The Submitted Son

I know that this will come as a surprise to most of you, but I was not ALWAYS an easy child to raise.

Sure, you’re all used to seeing the calm and serene person standing before you this morning. But there were times in my life — even as the angelic child I normally was — when I could be a bit of a handful.

Most of you have heard me talk about the times when I’d act up in some public space around my mother. She would lean over and ask me if I wanted her to take me to the bathroom. And if I didn’t straighten up and fly right, she’d do just that.

My subconscious mind has mostly blocked out what came next, but I do recall that it involved a few swift, smart smacks to my backside.

Along with a warning that I’d better stop crying and get my face on straight before we headed back out into the public space.

And then, there were the times my father spanked me, though that usually took place at home.

I really don’t want to give the impression that I was abused, because I wasn’t. I was loved and disciplined, and the discipline was done in love, not in frustration.

And I recognize that the world isn’t so keen on spanking as it was then.

And, as it turned out, the spankings weren’t as effective as the times later in my childhood when Mom or Dad would look me in the eyes and say, “Res, we’re so disappointed in you.”

But, for me at least, I think the spankings sort of broke the ground for me to be able to learn obedience later on from the verbal rebukes.

In other words, my parents brought me to a base level of compliance with spanking and then used the power of their admonitions to make me the perfectly obedient person I was as a teenager.

Or something like that.

Anyway, whether you believe in spanking or not, one of the hardest tasks for a parent must be to inspire obedience in a child who, from the very first time he cries to be fed outside of his feeding schedule, seeks to assert his own will above and in place of his parents’ will.

My parents needed to ensure I was submitted to their will as a young child so they could be confident I wouldn’t slip out of the house and go off carousing as a teenager.

A submitted son is an obedient son, and an obedient son doesn’t do things that will cause the parents to get a phone call from the police late at night.

But these things — obedience and submission — have to be learned by most of us, because we’re born as sinners. We’re born as people who want to assert our own wills over and above the wills of those in authority over us.

And so, for a long time, I wondered about a passage about Jesus that appears in the Book of Hebrews. You’ll find it in chapter 5, verses 7 through 9. Let me read if for you now.

Hebrews 5:7–9 NASB95

7 In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. 8 Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. 9 And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation,

Now, we know these verses are about Jesus, because He is the one source of eternal salvation for all who come to Him in faith. He is the only one through whom we can be saved from the penalty we deserve for our sins against God.

Our sins — yours and mine — create a chasm between us and God that none of us could bridge. There is no amount of good deeds or even the best of intentions that can repair the damage we do to that relationship with even the smallest of our many sins.

But we were made for relationship with God. We were made to have fellowship with Him.

And so, because of His great love for us, He sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus, to live among us as a man. And where all of us fail, Jesus succeeded.

He lived a life of perfect obedience — He lived without sin — so He could go to the cross and take upon Himself the sins of all mankind and their just punishment.

He made Himself a sacrifice so that all who would put their faith in Him can be saved and have eternal life — life in the presence of and in fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That’s the message of the gospel in a nutshell, and it’s a message many of you are familiar with.

But if Jesus lived a sinless life — a life of perfect obedience to His Father — what does the Holy Spirit-inspired writer of Hebrews mean when he says that Jesus “learned obedience from the things which He suffered”?

If Jesus was already obedient, how was it that he needed to LEARN obedience? And how does this connect to the “prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears” that Jesus is described as offering to His Father in this Hebrews passage?

Well, today, we’re going to take a look at this incident that took place on the night before Jesus’ crucifixion as it’s described in the 26th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

You might recall that in this series, “The Road to the Cross,” we’ve talked about Jesus revealing Himself to the people as Israel’s rightful King and spotless sacrificial lamb.

We’ve seen that He revealed Himself to the disciples as the promised Prophet greater than Moses, as the Just Judge, and as the Righteous Priest.

We’ve talked about how He revealed Himself to the religious leaders of Israel as the Son of the Living God.

And we’ve seen how, under the examination of those leaders, He showed Himself to be without blemish and therefore suitable for the sacrifice for which He would give Himself at the cross on that Friday Passover.

Today, as we look at Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion, we’re going to see Him pass another test, and passing this test reveals Jesus as the Submitted Son, the Son who was submitted to His Father’s will.

We’re going to pick up in verse 36 of chapter 26.

