Prayer is something we love to feel
guilty about. We never pray enough, with enough passion, for long enough
periods of time – so it seems. It is not my desire to stir up
guilt when I repeat Jesus’ words; ‘Pray that you may not enter into
temptation’. (Luke 22:40) Or six verses later when he repeats with
emphasis: ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not enter
into temptation.’ J I have two things to say about this:
1.
We would do well to
heed his admonition.
2. Everyone seems to
have failed to heed this admonition that night.
Actually this is no surprise
because God had to redeem the world, Himself, for His own glory. We could not
(would not?) participate in our own salvation. Praying doesn’t earn us
anything. But it does allow us to share in the overcoming power of Jesus Himself.
It is a bit of a comfort that even the disciples failed Jesus in prayer.
So we can get up off our faces and shamelessly pursue God through prayer
– in spite of the fact that we are inclined to failure! When we do we
find:
them
in spite of their failures and our pain. Call people by their
names. Luke 22:48
2. Mental laziness
flees and instead of being reactive we are ready to heal & be the
peacemakers Jesus recreated us to be. Luke 22:49-51
3. Instead of being intimidated by circumstances we can speak God’s truth graciously into the
lives of those around us. Luke 22:52-53
Isn’t this enough motivation to
carve out space, search out those promises and special verses on prayer, and ‘Devote
yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving’?
(Colossians 4:2) No matter how poorly your track record is. In whatever
way you are drawn to prayer (while driving down the road, right before bedtime,
in the morning, late at night, in popcorn portions or meat and potatoes) ‘Pray
that you may not enter into temptation’!
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