Yesterday we read about the first council at Jerusalem, and read about James speaking up from Amos 9:11-12. Today, let’s read that passage in it’s context. Read the whole chapter of Amos 9.

Questions:

1. What is this chapter about? What is being described?
2. How does the chapter make a shift from judgment to hope towards the end?
3. Why do you think James pointed to this prophecy in order to validate the decision to allow gentile believers to free free from Jewish laws? In other words, how does his use of this prophecy make sense?

There comes a time in every kind of training when your body hits the wall. It doesn’t matter how bad you want it on the inside, you just can’t keep going. This is one of the best examples of how our spirits and our bodies are intimately connected.

Jesus’ best friends had this problem at the worst possible time. At the cusp of his betrayal, public shame, and impending death sentence, Jesus took his closest partners on the greatest revolution of man and headed into the grove of olive trees at the garden of gethsemane for one reason: to pray. Jesus was on the verge of personal breakdown, beseeching God to change the course of history – if possible – and sweating blood in anxiety. He asked Peter, James, and John, his closest friends, to pray.

“Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “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” (Mark 14:37-38).”

They fell asleep.

I’m fascinated by this passage, mostly because of what Jesus is teaching about prayer, but partly because pf what we can infer.

Prayer is “watching”
Jesus talks about “seeing” in spiritual terms quite frequently, and here he seems to indicate that prayer is a kind of watchfulness that will actually make a difference. It’s important enough that he wakes them up to continue. I wonder how many of us feel that same sense of urgency about active prayer? Do we really think prayer will reveal anything? Do we think it matters?

The watchfulness of prayer guards us against temptation
Being watchful apparently had something to do with guarding against temptation. But what temptation? Usually when we hear that word we think of personal seduction – lust, greed, lying, etc. – but this isn’t the setting for those sorts of sins. It’s the middle of the night in an olive grove! I’m reminded of Jesus’ words in John 5, “I can only do what I see the father doing.” Perhaps Jesus is tying prayer to the ability to recognize what God is doing, and the inability to recognize God at work causes us to be tempted to resist it. After all, it was immediately after this that Peter tries to resist Jesus’ arrest with the sword, cutting off a soldiers ear. Jesus prayed, and recognized the work of God. Peter didn’t, and resisted it. Was that his “temptation?” If so, how often do we miss the move of God in our own midst because we’re not “watchful” in prayer?

Prayer is rigorous
Most disturbing, how often do we miss God’s move because we’re simply to spiritually “flabby” to keep up the pace? Jesus makes it clear that his three best friends don’t fail for lack of sincerity, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus is a seasoned veteran, able to keep long watch and run the spiritual race to completion, but the boys – being still only a few years into their training – are simply unable to keep up. Prayer is far more than an occasional therapy session with God that comes along whenever we feel the urge. Done properly, it is a rigorous endeavor that taxes the body as well as the mind, just like any other serious discipline. Only those who train accordingly, like Jesus, will persevere to see the prize that can only be recognized in prayer.

Prayer Exercise:
Time to stretch your limits. If you were training to run, you would add a little distance or a steeper incline. Let’s do the same. You’ve learned the Lord’s prayer as an outline for coming before God, now use it to push yourself. However long you normally pray, set aside a longer session. If you typically pray 10 minutes, set aside 30. If 30, set aside, 45, and so on. Now use each line of the Lord’s prayer as a point of meditation to walk yourself through a prayer that moves from reverence, to intimacy, to petition, confession, forgiveness, etc.

A word of caution: the point of this exercise is not length, it’s depth. Don’t go babbling on just for the sake of stretching it out (we’ve already learned about that, remember?). We need to learn to plumb the depth of our hearts, our world, and our God with our imagination in prayer. This is one way the Spirit get deep into us through prayer and begins to reveal to us what God is doing. This is how we learn to see.

The kind of “gift-community” we discussed in Part 4 would be remarkable in a world of greed, isolation, aggression, and loneliness. It would be conspicuously Godly or “Holy.” In fact, that’s the point. Ultimately, we are becoming eikons of God designed to both imitate Him and become a dwelling in which He lives by His Spirit (Eph 3:22). But what does it mean, practically speaking, to be God’s eikons? What does that look like?

Again, Jesus gives us the answer.