Worn Knees

Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut.

The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

This can be found on page 1012 of your Pew Bible.

Throughout Jesus' earthly ministry, he turned to his father in prayer for power and strength.

Facing imminent betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion, he does the same, accepting the reality of his coming death.

A reading from Mark chapter 14, beginning with the 32nd verse.

Mark 14 · chapter mention

And they went to a place 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 fell on the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.

And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.

Remove this cup from me.

Yet not what I will, but what you will.

And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, Simon, are you asleep?

Could you not watch one hour?

Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.

The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words.

And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to answer him.

And he came the third time and said to them, Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?

It is enough.

The hour has come.

The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

Rise, let us be going.

See, my betrayer is at hand.

May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

At the age of 30, Ingrid and I took our three children, all under the age of three, to France to learn French.

Now, learning a language as an adult is a challenge, but to learn French among French people is even a greater challenge.

I had a professor in that course that we were taking that said, You Americans love your flag.

We love our language.

Basically, he was saying, don't butcher it.

Make sure that you speak it well.

Well, after several months, it was not coming very well for me.

Ingrid grew up in a family that spoke two languages, so she had ears that were picking up, and she was flying along, and I'm thinking, this is a disaster.

They're gonna send me home because I had to learn French to then learn Bombata, using French to learn Bombata.

And I thought it's over.

We'd been a part of this big campaign of our denomination.

Three young couples, ready, willing, and waiting.

They were trying to raise money to send us out.

And I thought the next year it was gonna be ready, waiting, and willing, but couldn't learn the language.

Well, we had taught our kids this song during this period.

Uh, Lord, listen to your children praying.

Lord, send your spirit in this place.

Lord, listen to your children praying, send us love, send us power, send us grace.

And there was a half-mile walk to school every day.

I had to do it four times because the kids would come home for lunch.

And one day I was totally in my mind.

I was not praying, I was in anguish.

I thought, how can I fulfill this calling that God has for me when I can't learn the language?

And I remember walking down the uh road, and little Linnea, who was about three and a half at the time, started belting out, Lord, listen to your children praying.

Lord, send your spirit in this place.

Lord, listen to your children praying.

Send us love, send us power, send us grace.

See, it's not only Pastor Gelani that can do that kind of stuff.

I can do it too.

Yeah, thank you.

Give him a hard time after the service, that he's not the only one.

But in that moment, as she started singing this song that we had taught her, I was both exhorted and invited by God to go back to the source.

See, it wasn't about what I could accomplish, it was my availability to him in prayer to watch what he would accomplish.

We're walking with Jesus this fall.

Today we're gonna stop walking and we're gonna kneel with him.

Because to consider Jesus, you have to consider that his primary task was praying.

We always see him sneaking off to different places to pray.

And it's an invitation, not just to admire Jesus, but it's an invitation into the Christ life.

This is the promise.

He is the one who gives us access to the Father, but in access through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, he will give us a ministry of conversation with God so that we can align ourselves to what God has for us.

Basically, the invitation is this exchange our fear, our distraught, and our worry for his peace, his productiveness, and his perseverance.

Anyone need that?

Yeah, I need it all the time.

So let's look and see how Jesus prays.

Verse 32.

And they went to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, Sit here while I pray.

Gethsemane literally means the oil press.

We often refer to the Garden of Gethsemane.

This was a place that Jesus regularly attended with his disciples.

It seems to be their meeting place.

Luke tells us that as it was his custom, Jesus went to meet his disciples.

So Judas is going to come in a few verses.

How did Judas know where to go?

It was the meeting place.

And regularly they would be there to talk about what God was doing.

Jesus would use this time to teach.

And he says to them, Sit here while I pray.

Now, some of you are old enough like me that you heard this often as a kid.

Don't just stand there, do something.

Jesus says, Don't just do something, sit there.

It's kind of a reverse in the kingdom of God.

Wait to see what God is going to do.

This was Jesus' pattern.

If you remember when he was a teenager, he goes back to Jerusalem with his parents, and they lose him for a time, and they're really upset with him.

And Jesus says, Well, what did you expect?

