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The most radical answer, I can imagine to the question, what is that you want … is … nothing, or at least; nothing at all for me. What if everything you wanted, you wanted for someone else, and not yourself, not even health. It is hard to imagine only wanting something for another, not even to be shared, but instead wholly offered to another and only for them. When our health is crumbling, we want our own health addressed. We may pray for the health of others who are in need, but we also pray for our own health as well. It is natural. It is only human to do so. The same is true for those in financial need, we will gladly pray for God to meet their needs. But if we too are in financial need, we pray for ourselves as well. In short, we ask God for the things we “believe” we “need”. Very often our prayers BEGIN with asking for the things “we” need. Eventually we get around to asking for others, but our first thoughts tend to be about our most immediate needs, our own needs. But what if what we needed was truly nothing? Can you imagine needing nothing?
Our prayers often reveal our thinking. When the focus of our prayers is staring back at us in the mirror, the disease of “self” has crept into our prayer life. “Me first” thinking, is not uncommon in the requests we take to God. This is because, the most pressing concern in our lives, is our own lives. The lives of others are not truly thought of ahead of our own. And how we live in general reflects this reality. We provide for ourselves, and those we love first, then, if there is time and enough left over, we think about the needs of others in the world. When those we love are in jeopardy we pray to spare them as it is “we” who would miss them so, if they were no longer around. We want them to be happy and healthy and doing well, for their own benefit, but also because we love them and “we” want them to be here with “us”. This too is human. This too is natural. And this too is reflected in our prayer lives.
But Jesus, was and is a radical example, of the absence of self, in His thinking, and in His prayer life. We assume the health of Christ to be good. We assume He had no pressing needs for healing, or comfort where it comes to His health. We assume other than at the end of His life, He had no bumps or bruises, or physical pain He endured. In essence He goes through His life without incident, and therefore without complaint, or prayer to address His own needs. But life, history, and scripture do not offer us quite as idealistic a view into His time here on earth. As an infant, He was born into this world in a manger, decidedly NOT the cleanest, or sterile conditions in which to enter the world. The temperature was not controlled, the air not the purest of smells, the environment not the cleanest to avoid germs. Not long after His birth, His parents must flee into Egypt. Not only is this a long hard journey, but Egypt itself is a hot dry desert region. Growing through your early childhood years there would not have been an “easy” life.
When He returns after His first 7 years, He helps His father with carpentry work for the next 26 years. I do not imagine his aim was always perfect with a hammer and nails. I do not imagine He was born with perfect carpentry skills and did not, like we do, learn those skills from hard work, and making mistakes and adjustments over time. He had no great wealth, so He would not have been raised with the finest of diets, and the widest variety of things to eat. But as healthy as He may have ever been, the outset of His ministry begins with 40 days in the wilderness, without food. This length of time would not just have made Him skinny. It would have brought Him near death from starvation. This does not make the body healthy, it nearly kills it. He might have sustained health problems from this time forward. He was difficult to recognize when He returned from this encounter because He was so emaciated from it. And walking down dusty, rocky roads; sleeping outdoors in cold air nights, and in the rain (when it comes); does not tend to present opportunities for perfection, rather for periodic aches and pains, and circumstances we all tend to avoid.
Now, here facing the end of His life, He will be betrayed, abandoned, and tortured until He is dead. So for us, the most pressing concern would be to pray for our “needs” given that situation. But for Christ, who is continuing His communion with His disciples, He continues to think first of their needs. Now to continue to offer them renewed hope in His mission, and in His divinity, He intends to change the nature of their prayers. John records in his gospel in the 16th chapter beginning in verse 23 … “And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you. [verse 24] Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” Up until now, prayers were offered to the God of Abraham, of Moses, of David, of Daniel. God was a somewhat mysterious entity, whose personality or motives we could hardly fathom. But now, there was the ability to connect a face with a name. Now, we would ask God the Father, our requests. We were asking a specific entity with a specific personality, who had demonstrated His interests in our healing, and in meeting our needs, both physical and spiritual since the beginning of the ministry of Christ, where ALWAYS, Christ worked the “will” of the Father.
