Jesus' genuine humanity is revealed through his prayer life, particularly in Mark 1:35 and Mark 14:32. While Jesus demonstrated authority over demons, disease, and the Word of God, his solitary early morning prayer in Mark 1:35 highlights his personal dependence on the Father. Later, in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32), his profound distress and prayer reveal the depth of his human suffering and his reliance on God, even as he sought companionship from his disciples. The sermon emphasizes that this sense of dependence and need is crucial for our own spiritual lives and effective prayer.
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Those of you who have just come in today, what we've been trying to do is look at the genuine humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we began by considering Philippians chapter two so that we did not in any sense minimize his deity. This is the eternal Son of God who has taken a complete human nature and in his own choice has decided to live on a completely human level so that he shared our difficulties, life as we know it without taking any advantage of his own deity to make his life easier than it is for us. And then we were looking at his baptism and his temptation. Now I've just arbitrarily picked out another aspect of our Lord's genuine humanity as it's revealed in the Gospel.
Mark chapter one and verse thirty five. Or perhaps we can see the contrast, perhaps the connection beginning with verse thirty-two. Mark chapter one, verse thirty-two. That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons, and the whole city was gathered together about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him. And in the morning, a great while before day he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed. Now, chapter fourteen, and we'll read at verse thirty-two. And they went to a place which was called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, Sit here while I pray.
and he took with him Peter and James and John and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. And he said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch. And going a little farther, he found the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass drawing him. And he said, Abba, Father, All things are possible to thee. Remove this cup from me. Yes, not what I will, but what thou wilt. And he came and found them sleeping.
And he said to Peter, Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and As they
have heard sermons that would go something like this, whatever the reading for the particular day from the Old Testament, the man who spoke would say, On this passage, Rabbi Ben Joseph said so and so. Or on this passage, Rabbi Ben Eliezer, Rabbi the son of Eliezer, said so and so. And the whole of their ministry consisted in quoting what ancient rabbis and judges of Israel had said about this particular passage. That was the whole of the training of the rabbi of the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. He memorized what later took several volumes to write, came to be known as the Talmud.
And they memorized this long before it was put into written form. And so when they came to any passage of Scripture, they already had what was the authoritative interpretation and application of it as far as the people of Israel were concerned. And so the sermons would consist of these quotations from what the ancient rabbis had said about the passage. And now our Lord Jesus Christ comes and he takes the role. And if the sermon on the mount is any indication of how he preached, it hath been said to you by them of all time, but I say unto you. It hath been said to you by them of all time, but I say unto you.
And what he did was cut right through all the authoritative interpretations of their tradition and get them right back to thus saith the Lord. And I'm sure the godly in Israel and those synagogues, their heart leaped as he preached. because for the first time in their experience they had a man carry them right back to the Word of God. And he spoke as one having authority and not as the scribes. There were none of the quotations for authoritative interpretation from the scribes and the elders and the judges of years gone by.
They were face to face with the living Word of God. And this is the first area in which his authority shows. Not the first as far as the incidence of chapter one are concerned. I'm always struck by Mark's account, the way Mark presented. Because the first contact our Lord has with his disciples in Mark's account, though we know from the other gospel that it was not. But from Mark's account, the first account he recorded, our Lord walking by the Sea of Galilee and finding these men fishing or taking care of their nets, And he says to them, follow me, and they leave everything, and they follow him. And you wonder what kind of a man is this, and he simply walks by, issues a command that men leave their families, their parents, their fishing business, their boats, their nets, their profits, everything to follow him when they were not yet sure who he was.
And he had a tremendous impact on people like that. A man of great authority, but his authority showed up as far as the word is concerned, first in his preaching when he went into the synagogue. It showed up in a second way. When he was there in the synagogue, there was a man possessed with a demon who disturbed the service. And our Lord cast the demon out, and the people were astonished. On previous occasions, when demon-possessed individuals would have disturbed the church service, they were helpless to do anything about it. And all the teaching of the rabbis stood powerless. before the force of demons. But now this man commands, and the demons go out, and they're astonished.
What authority this man has. Even the demons obey him. And then in Mark chapter one, his authority is seen in the area of disease. As people come to him with various diseases, we're introduced to it when he goes into the house of of Peter and healed Peter's mother-in-law. I hope Peter took that as a blessing, but he healed Peter's mother-in-law. And then you'll catch up with me. Just keep trying. You're coming. You're coming. If those worldly fellows will stop thinking about that golf game this morning and get with me here and watch that for one.
