“Then He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw,
knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if it is Your will, take
this cup of suffering away from me. However, Your
will must be done, not mine.”
Luke 22:41 (GW)
“It went against every human instinct of survival, against every spiritual, God-implanted longing in His human being to face death and sin-caused alienation from God the Father. Body and soul cried out against it, so that in the teeth of an inner storm of protest He had to say with His naked will, ‘Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’
He said the words by faith. He knew by faith, not by feeling, that the Father was just, omnipotent and trustworthy. But Jesus was human as well as divine, and His body was in revolt against all He was called on to face…
The story of all that follows is well known. Twice more he returned to grapple in prayer with the issue before Him. Why?
Evidently the storms within Him did not abate at once. Again they broke out threatening in their fury to sweep his resolve away. Is not this our experience too? When God calls for a course which our nature cries out against, we may know from the outset that the course is a right one. But storms do not abate simply because the helmsman decides to maintain course. Nor as waves come washing over the decks or the chart grows wet and crumpled does the captain cease to check the rightness of that course…
Let it not dismay you then that in the fiercest storms of life the wind and waves should continue to buffet you long after you have said, ‘Not my will, but yours, O Lord!’ The storm will not last forever. But it need not abate the moment you set your course.
For Jesus the inner storm eventually died down. With quietness of soul and firm resolve He woke His little band while the lights of His captors flickered slowly up the hillside. Standing with His sleepy disciples He waited in perfect composure for all that was to follow.”
Dr. John White- “Daring to Draw Near”
(Counselor, psychiatrist, author of several books, including “The Fight,” “Eros Defiled,” “The Cost of Commitment,”
“Competent to Counsel”)
MORE IDEAS? See “Creative Object Lessons”
200 page e-book that explains everything you need to know when planning your very own object lessons. It contains 90 fully developed object lesson ideas and another 200 object lesson starter ideas based on Biblical idioms and Names / Descriptions of God.