Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. – Matthew 26:41
Thank you MC Hammer, for the gift of this line:
You’ve got to pray, just to make it today.
It’s a catchy paraphrase of the Word’s instruction to His disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. And He was demonstrating it through His anguished cries and supplication for the Cup to be removed from Him…”yet not My will, but Your’s be done”.
How you pray, what you pray, where you pray, and any other technical queries are merely the trees, bushes and shrubbery that make up the forest.
The more compelling point – illustrated and underscored by the ministry of Jesus on Earth – was that you’ve got to pray.
It isn’t optional. Particularly when you see the Son of God face down in the garden…the One who walked on the surface of a raging sea, and withered with a word the proud, unyielding fig tree…if He is talking about how vital it is to pray, then we who are His branches/offshoots have to pray.
With any endeavour – writing, singing, acting, launching a business, shooting a movie – the temptation of the beginner is to eschew the “cliched”, well-worn words of wisdom, thinking that in this posture is the opportunity to express their original voice.
They do this, not realising that they will be expressing their Voice in an environment geared towards silencing it.
They see a stage, but those who have survived long enough to have wisdom to share with – and be ignored by – those who would follow in their footsteps…these see all the invisible elements that they have had to contend with in a tangible way.
Hunger, cold, heat, fatigue, despair, longing, frustration, rejection, isolation, flattery, allure, despondency…the invisible elements of temptation (peirasmos; an enticement to sin; the trial of man’s fidelity; an experiment).
The novice doesn’t see this. And even if he accepts their existence, he underestimates their effects and overestimates his own ability to contend with them simply by the sheer strength of his own “good intentions”.
But where Novice looks to his strength, Experience wisely looks to a system that others have proven to work.
It’s 4 words.
You’ve got to pray.
Knowing this and embracing this is more important than whether you do it “well” or not at all.
Once you know you’ve got to pray, and you begin by praying about not praying/not wanting to pray/wanting the Cup to pass by you…this Monologue with Heaven will become the Dialogue with God that keeps you from falling into the waiting sand traps of temptation.
In other words, you were so busy telling God how you didn’t have what it takes, that you didn’t notice Him keeping you from the snares of the Evil One.
No matter how strong or weak you think you are, be wise enough to accept the wisdom of the Word…you’ve got to pray.