Our prayers would now be directed specifically to the Father, who had demonstrated His love for us over and over and over again in the deeds of Christ. But more than that, we would ask the Father in the name of Jesus Christ. God was more than just a mysterious entity who we did not really know, He was also known to us in the person of the Son, Jesus Christ. Our requests would now go to the Father in the NAME of the Son, Jesus the Christ. When our prayers would be answered, it would be another living example of the true divinity of Jesus and His mission and His work here on earth. If Jesus were just another false Messiah, or just another prophet, or just another “good man”, then asking God the Father to grant requests in the name of just another guy would have no effect. If however, we asked God for something in the name of Jesus Christ, and our prayer was heard, the Jesus must be real, and divine, and worthy of our prayers. If miracles were to happen in the name of Jesus Christ, then He too must actually be God. After all praying in the name of Diana, or Baal, or Ashkod, or any other false deity yields no tangible result; if Christ were false, the prayers in His name, would do no better. But as Jesus proclaims, when we ask in His name, and our prayers are heard – our Joy is full. Our Joy is full because we can know His promises to save us are real. Our prayers reveal tangible proof that He does live, and will save us. Our answered prayers prove that He is God.
The question then, is not whether Jesus Christ is God, it is instead, what do we want? For if our prayers are first and foremost intended to meet the needs we believe “we” have. Then are we not following the urging of the tempter when he asked Christ who had not eaten in 40 days to turn these rocks into bread, in order to meet the very real physical health needs He had at that moment in time? To which His response was that we live not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Why not simply pray to meet His own needs? Why was this a temptation at all? Was it not more of a simple logical request – I am hungry – my health is failing – there is no food around – God please meet “my” need. Even when the conditions were very likely a choice between life and death, even then “self” would not be present in the prayers of Christ. Even then, He would not ask to have His own “needs” met, instead trusting to the word of God. Instead He trusted that any real “needs” he had were already known of God, and would be met by God in God’s way of choosing, and His timing, and would need no expediting by Himself. In the face of starvation itself, Christ deferred praying for His own needs.
Often we read the scriptural text “ask and ye shall receive” as if it were an offer to open the proverbial candy store of heaven to us. We treat this promise as if it were intended for “us” to ask for things for “us” and that Christ is putting His own name on the guarantee of delivery to us. But when we look at the example of Christ, we find He only ever asked for things for others, completely ignoring what we would naturally think are His own needs. His prayers were always done for the benefit of someone else. His joy was derived in seeing the joy in another. His “needs” were simply left up to God to meet, and so He just did not seem to ever have to address them specifically. He did pray that God would be glorified, as the definition of glorified was defined in the actions of love He would perform. But each request of Christ to the Father, always had a target other than Himself as its object. Our human eyes, our untransformed vision, reads this snippet of scripture as a child would when creating a list for the mythical Santa Clause. But what was intended was so much more than what we find in a mirror.
The first part of verse 23 is also worthy of a second look, it says, … “And in that day ye shall ask me nothing”. Is it possible, that Jesus is referring to what happens to our prayers, AFTER we have submitted to Christ and are transformed by the power of His love? When we fully trust Christ, we trust our perceived “needs” to His love, and have the assurance like He did in the desert with His own Father, that our needs will be met by God, in God’s way, in God’s time. Therefore we ask “nothing” of Christ for ourselves, because He knows our need, and is already in progress of meeting it. But this is not an edict for the elimination of prayer, as the remaining text continues with “how” we ask. Instead it is about answering the question … what do we want … in a completely transformed way. After our encounter with Christ we begin to want only blessings for others and not for ourselves. Our prayers do continue, but the subject changes from us, to those who we now love as Christ loved. We do not constrict our requests only for those we personally know and love, but instead we are keenly interested in the needs of all men, even those who would declare themselves our enemies. We begin to know what it means to love our enemies, like we would love our disobedient children who declare they hate us, and yet we love them. We start seeing our enemies through the eyes of Christ, who loves the drunk driver just as much as the victims whose lives he cuts short. That kind of love changes what we pray for. We do not cease our prayers, but rather begin to pray for only others, just like Christ did.
