7 Portraits in Prayer, Day 6: Morning

Week 1, Power to Pray, Day 6: A Parallel in Purpose and Power

(Read Matthew 26:36–46)

 The Spiritual Parallel: In the New Testament, there is a parallel passage to Exodus 17 and the intercession of Moses for Joshua/Jesus. It is when the greatest of all battles took place, during the prayer of our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus told eight of the disciples to sit while He went to battle in prayer. As Joshua fought his battle in Rephidim, Jesus fought in the garden. He asked for the remaining three to intercede for him, just as Moses, Aaron, and Hur interceded on the hill.

Instead of sitting on a stone, as Moses did, Peter, James and John were only a stone’s throw away from where Jesus prayed. They did not stand with arms raised, as Moses did. They literally laid down on their job as prayerful intercessors and fell asleep on their watch when they should have been watching and praying.

It was not the hands of the three would-be intercessors that became heavy but rather their eyelids. They could see Jesus, fighting in prayer, falling down on His face, and crying out to His Father in heaven as He prayed, as He faced the temptation of letting the cup pass.

Like Joshua’s battle with the fleshly descendants of Esau, Jesus’s battle was with the flesh, His own flesh, which did not want to drink of the cup of death. It was not only physical death that caused him to sweat great drops of blood; the Holy Son of God would also taste the penalty of spiritual death for all the sins of the world. Since Jesus was sinless, we see that sorrow and grief can be a godly attribute and not solely a human emotion. Ephesians 4:30 states that we can grieve the Holy Spirit, and in Jesus’s case, one purpose of prayer was to align His will with His Father’s will.

Three times the enemy attacked. As Jesus narrowed his gaze from His heavenly Father to His drowsy prayer warriors, He saw them sleeping. “My soul is sorrowful, even to death. Watch with Me,” He asked of Peter, James, and John (Matthew 26:38).

The epic prayer battle in the garden of Gethsemane was less than an hour underway when He returned to the disciples. He had been frustrated with them before, but not like tonight, not for this battle. They had promised that they would never fall away; surely, they would not fall asleep!

“What?” He asked. “Could you not watch for an hour?”

May I step into this scenario and ask, do we not also fail to watch and pray? Is there any among us who can brashly say, “My prayer life is surely something to brag about?” For the next two days, morning and evening, we will look to the spiritual applications for power in prayer.

Let us purpose in our hearts to pray more diligently.

 

Pray this prayer to God: “Dear Lord, I confess there are times when people have asked me to pray for them, and I have fallen down on my job as intercessor. As I spend these next few weeks, looking at portraits in prayer, show me insights of how I can grow in this spiritual discipline. In Jesus’s Name, I pray. Amen.”

Click here for Day 6, Evening.