Mark 14:39

Though the answers to our prayers do not come quickly, yet we must renew our requests, and continue instant in prayer; for the vision is for an appointed time, and at the end it shall speak, and not lie, Hab. ii. Paul, when he was buffeted by a messenger of Satan, besought the Lord thrice, as Christ did here, before he obtained an answer of peace, 2 Cor. xii.

The history of our Lord's agony in the garden of Gethsemane is a deep and mysterious passage of Scripture. It contains things which the wisest divines cannot fully explain. Yet it has upon its surface plain truths of most momentous importance. Let us mark, in the first place, how keenly our Lord felt the burden of a world's sin . It is written that He began to be filled with horror and deep distress.

The history of our Lord's agony in the garden of Gethsemane is a deep and mysterious passage of Scripture. It contains things which the wisest divines cannot fully explain. Yet it has upon its surface plain truths of most momentous importance. Let us mark, in the first place, how keenly our Lord felt the burden of a world's sin . It is written that He began to be filled with horror and deep distress. He told them, "My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death," and that "he fell on the ground, and prayed, that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him." There is only one reasonable explanation of these expressions. It was no mere fear of the physical suffering of death, which drew them from our Lord's lips. It was a sense of the enormous load of human guilt, which began at that time to press upon Him in a peculiar way. It was a sense of the unutterable weight of our sins and transgressions which were then specially laid upon Him. He was being "made a curse for us." He was bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows according to the covenant He came on earth to fulfill. He was being "made sin for us who Himself knew no sin." His holy nature felt acutely the hideous burden laid upon Him. These were the reasons of His extraordinary sorrow. We ought to see in our Lord's agony in Gethsemane the exceeding sinfulness of sin. It is a subject on which the thoughts of professing Christians are far below what they should be. The careless, light way in which such sins as swearing, Sabbath-breaking, lying, and the like, are often spoken of, is a painful evidence of the low condition of men's moral feelings. Let the recollection of Gethsemane have a sanctifying effect upon us. Whatever others do, let us never "make a mock at sin." Let us mark, in the second place, what an example our Lord gives us of the importance of prayer in time of trouble .