Today we visit Jesus again in the garden (Matt 26:39-44), only this time we zoom out from his admonition to Peter and view, instead, with the wide lens that gives us a brief peek into his own prayer life:

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.”

Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. ⁴¹“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”

He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”

When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.

There three things about Jesus’ prayer that I envy: The first is that he is persistent. Three times he prays the same prayer, urgently petitioning God to give him relief. Frankly, I rarely do more than utter a half-hearted plea.

The second is related to the first: I envy Jesus’ passion. I don’t mean merely his urgency – no doubt if I was convinced of my impending death I would be rather urgent as well – rather, I’m talking about the sense that Jesus really seemed to believe in the nearness of his hearer. We speak differently to people we know are listening, and even more differently when we know a person of means is listening. That is the passion I hear in Jesus’ voice. He knew God was listening and could do something about it. On my bad days I think I may have given up on that.

Lastly, I envy Jesus’ submission. As paradoxical as it might seem, I somehow manage to lack persistence and passion, yet overflow abundantly in obstinacy. Like some dumb animal I just can’t see it any way other than my own.

Like most good things, these three traits aren’t skills that can be taught by instruction, they’re character traits that must be caught by practice. Like the father who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”(Mk 9:24)  we may need to say, “Lord I pray. Help me to learn to pray!”

Prayer Exercise
This prayer exercise is a bit different because it doesn’t actually involve praying. At least, not at first. Your task this week is to find someone older who you believe has a good prayer life and interview them. It doesn’t have to be formal, they don’t even need to know you’re “interviewing” them. Just find a way to ask them some questions about prayer. What have they learned? Why do they pray? What does it help? Think about the questions you really want to know about prayer, and ask their perspective. Then come back here and share what you learned.

Then go pray.

Jesus didn’t just teach about prayer, he also prayed! This week we continue our prayer series by looking at examples of Jesus in prayer. We can learn much from seeing what his own prayer time looked like. Today we begin with a short glimpse into Jesus’ prayer life from Mark 1:35-37:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

The most obvious thing to notice about this passage is that Jesus took time, early in the day, to find solitude in prayer. So what’s so hard about that?

Time and solitude. That’s what’s hard.

We live in a society and in an era when these two resources might be more scarce than ever. We have more distractions and more commitments than we’ve ever had in human history. Just as yourself, “When do you have a significant amount of free time to spend alone?” If you’re like most people I know, the answer is, “almost never.” The thing we often miss about this passage is that Jesus was very busy too! Go ahead, read the whole chapter and ask yourself if you’ve ever been that busy! Jesus was so busy, in fact, that he had to get up early to pray alone.

Martin Luther is known to have said, “I have so much to do (today) that I should spend the first three hours in prayer.” The busier we are, the more we need prayer to keep us sane.

I think we have two choices. We either accept these limitations or we make a change in our own lives. We either continue with the pace of life that is distracted to us by a modern society obsessed with busyness, money, entertainment, and noise or we find something, somewhere to reject in order to live a more sane and sustainable life.

Here’s the thing, if you can’t even find a little time in your day (or week!) to pray alone then is that a sustainable lifestyle? How long can you realistically keep that up? If Jesus needed time alone to maintain a life of spirit, what makes us think we can do without it?

This isn’t about performance. This isn’t about merit. This is about nourishment. Prayer is the feasting of the soul on God. How long have you been starving yourself?

Exercise
There’s only one exercise today: Sit down with your calendar and make some changes to accommodate private, solitary prayer at least 3 times per week. Cut something out. Give something up. Be ruthless.  If you already do that, great! Take this time to pray like Jesus did.

his is the final exercise for our week of looking at what Jesus taught about prayer. Read Mark 9:14-29.

There is an inherent sadness in this account, it seems. Demonic forces are causing horrible suffering to a boy and his family, and the disciples are unable to do anything about it. In his commentary on Mark, William Lane remarks that this scene “exhibits the disaster which occurs when men from whom the power of faith may be expected are proven to be void of power when it is needed.” The disciples were “void of power,” unable to drive out the demon, unable to join God in his kingdom work in this instance.

Jesus himself drives out the demon, and afterward he withdraws with his disciples to a house for a time of debriefing. “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” they ask. Perhaps they were wondering if their technique was wrong, or if they said the wrong words, or in the wrong order. Maybe they didn’t ask the right questions or perform the right gestures. Or perhaps they were simply trying to follow Jesus and were discouraged that they didn’t seem to be able to do it. Why didn’t it work?

Jesus’ response has baffled many commentators and theologians: “This kind can only come out by prayer.”

What Jesus seems to be indicating is that prayer is a kind of training ground or practice field for ministry in the kingdom. There is a difference between the “in the moment” crisis of ministry and the “behind the scenes” training for ministry.

Just like an firefighter cannot expect to perform well “in the moment” simply because she wants to fight fires, we cannot expect to function effectively as agents of God’s kingdom “in the moment” just because we want to. Training is needed, for firefighters and exorcists. The training that firefighters undergo is meant to help them to automatically function well “in the moment.” Likewise, a consistent and deep life of prayer will help us function effectively “in the moment,” when kingdom breakthrough is needed.

The feeling the disciples had of being “void of power” is one I have felt many times: I encounter a situation into which I would love to bring a token of the kingdom, only to find myself powerless to do so. The good news is that the disciples, although they couldn’t do anything about this situation in Mark 9, are eventually able to do the kinds of things we see in Acts, presumably because they stuck with a long-term training regimen of disciples to Jesus and prayer.

This is also the good news for us. Although we may have squandered many opportunities in the past because of a lack of prayer, God’s forgiveness is available to us, and we can begin training today for greater kingdom effectiveness through prayer.

Prayer exercise
Write down your normal prayer rhythms, however scrawny they may be. What kinds of prayer… what times… how much time… don’t shy away from being brutally honest with yourself and God about how much time you actually spend at the “spiritual gym” of prayer.

Offer this rhythm to God in prayer and ask him to show you where you need to change your “workout.” You might need a little tweak here or there. You might need a complete overhaul. Just like with a physical workout, be careful not to push yourself too hard too quickly. Ask someone wiser to help you craft a “prayer workout” that will move you toward greater spiritual power and kingdom effectiveness.

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.

Read Matthew 5:17-20 first, and meditate on it, considering it together with what has come before it. Then read Mark 2:23-3:6 and Mark 7:1-23 and do the exercises below:

• Why would Jesus have to say, “do not think that I have come to abolish the law…”; why might people have been wondering about him?
• At what point could following Jesus lead us to actions that might appear to be breaking the law of Moses, but actually fulfill it?
• Yesterday you learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a concentration camp for opposing Hitler. What other people in history can you think of who, by following Christ faithfully, came into conflict with the laws and customs of their culture?