Mark 14:34

New International Version 

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”

For Meditation

He went to pray in the last hours of His life on earth with His three best friends. They had been with Him all that long and He had taught them about the things that would happen to Him in the next few hours. What a support team Christ had raised for His hour of need! Don’t we all need such prayer support? But did they rise to the occasion as the Master intended?

Every opportunity the Master accords us with Him is for our benefit more than His. Jesus did not need Peter, James, and John to wait with Him. They needed the lesson of the hour for the task ahead of them. We need the insights and wisdom for our walk with Him and the victory we must aim at for the Father’s glory. But do we get it? 

Gethsemane had been a place He had reposed in and found solace with the Father in the past whenever He was in Jerusalem, so His Galilean team knew it well.

“My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death,” He said to them. “Stay here and keep watch” (Mk. 14:34).

Jesus bared His soul out to His friends, but did they get it? Did they have any inclination about the substance of the occasion? Did they see the raging storm and the devastation it would wreck on humanity if Jesus failed to hold His own and failed the test?

Dear reader. I recommend the path Jesus walked on to our victory over temptation in Gethsemane. When your soul convulses, and your strongest emotions get aroused under the weight of sin and its desire to have you for lunch (Gen. 4:7), what do you see? What voice do you hear?

The sin that weighed Jesus down in Gethsemane was not His to die for. It was that of you and I—the sin of the world that He would soon carry on the Roman cross. The moment defined the history of redemption—the fulfillment of His role as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (Jn. 1:27). He could walk away and leave us in our sins or suffer the punishment you and I deserve and liberate us from the tyranny of sin and death. The goal is the key consideration here—to work redemption for us and bring glory to the Father who has ordained His will for Him. What was it going to be for the Son of Man?

That is the crucial test for all of us as we walk through this life as His disciples—the Father’s glory or our miserable desires. Do we consider this question in every decision on our Christian journey with Him?

Three things I see that won Him victory for us.

First, His love for us consumed and constrained Him (Jn. 3:16, Rm. 5:8, Lk. 12:50). Does His love consume and constrain us?

Second, Jesus kept in view the holiness of God in His struggle against the ugliness of sin. Thus, He saw no other ground for Him than to maintain His submission to the Father as it had been from the beginning of redemption history. Do we consider His holiness all the time and in every situation?

Finally, Jesus maintained the joy of our final liberation from this body of sin and presented us to the Father as enabled by the Holy Spirit (Heb. 12:2). That picture was worth more than anything to Him, so He yielded His human will to the will of the Father and went on to Calvary (Mk. 14:36). Do we hold the joy of the hope of glory, the final stage of our redemption, in constant view (Col. 1:27)?  

Consider these, my friend, and let them encourage us to yield to Him every time we face the trials of our everyday walk with Him for the Father’s glory. Amen!