When what we want changes, what we pray for changes, and our interests are transformed from the life of the person in the mirror, to the lives of those we encounter. When we pray for others it is not about how our own lives are impacted by their suffering or loss, but instead how their lives are impacted by the pain of evil and loss. We begin to value the eternal and spiritual lives of others, more than we value what human eyes are constricted to see. And this kind of selflessness in our thinking, our desires, and our prayers does not happen because we work at it, or choose it. But instead because we submit our thinking to the will and transformation of Christ, allowing Christ to alter what it is we want, and how it is we think. His transformation of us becomes real and tangible, and is reflected in what we ask for when we pray, and why we ask it.
But the disciples were not quite ready to hear this kind of news. They were facing the crumbling of everything they had ever hoped for. Jesus was plainly telling them He was not going to be the earthly king they had hoped He would become. Instead He was leaving them. This was news that turned their entire spiritual scriptural understanding on its head. It was akin to telling Noah to build an ark for a flood no one had ever seen, let alone rain that did not exist. It was akin to telling Abraham to ignore everything He knew about the love of God, and instead kill His own son in the name of love itself. It was akin to telling Moses to march His people down to the Red Sea where they would have no escape from the pursuing chariots and armies of Egypt bent on killing them all. All through our world’s history, God often turns our understanding on its head, and asks us to do things that do not make logical sense. Yet when we trust His wisdom and not our own, things work out in spite of our logic and ideas about what are the facts.
But sensitive even then to the needs of His disciples, Jesus speaks to them in proverbial form, in order to give them the news they need to hear, but in a form they are able to hear it. John continues in verse 25 recording these events as Christ says … “These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father. [verse 26] At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: [verse 27] For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. [verse 28] I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” We no longer need Christ to pray to the Father on our behalf, because the Father loves us, because we have loved the Son. Our belief in the truth of the divinity of the Son, endears us to the Father in a way we cannot understand. And at the same time, insures our salvation, as it is only through the transformation of our hearts by Jesus Christ, that we will ever see the perfection in us that He is able to achieve. Trusting to the love of the Son, only makes the Father love us even more. This should have been words to comfort us like none other. But the disciples were still focused only on the aspect of loss they would feel from their separation from Christ.
They respond to Jesus in verse 29 … “His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb. [verse 30] Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.” They did not grasp the full weight of what Jesus was telling them, yet they declare that the words of Christ were plain enough. And if there is any lingering doubt in Jesus that they may not yet believe He is divine, they are going to plainly state that this is what they all believe. Jesus answers in verse 31 … “Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? [verse 32] Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: …” Jesus is trying to gently point out to them, that they are trusting to their own strength again, instead of His. They have just declared their faith in His divinity, yet they are all about to run in terror from the company of soldiers who are heading their way to kill their Lord. It is this trust in self that must be overcome through submission to Christ. “Who” we focus on must change. What we want, must change.
But still concerned with their fragile state Jesus continues in verse 32 … “and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. [verse 33] These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” Christ would trust His own needs to His God, who we KNEW would be with Him as He faced the end of His earthly life. In Christ we would find peace; in the world only tribulation. But our hope emerges not because “we” have overcome the world, but because Christ has overcome the world. We are not saved because we are conquerors, but because He is. Our salvation then transforms us, from the creatures of sin and self-service and self-focus that we are; into the creations of self-less-service to others that He intended and that He is our perfect example of. We begin to want different things. We begin to pray for different things. And our prayers, like the prayers of Christ, are answered as we are fully submitted to the will of the Father, and not of our own. The simple question remains … what do you want? …
But communion was not over yet …
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