And then you have this sunset scene that we read about where people were crowding around the door of the home where he would stay and he healed them all. In fact, this became so great in Mark chapter one that so many people were coming to be healed that he had to go outside the towns themselves and out into the country because the number of people who were coming to him were so great. You find his authority in this area of of disease, of healing disease. What an impact he must have made upon those villages and towns of Galilee with such a ministry. His authority in the area of the Word of God, his authority in the area of disease, his authority over demons.
They've never seen anyone like this. And then in the midst of all this, Mark gives us this little incident of chapter one, verse thirty-five. were rising early in the morning, a great while before days. He slipped out of the house and went out into a wilderness area. It simply means an uninhabited area and there prayed. I take it this was not the first time that he had done this because Peter knew where to find him. Peter went out seeking him and somehow knew where to find the Lord. I take it this was not the only time they had found this one whom they were following now.
They had found him at prayer. And this is one of the evidences of the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And I wonder here if in one sense Mark is not giving us one of the keys to all this authority that he was showing. is his own personal felt dependence upon the Father. And with all the press of this work of healing and preaching and teaching his disciples, he himself felt this need to get out into that wilderness place, the need for communion, the need to pray.
And here is the eternal Son of God, so human, so dependent, that that dependency expresses itself in this early morning prayer. If we are to follow the example of our Lord, I hope all of us have this sense of dependency. I'm not primarily concerned about the particular time when one prays. There's nothing in Scripture to indicate that this was our Lord's habit, that every morning he got up early and went out to pray.
On one occasion, at least it would have been impossible because on one occasion he stayed up all night to pray. But what I am concerned about is that our humanity, we in our humanity, should have no less a sense of dependence upon God than did the Son of God. When Paul writes to Timothy in the first epistle, and he's giving Timothy certain charges about the church's emphasis, things that he feels are vital, when you come to chapter two you find the first item in the list that Paul wishes Timothy to get across to the Christians at Ephesus.
And he says, I will therefore, first of all, let men pray everywhere. And then he gives a series of words that describe prayer, synonyms. It's very difficult to find distinctions in some of those words. You get the general sense of an emphasis, but it's very hard to pin down precisely what those different words imply in the area of prayer. One thing seems to stand out, however, in the first word that Paul uses in First Timothy chapter two, when he talks about wanting the Christians of Ephesus to pray.
And the first word he uses stresses our need. The second word he uses, by the way, is a word that in the New Testament is used only of address to God. The word that stresses our need is sometimes used of need that's on the horizontal level, that's expressed to another human being, that another human being can fill. But the second word he uses speaks only of address to God. And if you put the two things together, it's the realization that our real needs can be met only by God. But at least Paul is telling us that ever he was with our Lord Jesus Christ, it should be the sense of our need. one of the things that brings us before God.
I'm diverting again. I wanted to talk about the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. But it seems to me one of the real difficulties in our prayer meetings is that we never come to grips with our needs. One of the things I have noted or that has struck me in most of our prayer meetings And this may or may not be true in your particular situation, is that our praying is objective and for those who are absent. By objective, I mean we pray for things physical.
Someone has a physical need. He's sick, going in the hospital, whatever it may be. And that is indeed. And we should pray for those who are in those situations. The second thing I noted is we pray for those who are not there. How very seldom we pray for each other when we are present there in the prayer meeting. unless of course someone who is there in a prayer meeting is going to the hospital in a few days then we'll pray for that individual but normally we do not pray for people who are present there in the prayer meeting and we normally confine our praying to physical needs and that may be I'm suggesting it may be the reason for some of the dryness and dullness of our prayer meetings and our reluctance to go I was in a prayer meeting a short time ago, a prayer meeting of an assembly.
It was following the traditional pattern. We were expressing requests for prayer until one brother got up and talked about the problem he was having with his son. He was a Christian. His son was a Christian. And in his words, it was a kind of problem that should exist. And he didn't know how to handle it. And he asked us to pray for him and for his son. It galvanized the whole prayer meeting. Almost instantaneously, men got under him in prayer.
