We Could Not..So He did:
Let this pass… but
Matthew 26:36-47, 1 Peter 1:6-9

† In Jesus Name †

May the grace of God our Father help you to look to Jesus when you can’t endure.

1. The Chalice…

The prayer of Jesus in the Garden has always been fascinating to me. Let me set the scene again,

³⁷  He took Peter and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. ³⁸  He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, “My Father! If it is possible, let this Cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”

He knelt there, in the Garden, and thought of the suffering her was going to endure… that He was going to embrace.

The Cup of suffering,  the Cup that the Passover foreshadowed, was His to drink.

How he got to this point, through the Last Supper, amazes me… and here in the Garden…he would do what I could never do…

He drank deeply of the suffering…

2. The Cup That Needs to Pass

There are two types of suffering.

Suffering because we deserve it, and suffering when we don’t deserve it.

To be honest, I do not like either!

It is one thing to suffer because I screwed up. You know, the consequences that happen because you overate and felt sick.  Or perhaps, someone, now one here, drank too much as has a hangover. Or maybe you didn’t walk away from that fight…

It is another thing to suffer because you don’t deserve it. The illness, the accident, the economy, or COVID…or perhaps you

In the midst of either, we struggle. We gripe and complain. We may get depressed and ask why me…, and we don’t ask God to let this pass.., we demand it, claiming that good people like us shouldn’t suffer so much.

I hate to say it, but we often sin in the way we deal with discomfort and suffering, not trusting the God who has saved our very souls…

He Took the Cup!

There is a third kind of suffering.

The kind of suffering where you take on the suffering someone else deserves.

The parent who tries to save their child from the consequences they deserve might be an example. Or the friend or co-worker who covers for another person.

But Jesus took on so much more, the agony and pain of every sin, the wrath of God.  Not just to cover it up or to enable someone. But to really deal with it. To embrace the agony that only He could deal with.

He knew that when He took the bread and the Cup and taught once again what He would do for us…

But now in the Garden, the threat takes on a new dimension, and  He embraces it all….

Knowing the pain, knowing the agony, the betrayal…

He does so… because He loves us.

We can’t deal with the Cup of suffering. We can’t deal with what we deserve, the consequences of our sin and error. So he did.

And He wants to make sure we are with the Father, forever.

This is what Lent focuses us on, the incredible love of God that embraced the suffering in the Garden and the cross…

So that we could be whole, and the damage of sin eradicated… but more importantly, that we would spend our eternity with Him.
This is amazing.. and leaves us in awe… for He loves us.

For the will of God was to take the Cup of suffering, to offer to us the Cup of salvation.

Think of that, as you come and drink, as you receive the blood of Christ, shed for the forgiveness of your sin.

Think of that, as we come… and lay down all that we suffer, and place it in His hands.