In and Within 26 Jesus at Prayer

[HKHaugan]

Jesus is not just praying into space nor is He praying as though His personal concern is the central issue. No, Jesus is praying directly to His Father. The way His personal prayer starts is in the reality of His Father’s presence. It’s conversational, son to father, Son to Father, “Father, the hour has come.” This is reality for Jesus, to pray in faith, to live in faith, to expect in faith, to ask in faith, to recognize in faith, not know the outcome but believe in the outcome, not trust blindly but trust personally from the heart. Faith has to do with belief and trust in the Father as a person and His will as fulfillment.

I remember as a child that we moved from the North to the South, lived in a neighborhood, moved to the country, had friends and wonderful experiences, enrolled at a school, moved back north, into a city tenement, had an awful teen age time, finished school. We went on vacations, had meals together, talked about the old country, traveled with my dad on his business trips, went through life as a child oblivious to where I was or really why or what I was about. All of this under the cover of my father’s will. I never questioned why he did what he did, worked where he did, what his life was about. I grew up trusting him. Wherever he went or wanted to go or be with particular people, those were his decisions and I was included. I was his child and that was it.

If all of us recover some of our past as a child it was lived in complete trust in the mind and heart of our fathers and their will most of which was never really questioned or even explained. It is that cushion of ‘we just go where our father goes’ kind of faith that covers us, which, imperfect as it may have been, is the bedrock for us to understand the perfect will and grace of God the perfect Father. This makes it easier to understand Jesus’ words when He says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these (Mt.19:14).”

The remarkable introduction to the Gospel of John clarifies it even further, “Yet to all who receive Him, [that is Jesus His Son] He gave the right to become children of God---children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God (Jn.1:12-13 NIV).” What we lost through Adam, being children of God, is returned to us by faith in His Son. We are reborn by the Spirit of God. His will is our restoration to Him through faith and this is what grace is all about. This is why Jesus went to the Cross, to extend to each of us the opportunity to believe, to trust and have faith in Him as the way back to the Father.

So then as Chapter 17 opens, the directness of Jesus’ address, “Father,” tells us this is THE Son at one with His Father in faith. It is so clearly what the writer of Hebrews says about faith being, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (11:1).” Jesus is the assurance for us that the Father is always here with us ready to listen and always with us to cover us even in our non-God conscious moments, which are many. Just like Jesus we can confidently go to the Father and start every prayer the same way, “Father.”

But it is in His very next words, “the hour has come” that the consciousness of destiny, the awareness that He has been called to make a decision that carries the weight of facing physical death within, knowing no one can go through this experience for you or with you. It’s yours alone. ‘Hour’ is time and time is the life-death cycle that the devil and sin use as the narrowing conscious means of defining our personal existence. Time is a concept that does not exist in God who is timeless, unrestricted by any concept or emotion.

What Jesus is saying here is a choice has to be made in the present conscious point of our personal existence. Since mankind has developed a system of measuring the period between birth and death as ‘time’ Jesus has entered our concepts not to give them authority but to redeem them. His ‘hour’ is an experience of choice, of decision, of being faithful, of extending Himself spiritually into the world that lives in terms of life and death and what it calls time. He is doing this to remove from our minds and hearts the idea we are trapped in our own conceptual jungle called time. Life is not about time but about choice, conscious choice, awareness of God in choice and the realization that He is the Savior and Lord to deliver us from time and bring us into His eternal present. This is how we redeem time in the Spirit, see our life as the choice to serve and please God as opposed to serving and pleasing ourselves. Transfer time, hour minutes and moments as choices for God, opportunities to serve God and events that give God the glory.

Jesus also carries, as only He can, the burden of the Word that has shown Him He is the Messiah, the only One who could suffer and die for the sin that has plagued mankind since Adam. And more than Messiah, He is the Son of man and the Son of God. He is the fulcrum, the focus, the hinge upon which eternal life rests. He is what human beings are meant to be like. He is a spiritual being having a human experience to show us that is what we are made to recognize and realize about ourselves. We are first spiritual beings but that consciousness was lost in the blizzard of sin that caused our choices and decisions to be filled with fear of death and a lonely grasping for control. He carried that in His prayer to the Father. Perhaps now we can understand the reason for His praying to be glorified so that He could glorify the Father.

Unlike us in our time-binding sin His concern was to be what His Father willed. The glory He prayed for was to be a sufficient and pure sacrifice without reluctant hesitation for His Father. He recalled before His Father the authority given Him over everyone that they might have eternal life. Note here that life was not an eternity of time but a timeless eternity, a consciousness that is always in a present state. Like Jesus said, “Have you not read what God has said to you, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and the God of Jacob”? He is not the God of the dead but of the living (Mt.22:31-32 NIV).” And didn’t the writer of Hebrews say, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”? He is the great ‘I Am.’ Let these thoughts guide you in your personal moments with the Father and in the moments the Lord has rescued as choice.