My feeling was, now we were getting hold of some of the real needs that all of us felt. And we wanted, we wanted to get in with this man, his problem, and pray. I didn't have that kind of courage. I hope Ginny will excuse me, but back in February she was faced with serious surgery. We're not sure what the outcome was going to be, and the Christians, of course, prayed for the doctors, the surgeons, for her that she would recover. But that wasn't our real need. We appreciated that prayer, but that wasn't our real need.
Our real need was fear. She was afraid, and I was afraid, of what the outcome would be. And that's what our real need. But do you think I got up in a prayer meeting to tell those people, my wife's afraid, and I'm afraid of that surgery that she's facing? No, because couple of reasons. One, I would have a verse of scripture thrown at me or some slogan that if you trust the Lord, you don't worry. I know that. I know that. I know that. But I need help where I am. I know that's the goal, but I'm not at that goal. And I need help in moving toward that goal.
And I suppose the second reason was to try to save faith. You know, a preacher is not supposed to have those kinds of problems. But we do. But wouldn't it be great to have the kind of prayer mission where you could share that sort of thing and you sensed your brothers and sisters closing in around you and lifting you up before God? But it's this sense of need that brings us to God in prayer. It was our Lord's own personal sense of need that took him out into the wilderness to pray early in the morning.
Now someone's going to sing on that early in the morning and say, every Christian should get up at five thirty and pray. I remember the answer of Dr. Arthur Rendell Short to that one zealous young individual who found a great blessing in getting up at five-thirty to pray, expressed this to the whole group of young people that you all must get up at five-thirty in the morning and pray. And Dr. Arthur Rendell Short said, young man, the only thing every Christian must do is what the Word of God commands him to do. Your personal experience cannot be a law for anybody else. And you see, we read these stories of the great men who got up at four and five o'clock in the morning to pray every morning. What those stories don't tell you is they went to bed at seven or eight at night. And that's true.
They did. They did. R.C. Chapman, I think nine o'clock was his bedtime on. It didn't matter who was there, what was going on. Good night, gentlemen. And he went to bed. Some of you who work the way I know, most of you are farmers, aren't you? I don't know. I haven't got the feel of this audience yet. But if you work in a factory from four in the afternoon to twelve at night, you're going to have a job getting up at four in the morning to pray. And some of us don't function as soon as we get up out of bed. I don't. There are some people who, the instant they hit the floor, they're awake and they can carry on an intelligent conversation, they can pray. Not me, I've got to wash and shave and get a cup of coffee down me, and then I think God is saying, all right, now you're in decent shape to talk to, let's talk.
But until that, I'm not functioning. No, I'm not saying it has to be a certain hour, but what I am trying to stress is there's something wrong with us if we do not have this sense of dependence of need. If we get the idea, where our Lord did not have the idea, that we can make it on our own. We can't. Let me, while I'm talking along this line, suggest a couple of other things in Mark chapter one about our Lord Jesus Christ that I think Mark is telling us provide something of the key to his ministry. One of the things I've already stressed is one of the reasons he's able to meet the needs of people was his own authority.
Now, I'm not sure I want to say that it's simply his authority as the Son of God. He was baptized with the Spirit of God, anointed with the Spirit of God. God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost in the world. And he went out in his ministry in the power and authority of the Spirit of God. That was one of the reasons he was able to meet the needs of people. The second reason he was able to meet the needs of people was this sense of dependence upon his father, as he expressed this in prayer. The third reason it seems to me that Mark presents in chapter one is our Lord's compassion.
We did not read the incident, but there's the story of the healing of the leper in chapter one, where this leper comes to our Lord and he says, if you will, that is if you want to, you can, you are able to make me whole, to cleanse me. Having seen what our Lord did in all those miracles of healing and casting out demons, there was no question in this leper's mind of our Lord's ability to cleanse him from the leprosy. The question that remained in his mind was whether this man would want to or not. And that's the way he puts it to our Lord. if you will, if you wish, if you want to, you can, you are able to cleanse us.
Now, from Luke's account of the same incident, this man was far advanced in leprosy and must have been a rather loathsome sight. Our Lord was faced with that wretched human being who was in a condition that we with our natural sensitivity could find very, very repulsive. We are turned off by sores on the face of another person. And this leper was covered in an advanced stage of leprosy, and really by our sensitivity, in physical appearance, a very low individual.
