i think that the prayer life of Jesus is yet another example of His humiliation in taking on our human nature.
being fully divine, and having created the whole universe by the power of His Word, i suppose He had completely within Himself the power to heal and to cast out demons and to raise people from the dead.
but it is my guess that He completely emptied Himself of this power, and humbled Himself to depend utterly on His heavenly Father for that same power through prayer.
i think that Jesus deliberately chose to pursue His ministry in this way so that He would be unable to perform miracles and heal and cast out demons without the power given to Him by God
through prayer.
why would He do this deliberately? i think He did it to show us how we are supposed to conduct our own ministries, whatever they may be. (and everyone has at least one).
He is setting a pattern for us to follow, in other words.
all of us have been blessed with natural gifts. but we are not meant to depend solely on these talents in the doing of God's work, even if these gifts are tremendous. if we do, the glory goes to us.
whatever our capacities, we are meant to rely on our Heavenly Father, through prayer, in big tasks or small, so that the glory goes to Him.
we all know that, we might be saying to ourselves. it just goes to show that we rarely need new revelations to jumpstart our spiritual lives. we just need to really trust and act on the same old basic truths we've known all along.
truly, during His earthly life, Jesus came to live the perfect, Spirit-filled, God-centered, sinless life that we could never live.
He always lived in the presence of God and in perfect communion with Him. He set the pattern for us, and we are to emulate it.
when we humble ourselves in prayer, i suppose that the feelings of doubt and exhaustion and discouragement which so often beset us, would overcome us far less often.
i thank Jesus that He humbled Himself so much, becoming one of us and showing us by His example how completely we are to depend on God for everything through prayer.
a chorus of a certain song summarizes this so well:
He came, He saw, He surrendered all
So that we might be born again
And the fact of His humanity
Was there for all to see
For He was unlike any other man
And yet so much like me.
I was listening to this one song as I was coming into work this morning. The lyric goes...
ReplyDeleteAmazing love, how can it be?
that you, my king. would die for me.
It's just very weird. WHY WHY WHY would GOD die for his worthless people? It's overwhelming.
I love reading about when Jesus went to pray. I also am fascinated by what he said when he prayed and the overwhelming love he expresses for us to his Father, e.g. John 17.
ReplyDeleteJeetae, I don't know the exact answer to your question, but one clue may be in the phrases "Abba" and "Son" that the Father and Jesus use to refer to each other. We're also instructed to pray to "Our Father" with the notion being that the gift of our earthly family and the love we share within that family is a small example of the relationship between us and God.