I would be in my father's house, which he later defines as a house of prayer.

When he starts his ministry, he's baptized and heaven's open, and the father declares, This is my son, whom I love and whom I'm well pleased.

It's a model that prayer is not just a monologue to heaven, but it's a conversation, it's a dialogue.

Charles Kraft says it this way: sometimes we pray as if we're on a phone, we tell God everything that we want, and then we hang up before he gets a chance to respond.

Jesus is modeling a different way.

He goes out for temptation.

He's fasting for 40 days.

When you hear the word fasting in the Bible, there's prayer attached to it.

It's that that he's beginning to unfold the ministry that's before us.

Mark's gospel, he likes that word immediately.

We've talked about this before.

The first chapter, Jesus, after he's baptized, announces repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

Then he goes to the synagogue in Capernaum.

There's a man who has a demon.

He casts the demon out.

He goes to Peter's mother-in-law's house and she has a fever and he heals her.

Now people are coming from all over the place.

He's got something good going.

And what's verse 35 say?

Early in the morning, Jesus went off to a solitary place to pray.

Luke tells us that this was his common practice.

Before he calls his disciples, he spends the whole night in prayer.

Why?

He's listening for what the Father has for him, how the Holy Spirit's going to lead him.

When he comes off of Transfiguration Mountain, they have that big experience.

He comes upon the disciples, and there's an argument going on because the disciples couldn't cast a demon out.

Now they had already done that, so they knew the how of it, but they're not being successful.

Jesus does it, and the disciples ask him afterwards, why couldn't we do it?

And Jesus says these words These kind only come out by prayer.

Now, he never prayed during that account.

So it wasn't the demon coming out because of prayer, it was the quality of his prayer life.

So much so that the disciples, when they have an opportunity to get information from Jesus, ask him, Teach us to pray.

This is what Jesus did in my book, Speak Up, God is Listening, Listen Up, God is Speaking.

Chapter 14 is all about Jesus in prayer.

And the title is Jesus Prayed and He Prayed and He Prayed.

But now He comes to his most anguished time of prayer.

And we get to enter into the humanity of Jesus.

I want to remind us that as Protestants, we're not very good with the humanity of Jesus.

We know there's a mystery here, the God man, he's not some kind of hybrid.

He's always God and he's always man.

But we sometimes put Jesus above all of the emotions that we have in life.

We're going to see that he prays in a very similar way to how you and I pray.

Verse 33.

And he took with him Peter and James and John and began to be greatly distressed and troubled.

Have you ever been greatly distressed and troubled?

Did you pray or did you stay in the thought process of anxiety?

Confession.

I often go to anxiety.

Even when I'm praying, sometimes I find myself about a minute later worrying about the situation and figuring out the situation.

And I come back and say, sorry, God, that's your job to figure it out.

I'm here to pray.

But Jesus is feeling this.

This is our Savior.

This is our Lord who's feeling the distress and the trouble.

And he said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.

This is the one who had set his face towards Jerusalem.

He knew he was going to die.

He told his disciples three different times that this was the outcome.

But his soul is even unto the point of death.

And he says to them, Watch.

Later in the passage, he's going to say, watch and pray.

This becomes a code word because Paul, a couple times in his letters, will tell us in life we need to be alert, watching, because we're in a spiritual battle, but then praying all the time.

An eye on what's going on here, and an eye towards God and what he wants to release in that space.

It goes on in the text.

Going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.

This is Jesus.

Those of you who have gone to Israel with Brian Whidbin, you stood in this space where there are olive trees today, where that oil press would have been.

And Brian makes this very interesting point.

He says, What's Jesus doing in that garden?

You see, the garden was no longer not in Jerusalem, it was across the Kidron Valley at the base of the Mount of Olives.

With one simple pass up over that mountain into Galilee, Jesus would have been free.

And you did not leave Jerusalem until the Passover was over on Sunday.

So what's going on in Jesus?

He's feeling all the tension and the anguish that you and I feel.

You have a Savior in heaven who understands.

He's not distant from you.

He knows the struggles that you go through, and he's willing to hear them in this prayer of abandonment.