I like Philip's translation of our Lord's response. Philip skips it across by saying, of course I want to. Of course I want to. And this man had been cut off from society. As you know, the law in the Old Testament. He was removed from the congregation of Israel, and if he saw anyone approaching, he had to cry, unclean, unclean. For him he was dependent upon the kindness of people, leaving food along the roadside that he could come when no one was around and pick up and eat.
It's not just the physical suffering of the disease. It's that isolation that the disease had brought. If you've ever been in a situation of isolation, you know that tremendous longing for human contact. Now when our Lord healed this man, what did he do? You remember when ten lepers came to him? Go. And as they went, they were healed. But not in this case. It's not something our Lord had to do to heal the man.
He could have healed the man with just a word, be clean, or go. and the man would have been cleansed. Our Lord didn't have to do what he did. But I was going to say instinctively, and yet I'll keep that word, instinctively he did what he did. He reached out and touched the man. He reached out and touched him. He didn't have to do that. But All the years of isolation that this man had experienced were broken down in that one touch. A human being was not repulsed by him.
Another human being reached out and touched him. And of course in that touch there was human. But the point is our Lord reached out and touched him. He did it out of his own compassion for the individual. So I think in Mark chapter one, as we look at our Lord as a human, as the Son of God who has become man, serving his Father here on earth, there are at least those three factors involved in the effectiveness of his service as a man. The authority of the serve of God.
his own personal sense of dependence. First time my preaching has ever said the bell is ringing. Can you hear me back there in front of that? Okay, fine, I keep going. I think those are the three factors Mark shows us in the effectiveness of our Lord's ministry. The Spirit of God Our Lord's own sense of dependence upon the Father and our Lord's own compassion for other people. Our Lord who could see beyond the external, beyond the thing that so often turns us off.
In this case it's a matter of disease. For some of us it's the way some people dress, the way they look. We can't get beyond that to the individual and the emptiness of the heart and of the life, we are without compassion. It does not mean that our Lord accepted leprosy as normal. It does not mean he was putting his approval on leprosy, but our Lord reached the individual. And it's certainly one of the reasons for the effectiveness of his ministry. You can make the application, can't you?
If we human beings are to serve our Heavenly Father as His representatives here on earth, saying three things. It's one of the reasons we have been given the indwelling Spirit of God. One of the reasons we have been given the avenue of access to the presence of God in prayer. And one of the reasons the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. is to reach out in a genuine compassion for the needs of men. Alright, so in chapter one, here are the evidences, and I was stressing the one of dependence of the genuine humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now in chapter fourteen, our Lord is at prayer again, only this time in the seminary. Here he is not alone. By his own choice he is not alone. As in chapter one, by his own choice he went out alone to pray. And I think all of us have that sense. There are particularly those times when we need to get away from everyone else and have that time, of course, quietly, alone with the Lord. We can spend that time with him. By the way, I want to throw in this aside again. I throw in these aside so they don't cost you anything extra. When in the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord said to his disciples, when they prayed, they would enter the closet and shut the door.
In context, he's not telling them to do that so that they could shut out all distractions. He's telling them to do that in the context of his instruction. He's telling them to do that so that no one will see them pray. He's just talked about people who pray out on the street corner in order to get the praise of men. And he's saying, when you pray, you go into the broom closet and shut the door. Who's going to look for a saint in the broom closet? But that's where you go, and you shut the door, and it prevents your praying in order to get the praise of men. So everybody knows how long you pray. And here is this great stint of prayer. No? You go in there where no one can see you, and that's the indication you really need to pray and not to use prayer to get the applause of men.
So when I walked here, though, when our Lord went out alone, it was to avoid the press of the people who are constantly coming to him for healing and health. But now in chapter fourteen, he is not alone. He doesn't want to be alone by choice. He puts AIDS at the entrance of the garden and takes it free with him, Peter, James, and John. And I want to talk about that relationship for a moment. particularly as it relates to this incident in chapter fourteen. One of the things that impresses me as I go through the gospel narratives is the relationship of our Lord to these twelve men. I say twelve, including Judas, until the time when Judas left to betray him.
