“Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”” (Matthew 26:38-39)
This is probably the most heart-wrenching passage in Scripture. These words came straight from the lips of Jesus Christ…hours before his arrest.
Jesus spent his last night as a free man on his knees praying while his closest followers slept on. He was completely alone. He wrestled in the fullness of his humanity pleading with God to let him off the hook. Even though he knew this was all a part of the redemption plan, he’d still prefer a way out. “Send someone else!” Jesus might have secretly hoped.
The agony Jesus experienced was beyond anything we could comprehend or grasp. In one translation of the Bible, it says, “His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Think about the weight that was upon Jesus at that moment. He could not be thinking about how he was falsely accused or unfairly treated. The pain he bore was not about any of these things. He was carrying the full weight of SIN of every man from the beginning of time to the end of time. The brutality committed against him was a gruesome display of human depravity.
He was innocent.
How can this be a fairy tale? How can we pay no heed to this man’s death?
Some of the most distinguished men in the world have knelt at the foot of the cross to acknowledge what Jesus had done – He paid for their sin and died in their place.
The more we know the more helpless we become. We think our knowledge or intellect would give us everything we need in life; yet, what we end up is brokenness. We have no answers to our pain. We find no relief to our distress. We are lost in despair.
Where is God? What on earth are we here for?
God longs to have a relationship with us. He is on a mission to rescue us. But He can’t come to us unless we are willing to turn to Him. We are merely surviving in the mire of sin and God stretches out His hand and says, “Fear not. I’ve got it covered. I have sent my son to pay the penalty and you only need to accept what He did for you and you can come out of the swamp.”
The moment we accept Jesus as our savior, we activate a reset button. All of our past sins are forgiven and wiped away. We have a clean slate to start our life anew. This is GRACE at work. He does not hold our past sins against us, and we don’t need to do anything else to gain His favor. All the work of redemption has been done for us through Jesus on the cross. We just need to receive it, freely.
This is the Gospel in my own words. It’s not scripted or memorized from a pamphlet. This is how I understood it. I believe I am a sensible person, and I find that I am able to accept this ancient belief as completely relevant to those of us that live in the modern age. How about you? Have you personalized the gospel message?