This article is part of a series, Pray like Jesus, on ways Jesus teaches us how to pray to our heavenly Father. Keep an eye out for related articles.
Throughout Scripture, we are privileged to “hear” the personal and bold petitions Jesus prayed. In honest vulnerability and humble surrender, Jesus prayed to the Father about His own needs — what He needed at that particular time to glorify God and complete His painful and difficult mission.
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The agony of the cross
Jesus prayed that God would help Him face His deepest and most painful struggle — death by crucifixion. Roman crucifixion brought severe physical pain and a slow, agonizing death from asphyxiation, shock, heart failure and dehydration. It also involved flesh-tearing torture and scourging, humiliation and shame and betrayal and mockery. (See Isa. 53:4–5, Mark 15:34 and Matt. 27:41–43.)
Jesus needed His Father’s strength as He surrendered Himself to a cruel death on a Roman cross.
Gethsemane: The cup of suffering
Throughout Jesus’ ministry, the image and reality of the cross — and His upcoming crucifixion — shadowed Him like a shroud. The writer of Hebrews reveals the reason for Jesus’ intense, personal prayers: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverent submission” (5:7).
Before His arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweat drops of blood, yet He humbly submitted His life to the Father’s plan. “My Father,” Jesus prayed, “if it is possible, may this cup be taken from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matt. 26:39).
Mark also records Jesus’ intense and powerful plea. “‘Abba, Father,’ He said, ‘everything is possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will’” (Mark 14:36).
Sweat and blood
Luke, the physician among the evangelists, noticed Jesus’ brow — how His “sweat became like drops of blood” (Luke 22:44). Medical science today understands this medical condition — hematidrosis — as extreme stress causing capillaries around sweat glands to rupture, mixing blood with sweat.
“In Gethsemane we see the perfect humanity of Christ in all its anguish. His prayer teaches us that real surrender often begins with honest wrestling,” writes N. T. Wright in “Jesus and the Victory of God.”
Ultimate surrender
As Jesus died on the cross, He again prayed intimately to the Father. “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit’” (Luke 23:46).
In this personal prayer, Jesus surrenders and entrusts Himself totally to His Father’s care — His divinely appointed salvific mission completed.
In a March 6, 2020, “Ask Pastor John” interview posted at DesiringGod.org, John Piper discusses the involvement God has in our prayer life. “God plans our prayers just as surely as He plans the events that He performs in answer to our prayers,” he writes.
Jesus shows us that it’s OK to pray for ourselves — to bring our deepest struggles to God.
Suggestions
When you pray personally:
Approach your Father in honesty and vulnerability. He is your heavenly Father and because you are His child, He loves you dearly. His Word assures you that your Father puts your tears in His bottle (Ps. 56:8) and that He numbers the hairs on your head (Matt. 10:30). He deeply cares about your needs, both big and small. He invites you — and welcomes you — to bring your concerns to Him in childlike trust and intimacy. But like Jesus, we must always ask that His will be done — not our own will and desires — and commit the outcome to Him.
The process may be difficult. “Often, I have said that the classroom of prayer is located in the school of suffering,” Oswald Chambers writes in “Prayer: The Real Battle.”
When we pray for ourselves and our urgent needs, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
When the Church prays:
“There is no more power on earth than the earnest prayer of a righteous church,” George Müller tells us in “Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller.”
When pastors and church leaders pray with heartfelt petition, they teach church members how to pray to God with their needs.
Create small group prayer ministries in your church where members can share their needs. Ask group members to keep these personal needs in confidence.
Allow time during worship services for church members to pray silently, requesting God’s help and presence in their lives.
From the pulpit, preach the Scriptures that show how Jesus, in His own time of need, approached His Father with personal requests for strength and God’s divine presence. And His presence will be with us, as Martin Luther says.
“Therefore wherever there is a Christian, there is none other than the Holy Spirit, who does nothing but pray without ceasing,” he writes in “Lectures on John.”
To be a Christian without prayer is truly no more possible than to be alive without breathing. Jesus depended on prayer. He prayed to His Father in honest vulnerability and humble surrender. In doing so, He teaches us how to come before God with our own personal prayers.
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