But our Lord's personal relationship with these twelve men. You find it, for example, in chapter three of Mark's gospel. In chapter three, there are certain identifications made of our Lord Jesus Christ, one that he is controlled by the power of the elders above. That's bad enough. But then in chapter three, our text says that some of his friends came out to get him because they said he is beside himself. Now, friends is an understanding of an expression that simply says those who are with him, those who are his, really, is what it's getting at. And as you read down through the chapter and come to the end of the chapter, evidently those are his mother and his brothers, who back in Nazareth, hearing all that was going on, he didn't even have time to eat, hearing all that people were saying about him, how the religious leaders from down in the capital city of Jerusalem, the official religious delegation that had been set up to investigate him, had reached the conclusion he's controlled by demons, could no longer handle the pressure and went out to get him and bring him home because he's beside
himself. To me, as I think about it, that must have been the most cutting thing of all that he had to experience in those early days of his ministry. They had time to get him, take him home. He's lost his self-control and his reason. And so while he's teaching his disciples, One of them comes through the crowd and says, Your mother and your brothers stand on the outside of the crowd. They want to see you. Many of you, Brother Lord, respond, who is my mother? Who is my brother? Who is my sister? And then looking round at his disciples, he said, These who do the will of my father.
These are my mother and my sister and my brother. And at least to me one thing he is saying is that in a family where John in his gospel tells us neither did his brothers believe in him, he had found a kinship far greater and deeper among people who are not physically related to him but who are spiritually related to him. And at least in his words I sense this human hunger for companionship. for people who understand, who see as he sees, and who identify themselves with him.
Some of you perhaps have come from that kind of a situation. I have not, but I have talked to many Christians who have, who have come out of a home where there was no love, and particularly because of this individual's confession of faith in Jesus Christ, there was a total misunderstanding, a total rejection on the part of the rest of the natural family. And people like that have told me I have found among the people of God a love and a relationship far deeper than anything I have ever experienced on a merely human level. So did our Lord. So did our Lord. So those of you who struggle with that kind of a situation, our Lord knows what you're going through because he experienced it in that home at Nazareth.
And he found among these men He found among these men the kind of companionship that he never experienced in the natural family back in Nazareth. These are people who are really my family. These are people who I really count as my brothers and my sisters. I like that. Oh, I love that expression in the letter to the Hebrews. He is not ashamed to call them brethren. I like this. You remember the elder brother in the story of the prodigal sons? You remember how he designated his brother when he came home and he was out in the field now talking to his father, the elder brother talking to the father.
He said, this, your son. He wouldn't call him brothers. And sometimes in the human family, human parents disavow their children. Usually because the parents feel they've been disgraced by the children. They disavow them. Our Lord never left that. And if I can use the colloquial, that's my kid. That's my kid, and I'm with him. He's not ashamed to call them to rest. And you look around at that crowd of disciples. how often they misunderstood, how often they failed.
He looks at those same people. He says, These are my mother, my sister, and my brother. And he found a companionship there. And then when he called out of that group of disciples with twelve in chapter four of Mark's gospel, He called out twelve among those disciples to be apostles. And Mark gives us the reasons why he called them, the first of which was that they might be with him. Now, I have always looked at that from their point of view. Of course, they needed to be with him because he was going to train them, which he did for those three and a half years of ministry.
But look at it the other way, that they might be with him. It's his own desire for their fellowship that they might be with him. To me, that's strengthened by his words in John chapter six. When preaching those hard sayings about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he watches the crowd begin to melt away. They can't take that kind of thing and they turn and leave. And then in one of the most poignant statements anywhere in the earthly life of our Lord, he turns to the twelve and he says, will you also go away? And maybe you could translate, you're not going to go away, are you? His sense of a relationship with these men that meant a great deal to him.
Maybe we'll talk about that tomorrow morning in a certain passage of Scripture where this comes out even more clearly. And other than that, what seems to be a greater kinship with Peter, James, and John, Not that he loved them more than he loved the other disciples. He's impartial. We show all sorts of partiality. He doesn't. But there evidently was a response on their part that did not exist to the same degree on the part of other disciples. Now, any teacher has to watch that, by the way.
And I can't imagine our Lord making the kind of mistake I made. I write myself a little note at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year I have to confess to the Lord that I failed to live up to it. But I write myself a little note in my class notes at the beginning of the year. Don't play up to the smart kids. That's always a teacher's danger. When you're interacting with your students and the kids that's got the wits and the brain and he's been doing your studies. and he sees what they're doing, he's able to interact, and he catches on, and he begins to pull in material he's been reading, and the thing begins to sparkle and jump.
