We continue our series in the Gospel of Luke, Luke 22, 39 through 46. And Jesus came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed. saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. And there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him, and being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow. And he said to them, why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever. Amen. You may be seated. Let's pray. Oh Father, Take this precious scene in your scriptures and imprint it upon our hearts so that we see the Lord Jesus Christ for who he truly is, love him all the more for it, and live as people who are awake to his calling. We pray this in the name of Jesus, amen. Preparing for this sermon this week, there was just one reoccurring thought that just kept popping into my mind. I just couldn't get past it. It was this, there's just too much here. It's just too precious. I mean, so personal. The heart of our Savior laid out before us in this passage. And you get the feeling, don't you, as you're reading it, that you're somewhere that you just shouldn't have been invited. You're beholding a scene that you shouldn't behold because it's just so precious and special seeing the Son of God postured in this way in the garden. His loud cries and his prayers. They reach our ear from a stone throw away where we're sitting with the disciples listening. It's just too much. Jesus is less than 24 hours away from dying on a Roman cross. and he's just left the warmth of the upper room, the fellowship with the disciples there, and he's gone out to the garden called Gethsemane. It's not mentioned in our passage by that name, but all the other gospels give a name to this garden on the Mount of Olives, and it's called Gethsemane. And you can go there today, and it is a beautiful garden. It's beautiful. It's the exact kind of place that you'd want to go to kneel down and to pray for hours. But it's also a place where the Savior's heart is laid bare, just laid out on the ground for us all to see. That's what I want us to see today. I want us to see that we see the Savior's heart in this passage. And Gethsemane, the garden here, is the key to the cross. What we see in this moment is the key to everything we're going to see in the weeks ahead as we move to Christ's death, his burial, his resurrection. All of it, all of it has to be understood in light of what is happening in this precious, this precious scene. The scene that we don't know how to talk about. Let me attempt to talk about it. We're going to see in this garden, the humanity of Jesus, the agony of Jesus, and the obedience of Jesus. And we see the humanity of Jesus Because everything about this prayer in the garden, everything about this precious scene highlights that Jesus is truly human. He is man of man. He is flesh and bones. He trembles. He struggles, he pleads. There is a desperate cry from the heart of Christ as the cross looms ahead of him. It's like the cross, the shadow of the cross comes and bears down upon him and that weight just causes him to cry. A dark night of the soul, you could call it. And it's almost uncomfortable to see, right? It's almost uncomfortable to be invited to behold this. Because we see this and we hear his cries and we say, where is the Jesus, that divine son of God who set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem? And he seemed undeterred. Where's that Jesus now? Where's that Jesus who sets his face like flint and it seems like nothing causes him to struggle, nothing causes him to waver. See, some scribes, some early people who are copying the book of Luke that was handed to them, and they were passing it on and distributing it to other churches, they saw the language in this passage, and some of them were so uncomfortable with how human, how real it is. It didn't fit with their view of who Jesus is that they started to just kind of leave it out. But we see from the earliest manuscripts of the Bible, earliest copies of the Bible, that everything in here, everything you see before you was meant to be here. It is original and God wants you to see it. Why? He's showing us that, yes, Jesus is fully God, but make no mistake about it, that one who is fully God, the son of God come for us is also fully man. Jesus's human resources are stretched so thin in this passage that he needs an angel to come and support him. He is. He's having so much trouble bearing it up, bearing up the weight of the cross that awaits him. that he needs this angel to come and strengthen him and encourage him. Jesus is so overwhelmed in this passage by what lies ahead of him that he sweats like drops of blood. And you read that and you wonder, was the sweat pouring off of the Savior's face like drops of blood or Or was it that medical condition that can happen when someone is so anxious, so tormented in their soul, that this can really happen, that blood vessels rupture and sweat mixes with blood? One thing is for sure, what we see in this passage, what we see right before us is a human savior. Yes, true God, but true man. More than we're comfortable with at times. Why does God show us this? Friends, he wants you to see that Jesus really is a relatable high priest. Think about this for a moment. If Jesus was some man of steel, some character out of a comic book, right? A hero out of Marvel or DC. And he came and he never flinched when troubles came. Then