Fifty minutes now, engine off, one lamp on a pole about thirty feet away doing that amber thing that makes everything look like a photograph from 1987.
Three other cars in the whole lot, all of them parked in a cluster near the doors, which means they belong to people on a shift.
Dan is forty-seven and he came here to do something and did not do it, or he did it and cannot leave, and the truthful answer is that he could not tell you which and it does not matter.
He has been praying. That is the thing. He is not a man in a car who has stopped talking to God; he is a man in a car who has been talking to God for fifty minutes and for about eleven years about this one subject.
He is not a stranger to any of it. He would tell you, if you asked, that he prays about this constantly, and he would be telling the truth.
And what he has just noticed, at about the forty minute mark, is the shape of it.
Every single time he has prayed about this thing, for eleven years, he has prayed the same prayer, and the prayer is a proposal.
Here is the situation. Here is what I think would be good. Here is why that would actually be better for everybody, and here are the two or three ways it could be done, and I am completely open about which. He has never once been dishonest in it. He has never once demanded. He has been, by any reasonable standard, a humble and persistent man about this.
He has just never finished the sentence.
He has said the first half ten thousand times. Father, if thou be willing.
And then he has gone on to the details, at length, and then he has said amen and started the car.
There is a word that comes next in the prayer he is quoting from, and he has never said it about this. Not once in eleven years.
You have that sentence. Yours has a different subject. I am not going to guess it. But you know the shape of your own praying about it, and you know that you can do the first half in your sleep.
He asked. Plainly. For it to be taken away.
Luke's account of Gethsemane is short and it is not decorated, and the sentence at the middle of it is one every person reading this has half of.
Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.Luke 22:42
Read the first half properly before you go anywhere near the second, because most teaching rushes past it and it is the half that sets you free.
Remove this cup from me.
That is a direct request for a specific outcome. It is not vague, it is not resigned, and it is not spiritual language. It is a man asking, plainly, for a hard thing to be taken off him, and He asks three separate times according to Matthew, which means the asking was not a lapse He corrected.
You are allowed to ask, plainly, and the asking has never once been the failure. That is the written word and not my permission granted to you in a parking lot, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a prayer prayed under olive trees and lays it in a car at midnight with the engine off.
Because that is one of the two things that has kept you circling. Somewhere you have picked up the idea that a mature person does not ask for the outcome they want, and that wanting a specific thing is itself the problem, and so you have dressed your asking up as a proposal for eleven years because a proposal feels less like wanting.
He wanted it removed. He said so. Out loud. Three times.
And then, having asked without dressing it up at all, He said the second half.
The strengthening comes in the middle
Now the detail Luke includes that the others do not, and it changes where you think help arrives.
There appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
Read where that sits. It is not after the resolution. It is not a reward for having got to the nevertheless. Luke puts it in the middle of the praying, between the asking and the agonizing, while the thing is still unresolved and the sweat is still coming.
The strengthening arrives during, not after.
You are strengthened in the middle of the sentence and not on the far side of it, and that is already the arrangement. Luke 22 puts the angel between the asking and the finishing, and the same Spirit who was upon Him without measure is the one making it a present fact in a man on a hood with a paper cup going cold.
That matters for you tonight, because the second thing keeping you circling is a calculation. You have assumed that if you say the second half, you must first become the kind of man who can carry whatever comes after it. That you have to be ready. That the strength has to be in place before the sentence is finished.
Luke says the help came while He was still praying, and that He went on praying more earnestly afterwards, which is not the picture of a man who was handed serenity.
Now let me guard this the way it needs guarding.
I have not guessed what your cup is. There is no list in this article and there was never going to be.
And you have not failed by eleven years of proposals. Nobody in Gethsemane is on a timetable and God has not been standing in this parking lot getting colder about you since 2015. If you cannot finish it tonight, this message is not a deadline and He is not further off in the morning.
And I am not telling you what the answer will be. His was not removed. That is in the text and I am not going to hide it or dress it. What I am telling you is what happened in the praying, and what came to Him while He was in it.
So here is where we are, at midnight, engine off, under an amber lamp, fifty minutes into a prayer you have been praying for eleven years.
You are going to finish the sentence. Not because the asking was wrong, because it was not, and He asked three times. Because there is a word after the asking, and you have never said it about this one thing, and you have been treating that word as a price rather than as the second half of a prayer.
It is already settled that the strengthening comes in the middle of the praying, and an unfinished sentence has no right to stay as how you talk to Him about this. Luke 22 has Him ask plainly and then say nevertheless, and puts the angel between the two, and the Holy Spirit is the one confirming it in you right now, in whatever car or room you are actually sitting in.
Ask for what you want. Say it plainly, the way He did. And then say the other word.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud. The authority to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, not because you got ready first, and Scripture is the ground under every word while the Holy Spirit carries it. Jesus said speak to the mountain and do not doubt in the heart. So speak, and leave what He does with this to Him, in His own way and His own time.
- Sentence I have never finished, you are not a prayer yet and I know it. Scripture says nevertheless not my will but Thine be done, and He asked plainly first and then said the second half.
- Fear of what the second half costs, get out, in the name of Jesus. Luke says there appeared an angel strengthening Him and it is written as happening in the middle of the praying, and the Holy Spirit is the One who strengthens, not my resolve.
- Lord, You asked plainly for the cup to be removed and You did the asking, and I thank You that the asking was never the failure and the nevertheless came after it and not instead of it. Your word says not my will but Thine be done, and Your Spirit is the one in this car with me. I am naming it out loud and taking one step today.
Luke 22:42
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