Your tendency is to concentrate on those kids. The kids that aren't as swift, can't read as well, and don't study as well, you leave them out on the periphery, and you begin to show partiality. And I can't imagine our Lord being guilty of that kind of failure. His love is impartial. He loved them all. as he does us. But there was a response of three who seemed to be able to enter into his feelings and thinking in a way that the rest could not. Peter, James, and John. And three times in Mark's gospel, he separates those three from the rest of the disciples and takes them with him. They were present when he raised Jairus' daughter.
They were present on the Mount of Transfiguration. And now in chapter fourteen, they are present when he goes into Gethsemane. They go in further into the garden with him. I'd like just to make a suggestion about those three incidents, by the way. When he raised Jairus' daughter, I wonder if they were not seeing him as the Christ, the anointed of God. When he was on the mount of transfiguration, they were seeing this man, Jesus, in his resplendent lordship. But now, when you come to the Garden of Gethsemane, they are seen as they never saw before to man Jesus.
And in the three incidents with Peter, James, and John, there's the revelation of the Christ, the Lord, and the human Jesus. Now, there's language in the accounts of Gethsemane that leave me baffled. I don't understand them. I don't understand the terminology Mark uses. I can't put it together with our Lord. But at least let's have a look as far as I'm able and as far as perhaps we can follow into what this shows us about the genuineness of his humanity and something of the depth of his suffering as a man here this night in Gethsemane.
It's revealed in several ways. One, it's revealed by what Mark says about the Lord Jesus. And by the way, Mark's gospel, according to reliable history, Mark's gospel is the written record of Peter's preaching. So we're getting really what Peter saw that night when he went into Gethsemane with the Lord Jesus. Mark recorded Peter's preaching. Now, what Mark says about our Lord is one of the revelations of how intensely he felt this night.
And that's in verse thirty-three of chapter fourteen. He began to be greatly distressed and troubled. That's Mark's description, really Peter's description. Now, by the way, do we have any other translation besides the King James or a revised tentative? We've got something like a Phillips or anybody got any different translation that would read those two expressions for us. Maybe we'll get some idea of the difficulty in trying to translate them. I don't know for word, but I know there's something deeply depressed. Deeply depressed. Sore made. I'm sore made. Right?
Any other translations? One of these words really indicated to me in one of my new things, terror. And my Lord, I never know how to put it, but for the rest of my kids it was like, I think I was like, further in which they would face the issue of crucifixion, and it would not be his primarily of the physical crucifixion of the world, but of the nature of the afterlife.
When he knew this was coming, of course, that he could also be experiencing something similar on the left of the plane. He could know, Satan, that surgery is coming. He's going to accept the surgery. Thank you.
There's another place in the New Testament that the people in Philippi had learned of his illness in carrying the money to Paul in Rome. He was greatly distressed. We really don't know what the word means, how it's used. There are some new Well, the word is used is really what we're after, but the root meaning of the word seems to be to be away from home is the idea of the expression. And I suppose for Epaphroditus, his sense of suffering was greatly increased by the fact that he was so far away from Philippi.
If you've read the story of Henry Martin, the missionary to India, up through the Near East and across Turkey trying to get home. And in his biography, the last part of that journey he took in a caravan that was led by an Arab and an Arab who seemed to take great delight in driving the caravan a little further every day than Henry Martin's strength would take until finally, in some obscure little village, Henry Martin died.
When they found his diary, his great longing was to get home to England to die. And his suffering was intensified, not just by the tuberculosis, but by being so far from home. Now, if that's the expression, if that's the force of this expression used of our Lord Jesus, it's not Nazareth he's thinking of. It's not Nazareth. and the intensity of his suffering is increased by the fact that he's so far from home. That's making a sense. He's going to be eating even further tomorrow when he's on the cross.
You see, one of the things that intensifies our suffering as human beings is that intelligently we can look ahead Now I'm not talking about those irrational fears that sometimes overtake us. I'm talking about the solid thinking when we know the way the course of events is going. So that we are aware now to some degree of what is still to come. And our Lord, when he was hanging on the cross, would be the furthest from home he could be when he says, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
So here it all comes upon him that night in Gethsemane. And we learn first of the intensity of this suffering that this man went through by Mark's description of it. We learn it secondly by our Lord's own words in verse thirty-four. He said to them, my soul is very sorrowful, even to death. In his own description of it, the intensity of his sorrow in his experience brings him very, very close to death. Even that may be a sin of him.