Abba Father, all things are possible for you.

Remove this cup from me.

Yet, not what I will, but what you will.

This is called the prayer of indifference.

When you pray, bring your real self to God.

He knows what's going on in your heart.

There's no need to fake it.

Don't pray like you can't, pray like you can in those moments, bringing everything of struggle that's going in you.

But the indifference is to say, Lord, this is what I want, this is what I'm hoping for, but in the end I trust you because you bring the best things into place.

Are you following that?

The rest of the passage is Jesus coming back and finding disciples sleeping.

Should make me feel a lot better about my prayer life.

Says to Peter, Can't you just watch and pray?

Temptation's right around the corner.

He's giving him another warning.

All these aspects are showing that prayer is a struggle.

It's something that we grow into and we become comfortable with over time, and we do that by praying.

So, what's the soul of this passage?

I have eight of them.

So, Lord, which one do you want to use in this service?

I'm gonna go with this one.

There's a perpetual prayer meeting in heaven that was started by Jesus on earth.

A perpetual prayer meeting in heaven that was started by Jesus when he was on this earth.

So think about the incarnate Jesus when he's on earth.

He is God and he's conversing with God.

And how is he getting instructions?

Through the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is already in conversation in prayer.

We say, well, how's that in heaven?

Scripture says that Jesus intercedes for us daily before the Father that we would know that we are belonging secure.

This is bringing us into the belonging space.

And then Paul, in writing to the church in Rome, says this we don't know how we ought to pray.

Can you relate?

But the Holy Spirit will pray through us with groans at times that we don't know how to pray.

Jesus and the Holy Spirit are praying for us right now.

Actually, the Holy Spirit is praying.

Help Chuck to get the right conclusion to this sermon because he has eight different ones that he wants to bring into place.

We get to enter into that.

That's the ongoing invitation of God.

That's why I love the series that's coming up, the God, the uh inviter.

Is that what we called it?

Great inviter, yeah.

I'm teaching one of them.

I should probably know the title of what it is.

But it's God who invites us into this space of being in conversation with him.

It's incredible.

Now, let me tell you what prayer isn't, so we get away from some of the misconceptions.

First, prayer isn't a placebo, it's not what you do to occupy yourself until God's gonna do what he's gonna do anyhow.

There's a unique partnership between God and humanity.

If not, if that weren't so, then Jesus says things to us that make absolutely no sense.

He says, Up to now, you do not have because you have not asked in my name.

He says, Ask anything in my name.

He says, you do not have because Jesus wouldn't say that if it was a placebo.

There's somehow our prayer interacts with what God is doing in this world.

He's the first mover, but then he'll pray things through me that become his working in this world.

Uh the second misconception on prayer is it's not a get out of jail free card.

If it were, Jesus wouldn't have gone to the cross.

It's a matter of aligning our wills to his will.

That's the conversation dialogue piece.

And thirdly, it is not a call to laziness and not doing anything.

All you'd have to do is go to a few verses earlier, and Jesus is on his knees in a different way.

He's washing his disciples' feet.

And go a few verses later, he's going to be on his knees again when he can't carry you the cross.

And someone who's going to have to come and help him get to that space.

See, prayer is effort, but it's learned in the process of being in conversation with God.

Um, I'd like to tell you to read my book and then you'll be able to pray.

You may learn some things about prayer, but you're gonna learn to pray by praying.

I've seen this happen over 40 years of ministry.

See, there is a bit of an element in us, let's just talk as people in Fairfield and Westchester County.

We don't like to step into things where we might look silly or we don't know what we're doing.

Can you relate to that?

We're pretty much experts in our various worlds, and so when there's an area of our world that we're not too good at, we kind of feel shame there, and our pride keeps us from entering in.

But I see that happen with prayer.

Because we have people around us who've learned the language.

I've been praying since I was three years old.

I can rattle off prayers.

I go to events and they'll say, Will you pray for us?

And I'll say, No, I didn't bring my prayer book.

That's a joke.

It's just natural for me, it's part of the conversation.

And sometimes we hear people pray and we're thinking, I don't want to pray out loud.

What if I sound foolish?

