Pride and prayerlessness go hand in hand. We must never forget that prayer is not only for petition, but it’s also for protection and preparation. Prayer not only gives us what we want, but it also prepares us for and protects us from what we don’t want.
We tend to pray when we think we need to pray. When a crisis hits, when we get bad news from the doctor or get let go from a job or have marriage problems or a wayward child, what do we do? We say, “Let’s pray right now.”
That’s good. And that is what we should do.
But what about when things are going well when we’ve paid the bills, our jobs are looking good, and there’s no bad news from any front? Do we pray then? Maybe not as much. And maybe it’s because we’re a little self-confident.
That is what happened to the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus said to Peter, James, and John, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matthew 26:38 NLT).
And really, what was Jesus asking? He simply was saying, “I need you guys to be with Me right now.” Jesus was contemplating the horrors of the cross. Being God, He knew exactly what lay ahead. He knew every detail. He knew He would be taken to Caiaphas and Annas and Pontius Pilate.
And He knew they would beat Him and whip Him with a cat-o’-nine tails. He knew they would lay Him on a cross and drive spikes through His hands and feet.
But the thing from which He recoiled even more than all of that, as awful as it was, was the complete awareness of the sins of the world placed upon Him. Jesus recoiled from it because He never sinned. Jesus never had a single thought out of harmony with the Father. But He was about to face all the world’s sin—past, present, and future. And He recoiled from it.
All Jesus wanted from Peter, James, and John was some companionship. He didn’t need a sermon; He needed friends. But His friends were sleeping.
In their defense, one Gospel account tells us they were sleeping from sorrow. Have you ever cried yourself to sleep, exhausted from weeping? The disciples didn’t know what to think. Their Lord was sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying with loud cries to the Father again and again. And they didn’t know what to do. They stayed up for a while, but then they fell asleep.
The Bible uses sleep as a metaphor for spiritual lethargy and apathy. Ephesians 5:14 reminds us, “Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
We often fall into a sleep, a spiritual slumber. And when we’re asleep, we’re a little bit delirious. That is what sleep is like. We don’t think clearly. And as Christians, it’s a sleep that we all can enter into.