how could we relate to that kind of a savior? You know, kids think about, you know, if you've read the book, I think it's called Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. I think, is that right? I think so. You know, one thing is he's half God and he's half man. Yeah, sometimes he has a tough time with things, but by and large, unflinching. And that's what these Greek gods were like in the time when Luke was writing. They had manlike qualities, but when it came down to it, they weren't tormenting their souls. They didn't know what temptation really was like. If Jesus was some guru, some leader who dealt with temptation like a math equation, you know, just punch in the problem and out comes the solution and there he is. Then how could he really sympathize with us? He couldn't. But friends, in this passage, Jesus knows. He knows what the dark night of your soul is like. He knows what it's like to fight sin with every ounce of his strength and to feel its way to feel and to see its pull and to say no and to feel that excruciating pain of saying no. If ever the thought crosses your mind, no one knows what I'm going through. No one knows how hard it is to obey God. No one knows how hard it is to live the Christian life. Then all you have to do is turn to this page and look at your savior here. And what is he doing? He's showing you that he knows. And because he knows, he helps. He helps when you are stretched thin. He helps when you are experiencing that dark night of the soul and you say, I don't know what to do. Lord, is there some other way? And Jesus says, let me help you. Let me strengthen you. There's no shame in crying out to God like Jesus cries out in this passage. It's the most human thing you can do, right? When you feel the weight the difficulty of obeying God, you say, there's no shame in this. Lord, I need you. I need your help. And this is what our savior struggles with and friends, yet he can help us because as Hebrew says, he is a high priest who relates to us yet without sin. Jesus feels the full weight of the struggle to obey what the Father has put before him, and yet at no point does he ever sin. That makes him even more relatable, even more worthy of being a high priest. He bore the full weight of it, and yet he took step by step in the way of righteousness. So why is it that Jesus in this passage is in such agony? The second thing I want us to see today, not only the humanity of Jesus, but also the agony of our Savior, the agony of Jesus. What is it that grips him with such fear, with such terror that he sweats drops of blood? Is it the cross? Is it the death that he knows is only hours ahead of him? You know, many people have known on death row that they are hours away from death. And yet, many people have faced death without a reaction like this, without the agony. Many people have gone boldly into death and faced it. But here, Jesus is terrorized in an agony. And here's the reason why. It's not first and foremost the death that Jesus is terrorized by. It's not death. It's the kind of death that he faces. That's what fills his heart with terror. He calls it the cup. Now we have to understand what this cup is. There were two cups in the Old Testament. One was the cup of blessing for the righteous. The cup of blessing. Listen to Psalm 16 as it speaks about the cup of blessing. The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. Psalm 23, a familiar passage. He anoints my head with oil. My cup runneth over. It overflows. Over and over and over again in the Old Testament, we hear references to this cup of blessing. It is a metaphor, a picture for the kind of life that is lived in uninterrupted fellowship with God. Just drink after drink, tasting that the Lord is good, walking in his ways, being filled with his presence. That's the cup of blessing. That's the life of the righteous. But there's another cup in the Old Testament held up for us to see and to look into. And it is the cup of wrath for the wicked. If you turn to Isaiah 51, I think it's worth turning there if you have your Bible. And in Isaiah 51, on page 612 of the Pew Bible, we hear this about another cup. Wake yourself, wake yourself, stand up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord, the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs, the bowl, the cup of staggering. It's a fearful cup. In the book of Revelation, this cup of wrath is described as a bowl full of fire and vengeance from God. And imagine, here's what this cup is. Take all of mankind's disgusting sense, every filthy thing that man, that every kind of man could ever do, and mix it into a bowl. And there it is swirling around, black and disgusting and filthy. And then mix into that bowl another ingredient, the wrath of God. the eternal wrath and vengeance of God that every one of those sins deserves and put it into the bowl as well. And what do you have? You have a concoction that if someone were to hold it up to you, it would be a million times worse than being offered a cup full of gasoline and being told to drink it. It's a cup of wrath. This is the cup that is a picture of hell itself. Absence from the Lord. Wrath deserved because sinners have turned away from God. And when we hear of this cup, we have to understand that Christ is the only person to have ever lived who had no claim to that cup of wrath. He's the only person who up to this point has been drinking