Gethsemane

Two Weeks Before Easter

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Today is the fifth Sunday in Lent, a week before Palm Sunday, and two weeks before Easter. I found this prayer that reminds me of what Lent and Easter are all about:

“You whose eternal love for our weak and struggling race was most perfectly shown forth in the blessed life and death of Jesus Christ our Lord, enable me now so to meditate upon my Lord’s passion that, having fellowship with Him in His sorrow, I may also learn the secret of His strength and peace.

  • I remember Gethsemane
  • I remember how Judas betrayed Him
  • I remember how Peter denied Him
  • I remember how they all forsook Him and fled
  • I remember the scourging
  • I remember the crown of thorns
  • I remember how they spat upon Him
  • I remember how they smote Him on the head with a reed
  • I remember His pierced hands and feet
  • I remember His agony on the Cross
  • I remember His thirst
  • I remember how He cried, My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

We may not know, we cannot tell,
What pains He had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.

Grant, O most gracious God, that I who now kneel before You may be embraced in the great company of those to whom life and salvation have come through the Cross of Christ. Let the redeeming power that has flowed from His sufferings through so many generations flow now into my soul. Here let me find forgiveness of sin. Here let me learn to share with Christ the burden of the suffering of the world. Amen” (John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer, Sixteeth Day Evening, updated and revised by Susanna Wright).

I think remembering what Jesus went through on the road to Gethsemane is important. I don’t mean so much dwelling on the gory details, but remembering that He suffered more than anyone has ever or will ever suffer.

The why is important. It’s not that He was the victim of oppression and injustice. Actually, it’s way more than that. It’s that He willingly laid down His life for us, taking all that punishment that we deserved, paying the penalty for sins we committed. He became the ultimate passover lamb, sacrificed for the sins of the world.

When I by my sin tried to take the place of God, God Christ for my salvation took my place. The resurrection from the dead proves that He was no mere victim but a victor over sin, death, the grave, and hell. That’s my Jesus!

Thoughts on God’s Great Grace

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It’s Monday. My brain is shot. I can’t come up with anything remotely inspiring or creative, so I decided to let one of my favorite writers express some powerful words about the grace of God:

“He saw you cast into a river of life you didn’t request. He saw you betrayed by those you love. He saw you with a body that gets sick and a heart that grows weak. He saw you in your own garden of gnarled trees and sleeping friends. He saw you staring into the pit of your own failures and the mouth of your own grave. He saw you in your own garden of Gethsemane and he didn’t want you to be alone.

He wanted you to know that he has been there, too. He knows what it’s like to be plotted against. He knows what it’s like to be confused. He knows what it’s like to be torn between two desires. He knows what it’s like to smell the stench of Satan. And, perhaps most of all, he knows what it’s like to beg God to change his mind and to hear God say so gently, but firmly, “No.” For that is what God said to Jesus. And Jesus accepts the answer.

At some moment during that midnight hour an angel of mercy comes over the weary body of the man in the garden. As he stands, the anguish is gone from his eyes. His fist will clench no more. His heart will fight no more. The battle is won. You may have thought it was won on Golgotha. It wasn’t. The final battle was won in Gethsemane. And the sign of conquest is Jesus at peace in the olive trees. For it was in the garden that he made his decision. He would rather go to hell for you than to heaven without you” (Max Lucado, The Gift for All People).

Now go buy all of his books.

Four Gardens

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I heard something new today, so I can’t take credit for any of what follows. It all involves four gardens.

The first garden was the Garden of Eden where it all went horribly wrong for all of us. Adam and Eve both ate of that dratted fruit. It doesn’t matter what kind of fruit it was or who ate first. The simple fact that out of every tree in that garden (and there must have been plenty), they chose the one tree God asked them not to eat from.

We’ve been like that ever since. Ever see a “Don’t step on the grass” sign? What’s the first impulse you have when you see that? I rest my case.

The second garden was the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus chose the cross. I know it was His destiny from the beginning and He knew all along that Calvary was His destination, but here is where the temptation to bail was strongest and here is where Jesus prevailed against such a temptation.

The third garden was the Garden of the Tomb. When Mary first saw Jesus, she thought He was the gardener. So it follows there was a garden. Here is where everything wrong was made right. Here is where Jesus’ victory was confirmed and forever validated.

The final garden is in Revelation 22. There you find a very familiar tree, the tree of life, planted by a river and located in the City of God. Here instead of a forbidding commandment is an invitation to come and partake.

Oh, and there’s the whole fruit of the Spirit thing, too.

I love how God doesn’t miss any details. Everything that was lost in the first garden gets found in the last one. Nothing that is good and pure and true is ever truly lost, but God finds a way to redeem it back.

Something Borrowed, Something Blogged

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I got this out of a devotional called Streams in the Desert. It’s from July 26. I hope it speaks to you as loudly and profoundly as it did to me when I first read it.

Enjoy and thank me later.

“There are times when things look very dark to me–so dark that I have to wait even for hope. It is bad enough to wait in hope. A long-deferred fulfillment carries its own pain, but to wait for hope, to see no glimmer of a prospect and yet refuse to despair; to have nothing but night before the casement and yet to keep the casement open for possible stars; to have a vacant place in my heart and yet to allow that place to be filled by no inferior presence–that is the grandest patience in the universe. It is Job in the tempest; it is Abraham on the road to Moriah; it is Moses in the desert of Midian; it is the Son of man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

There is no patience so hard as that which endures, ‘as seeing him who is invisible’; it is the waiting for hope.

You have made waiting beautiful; You have made patience divine. You have taught us that the Father’s will may be received just because it is His will. You have revealed to us that a soul may see nothing but sorrow in the cup and yet may refuse to let it go, convinced that the eye of the Father sees further than its own.

Give me this Divine power of Yours, the power of Gethsemane. Give me the power to wait for hope itself, to look out from the casement where there are no stars. Give me the power, when the very joy that was set before me is gone, to stand unconquered amid the night, and say, “To the eye of my Father it is perhaps shining still.” I shall reach the climax of strength when I have learned to wait for hope. –George Matheson

Strive to be one of those–so few–who walk the earth with ever-present consciousness–all mornings, middays, star-times–that the unknown which men call Heaven is “close behind the visible scene of things.”