But you only learn to pray by praying.

It often starts as a monologue.

You tell God the things that you hoped had happened.

Then often it becomes a dialogue.

You start reading your scripture, and then all of a sudden you realize, ooh, he has something here he wants me to be praying about.

Then it becomes a trilogue or a multilogue.

We sit with other people and they pray certain things and we hear the Holy Spirit through their prayers.

And it moves to another place.

We learn the principle of agreement in prayer.

It's time for us to move into more corporate prayer as a church.

I'm really excited.

We're gonna have some great news about Stanford this week.

Can't wait to share it.

It's so hard for me as a seven Enneagram not to want to tell you all about it right now.

I'm just gonna say, pray us through this last week.

Probably the person who's smiling the biggest is Pastor Nathan back there because he got us into this mess.

No, I got you into the mess.

I get it.

Uh God is gonna do something explosive in our area.

I can't tell you, the the expectation is off the charts.

But that means we've got to up our prayer game.

Because we're taking enemy-occupied territory.

I'm not saying anything about Stanford in a negative way.

I'm talking about every place where Jesus isn't glorified and our earth, that's enemy-occupied territory.

And there's an enemy who doesn't want us to go there.

And we're gonna have to step it up.

And I love the fact that you're praying people and you're praying at home, but we need more agreement prayer.

Every movement of God in history were when people got together and were serious and bound together to watch what God was bringing into existence.

So to Sunday, this Sunday is promotion Sunday.

We're going to the next level, we're inviting God.

To take us to a place that we haven't been before.

I'm inviting you to the school of prayer.

To begin taking risks.

Come to the invite course.

Come to one of our prayer gatherings.

Reach out to someone you know here and create a triad where you're praying together, creating a prayer shield for what God wants to do in our midst.

I want to finish with something very practical.

To talk about Jesus praying and to talk about experiencing prayer in my own life gives you testimony, but I already said it, learning to pray happens by praying.

So I want to do a concert of prayer today.

It's going to make some of you uncomfortable.

We did this all the time in Africa.

If you've been in other cultures, it's basically a prayer time where everyone lifts their voice at the same time.

We're all looking to God to meet us in certain places in our life, personally, and in the church.

You can cover your ears if you need to, if you're too distracted with the person next to you.

If you speak another language, that's often helpful.

But remember, when you're praying, you're not praying horizontally.

Doesn't matter what people think about your prayer.

Absolutely nothing matters what people think of your prayer.

But you're praying vertically.

To the one whose ears are wide open.

I love Pastor Gelani's declaration last week that Jesus' eyes of compassion are an invitation to relationship.

And Jesus kneeling with us is an invitation to be in conversation with him, to know the things that he wants to do through us.

I had this picture this week of the oil press that kind of gives us some guidelines for prayer.

Throw that picture up there, Max.

This would have been an oil press in Israel.

It was a stone with a lever, and you would walk it around until the oil came out.

Now there were four times of doing the press.

The first one, you got all of the pure oil, and this was given to the synagogue and the temple for worship.

Then you would add more weight to it and you would run the press over it one more time.

This is the oil you used for preparing food at home.

This was fruitfulness.

Then you'd put another weight on it, and you'd run, you think all the oil must be out of it now.

You put another weight and another set of oil comes out.

This is the oil that went into lamps so that you would have light.

And then one more time you'd put another weight on it, you'd go around one more time.

And this was the oil you used for healing, to speak healing.

It landed on me this morning in our first service that those four movements really are the movements of the Lord's Prayer.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Worship.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, fruitfulness.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Light shining into the darkness.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, healing.

So I want you to bring what you can bring to God today.

Maybe it's all going well for you.

Just worship.

Maybe there's something that is not flourishing and you need God's release in it right now.

Tell Him about it.

Maybe there's a sin that you're fighting with.

Maybe there's a place of darkness in your life that feels like a shadow.

Give it to God and invite him to come into that space.

Or maybe there's some place of healing that you need or someone that you love needs.

Bring those places to God.

To learn more about the mission and vision of Stanwich Church and how you can get involved, please visit Stanwichchurch.org.