep, that they have failed what it is that he asked him. And he challenges them and says can you not stay awake for one hour? Don't you see how much I'm suffering here? If you really loved me you would be weeping with me because we weep and mourn for those that we care about. But you have fallen asleep, stay awake, watch, wait and pray. And he goes away and prays and comes back again and they have fallen asleep. And then the same very thing happens a third time. And interestingly enough, James and John are two disciples, two brothers that had affirmed to Jesus, yes we can drink the cup that you have. Not knowing what they were even meaning. Jesus asked them if they could drink the cup and they said yes, Jesus were with you, 100% were with you, we're not leaving you, we'll drink the cup that you drink and they failed him. They couldn't even stay awake for an hour. And Peter, the one who so definitively and adamantly said, I'll die with you, Jesus. I will go with you wherever you go. Not only does he fall asleep but in the next very hours will deny him three times. We all find ourselves returning again and again to the same broken sisters, the same places of failure where we fail. God and those to whom that God has given us, we fail again and again and again. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I think that most of us this morning are because of being made new in Christ, have good enough hearts that we would say, Jesus, I would follow you wherever you called and can mean that truthfully in our hearts right now but an hour from now, I'm going to do it. I want. I'm choosing my path, God, that seems like a really stupid path. We choose again and again the same ridiculous foolish paths. We fall asleep and fail Christ at the times that he calls us to step up the most. But God's sovereignty is much greater than our failures. God's sovereignty and his goodness is so much better, so much bigger and faster than our weaknesses. And so when we like the disciples, find ourselves having fallen asleep and back again and again in the same broken sisters, we must remember that the cup of wrath is not ours to drink. Those who have listened to and welcomed the one who stands at the door knocks are the ones of the new covenant, the ones who drink of the cup of new covenant. And as we drink of the new covenant, we are called to die to our old self and step into the man and woman that God is inviting us to be and calling us to be. This means that we can and must see any suffering as an exposure of sin and brokenness as our part of a path of the journey of sanctification. And like Frodo and Sam this morning, we can run from it. We can run from suffering. We can run from our failures or we can embrace the goodness of the gospel which says the cup of wrath is not ours to drink. But we drink the cup that invites us to taste and see and know that he is good. And thinking about the disciples and their failures, I think about one of my favorite passages by one of my favorite writers who says this. It then follows that forgiveness is not much of a concept without something for which to forgive and to be forgiven. Healing has no meaning in the absence of illness. Peace is no treasure at all to those who have no no war and no strife. Saying hello has no joy in it without the saying of a goodbye. And so I'm coming to believe that the thing that God said just before let there be light was goodbye dark. And that Noah could not say hello to the rainbow without first having said goodbye to the world as it disappeared beneath the waters of the flood. And that something deep and mysterious about saying goodbye from the bottom of a pit made the hello that Joseph spoke to his father all those years later all the more wondrous. Goodbye Egypt turned out to be another way for the Israelites to say hello Canaan. Goodbye Jesus of Nazareth, whisper Mary through her tears at the foot of the cross on Friday afternoon. Hello Lord of the universe you murmurs to the one she mistakes for a gardener on the Sunday morning. And even Jesus himself the word that was with God in the beginning could not completely know the father's love without leaving home until he came among us. God's goodbye ringing in his ears. Jesus could not know anything of providence or mercy or forgiveness or grace. He could not know the side of God that can be known only by those who have been away. He could not know what it is like to be missed to be loved from afar to be whispered to in the darkness of the wilderness or the garden or the tomb. He could not know what it means to recognize God's face in the sunrise or pray God's name into the glittering silence of this guy on a sweet summer night. He could not know what it means to see God in the face of a child or hear God in the rustle of the trees. If in heaven there is no sin, no sickness, no pain, no suffering, then there is no mercy either and no compassion, no healing, no grace. There are no reunions, no fathers running down the road towards children who have been away, no neighbors crowding around to celebrate the finding of a lamb that has just come home on the shoulders of the shepherd. Who can blame God for wanting us to know these things about the one who dreamed us into being until there is a goodbye, there is no hello, until there is a journey away, there is no coming home. And so this morning as we come and drink of the new covenant, we remember that God experienced sending his son Jesus, that Jesus experienced the ultimate goodbye of forgotten presence of God so that we may be restored and renewed into relationship with God. We are invited again this morning to return home to the one who spoke us into being and who delights over us, who rejoices over us with singing in spite of our failures, in spite of the fact that we fall asleep and selfishly and foolishly say, I am going to do it my own way. We can taste and see that he is good again and his mercies are new even in this morning. Let's pray.