I understand from doctors, what I've read. There are people who die of broken hearts. There are people, the intensity of whose suffering or sorrow makes them give up the will to live. And there are even people like that who die without any medical reason. We are not... the kind of people that we can clearly separate soul and body in our human life.
And our Lord says, My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death. And the intensity of its feeling had its physical effect. And those are His words. The third way we see the intensity of his suffering is by his prayer. We know that ultimately the intensity of his praying laid him out prostrate on the ground. But it's what he says here that to me indicates the genuineness of his humanity and the intensity of his suffering. It's not just, though it is that, the prayer.
that the cup be taken from him if that is possible. But it's the address he uses in the prayer where he says, Abba, Father. Now, Abba, Father is a translation of a Greek word. Abba is not. Abba is a transliteration. It's simply putting the equivalent English letter or the Greek letter. In fact, the word in Greek is not a translation. It's a transliteration of the Hebrew in which the Greek letters simply are put in place of the Hebrew letters.
And so what we really have is not a translation, but a transliteration. And for some reason or other, and I suppose we wouldn't stand for the translation if we had it, but for some reason or other, no translator will translate this. All of us know, I'm sure, that Abba, is the word a Jewish child uses of his daddy in his home. The interesting thing is that no extant piece of Jewish literature has ever been found containing this word as an address to God. They felt it was far too familiar.
It's the family word, a little child running around in the home. That's the word he would use as a Hebrew, little Jewish boy. He would say, Abba, when addressing his father. And really, if we wanted to translate it, we'd have to translate it, Daddy. And this is why I suppose no one will translate it, but that's what we would have to do. We'd have to translate it, Daddy. Now you can say, okay, our Lord took the Hebrew word and the Greek word, Abba, the Hebrew, The Father, the Greek word, and he combines them in his prayer. I rather think, however, in the intensity of his me death night as a human being, spontaneously there came to his list the word that a Jewish child uses running around the home, or when he comes to his own earthly father with a me.
And he said, Daddy. What interests me is that twice Once in Romans, once in Galatians, we use the same term by the Spirit of God. We cry, Abba, Father, Daddy. Now, we don't use the term. I'm not sure why. But I think all of us sense that. We have this relationship like little children. Sure, we are mature sons.
That looks at it in a different way. But in our hours of need, we are little children who are throwing themselves into their father's lap and looking up into his face and saying, Daddy, that's what we're doing. I had a friend who was a psychiatrist, a Christian. I remember him telling me about working with a patient whose experience as she grew up in the home was so revolting. that she could not use the word father. She was a Christian. She found it impossible. And her problems were so intense that by this time she'd been hospitalized.
As a Christian, she could not pray. She could not get that word father out of her mouth. She couldn't have had too many painful, hate-filled memories. for her to use it. And so what this Christian psychiatrist did was suggest to her that just to start, the next time the nurse brought in her tray of food, that she gives thanks by saying, Daddy, thank you for this food. And she did. And it was the start of her healing. It's that infinite relationship of a child coming to his father.
But here is our Lord Jesus. That night in Gethsemane, there comes to his living, Abba, Father. Finally, the intensity that is needed as a human being to me is shown by the fact that he took Peter, James, and John with him. That was his choice. And I take it now, the intensity of his need was such that he wanted to reach out to these men. He wanted them to watch and pray with him. As another gospel account has, watch with me.
I think all of us have known this. There are those hours when you want to get alone and pray. And there are those hours when you desperately need the companionship of good, solid Christian friends who pray with you. So did our Lord. And that night in Gethsemane, no, he did not want to be alone to pray. In that night he wanted Peter, James, and John with him. He wanted the sense of their support. He wanted the awareness that they were praying with him. They went to sleep.
I've often wondered if they had stayed awake if the ministry of the angel would have been necessary. I don't know, but I've wondered. But here is our Lord as a man reaching out to his fellow men, men whom he deeply loved, reaching out to them and asking them to pray with him. Now I wanted to turn to other passage scriptures I've talked too long. Hebrews chapter five seems to be in that verse that in the days of its flesh he offered up those prayers, strong crying and tears, seems to be a commentary on the Gethsemane account.
I want to go look at that. We'll have to pass it by. But let me say this, that when you get in those situations, where your own sorrow and your own need is so great that you throw yourself flat on the floor before God and hardly know what to pray. Will you remember that at God's right hand there is a high priest who understands exactly what you are going through because he has been there himself?