day after day in beautiful fellowship, the cup of blessing, knowing the Lord's presence, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. Friends, you and I deserve the cup of wrath. And yet this is the cup which Christ knows the Father is giving him to drink. And that's what causes Christ's agony. That's what rocks him to the core. It's not the death, the prospect of death that horrifies him. It's not just the cross. It's what the cross represents. It's what the cross is. It's the kind of death. You have to understand in drinking that cup, Christ loses everything he loves. And he gains everything he hates. What does Christ lose by drinking this cup? He loses fellowship with God. What does he gain? He's forsaken by God, made to be sin, becoming the sin bearer. Christ detests sin. And yet he feels the weight of its punishment bearing down closer and closer to him. And so he is in agony, tortured in his soul. Father, is there any other way? If there is, then please take that cup away from me. If there's any other way to save mankind, just point me in that direction. I'll go there. Not this father, this, not this cup. And yet in the very next breath of Jesus, we hear this, nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. The obedience of Jesus, rolling over this text, coming out of those words, not my will, but yours be done. It's this submission to the divine will that had to be the hardest of all for Jesus. As a true man, Jesus consents to his worst nightmare. on Golgotha, on the place of the skull, at the cross, Jesus surrendered his body. But here's what one commentator says, here in Gethsemane, Jesus surrendered his soul. He crucified his soul. He submitted his will to the divine will. He submitted his human and struggling and tempted will to the will of God. Friends, you have to see that everything that happens after this moment is the fruit of this place in Gethsemane. Because when Jesus goes, and in moments we're going to see, next week we're gonna see him offer himself up willingly to Roman soldiers. He's not offering himself up to Roman soldiers. He's offering himself up to the Father. He's giving himself up to the Father's will. Isaiah chapter 53 says it was the will of God to crush him, to not just have him taste that cup of wrath, but have him drink it down every last drop until that cup was completely empty, until there's no more left. Why? Why would the father have the beloved son drink that cup? Here's why, simply this, so that you and I would have none of it to drink, not a drop, but instead so that we could have the cup of blessing held out to us. Christ talked about that cup of blessing moments before he went to the garden. He said, friends, disciples, here is the new cup in my blood. Drink of it all of you. It's the cup of blessing purchased by Christ. We heard 1 Corinthians 5.21 earlier. What was the father doing in all this? He made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God. You see the great exchange taking place as Christ takes our cup and we receive His cup, the cup of blessing. Friends, I want you to see two things out of this passage as we bring this beautiful text to a close. And the first is you have to look upon your Savior in this passage, and you have to see that this is what, this is what it cost Him. to save you from your sins. And if you have not believed on the Savior, if you have not called upon Him and looked to Him and said, Jesus, I need you. I cannot save myself. I cannot drink this cup of wrath. Then what are you waiting for? You have to call upon this Savior. He offers you His cup freely, but you have to believe upon Him. and believing upon his name, trusting upon him, receiving him as your savior, you can be sure from this passage that he has done everything that it costs for you to have the cup of blessing instead of the cup of wrath. Fellowship with the father instead of forsakenness. That's the first thing you need to see as you hear the words and the cries of your savior in this garden. This is what it cost him. This is what it costs the savior to die for sinners like you. And he comes to you now, disciples, and he finds you distracted and sleeping for sorrow. Like the disciples in this passage, struggling under the weight of your own temptations to follow him. And he calls you to an obedience to the Father's will. Rise, pray, don't fall into temptation. But we need to understand that Jesus does not ask this of us. He does not demand this of us without also showing us a beautiful example of what it looks like to struggle, to follow the Father's will, to submit to the Father's will, to pray and to be strengthened in order to follow the Father's will. Friends, let's rise and praise and pray and follow our Savior on this path. Heavenly Father, we've seen what you have given us to see in the garden. And unlike the brokenness of the first garden and the Garden of Eden, what we see here is beautiful. And yet it is hard. Obeying you, Father, is hard and we struggle with that. We love distraction more than dealing with sin and temptation. But you have given us a Savior who has done everything necessary, drank every last drop so that we can obey you. Help us then, Lord, to be fervent in prayer like our Savior was, to agonize over sin like our Savior did, and to submit to your will and obey you. like our savior does and helps us to do as our high priest. We pray this in his name, amen.