Matthew 26:36–38 NASB95

36 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” 37 And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and distressed. 38 Then He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.”

Now, we need to remember that nothing that is about to take place will come as a surprise to Jesus. He is fully human, but He is also fully divine. Both natures exist within Him undiluted and unmixed.

He would not be surprised when Judas the betrayer arrived with the Jewish religious leaders who would arrest Him and condemn Him to a shameful and unjust death.

He would not be surprised at the ferocity of their hatred for Him. He would not be surprised by the torture He will face at their hands.

He would not be surprised by the fact that, as He hung upon the cross — with the sins of the world heaped upon Him — that He experienced, for the first time in all of eternity, complete separation from God the Father.

The beloved Son would not be surprised when God turned His face from Him for three hours of darkness, because He knew that His perfectly righteous and holy Father would not be able to look upon the perfect evil and complete unrighteousness that Jesus represented when He took upon Himself your sins and mine.

And it seems certain that all these things were on Jesus’ mind as He entered the Garden of Gethsemane that evening with His disciples.

As they were walking to that garden on the Mount of Olives, Jesus had told them that they would all fall away from Him during His trial and crucifixion.

But Peter, the headstrong and overconfident disciple, said he’d never fall away. And even when Jesus said Peter would deny Him three times that very night, Peter said, “Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You.”

So, the picture Matthew paints in this chapter is of a group of disciples — with Peter in the lead — who are confident in their own strength. And of a Messiah — the very Son of God — who recognizes His weakness in the flesh and seeks to find the strength of God in prayer.

He says His soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death. In other words, He felt this grief might kill Him.

And I want to suggest to you that it wasn’t so much the physical torture He knew He’d face in the coming hours that grieved Him so, but rather the prospect of separation from the Father and the Holy Spirit, with whom He’d had perfect and eternal fellowship.

He knew that He wouldn’t be permanently forsaken by God, and He knew He’d be resurrected from the dead.

But this time of separation on the cross, as He bore God’s wrath over sin so that those who follow Him in faith would not have to — the prospect of this time of separation grieved Him so badly that He felt like it would kill Him.

And the point I want to make here is that when I talk about us having been made for fellowship with God — and when I talk about eternal life being ABOUT fellowship with God — I’m not sure any of us, including me, understands the depths or the richness of that experience.

If we did, we would grieve much more deeply than we do over the injury we do to that fellowship when we sin.

In His grief here, Jesus shows us just what we lose when we step out of fellowship with God in our sins. In His grief here, Jesus shows unbelievers the richness of life that they reject by rejecting Him.

And so, He has entered the garden with the 11 remaining disciples. Judas has already left to begin his betrayal. And entering the garden, He tells eight of the disciples to sit and wait while He goes deeper into the garden with Peter and James and John to pray.

There’s a lesson for us here, too. As Christians, it’s important for us to have Christian friends who will enter the garden with us.

But it’s especially important to have a core group of close friends who will go into the depths of the garden with us and pray with us and support us. If you don’t have that core group of prayer warriors getting on their knees before God for you, then you should.

And if you’re not BEING one of those prayer warriors on behalf of another brother or sister in Christ, then you need to find someone to do this for.

Of course, as we’ll see in the next few verses, Peter and James and John didn’t do a very good job of supporting Jesus in this way. Look at verse 39.

Matthew 26:39–41 NASB95

39 And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” 40 And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? 41 “Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

This is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus addresses God as “MY Father.” Doing so here, He expresses the intimacy He felt with God. By addressing God this way, He also expresses the complete dependance He has upon God.

When Jesus came as God in the flesh, He also took upon Himself humanity. He is completely God and completely human. And in His humanity, He was grieved nearly unto death concerning what He was about to face.

From before the beginning of time — from before mankind was ever created, much less before the first sin in the Garden of Eden — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had agreed among themselves that reconciling sinful man to the God in whose image we were created would require the sacrifice of God Himself in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

The cross was no case of divine child abuse as some atheists have described it. This was the loving choice of one person of the Trinity to give His life to meet the entire Trinity’s demands of righteousness.

But Jesus is God, AND Jesus is human. And in the flesh of His humanity, He hoped and prayed for His Father to present another way for mankind to be reconciled to Him.

“If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me,” he prayed. If it’s possible, let me not have to bear the shame of sin. If it’s possible, let the cup of your wrath not be poured out on me. If it’s possible, let this separation not happen between us.

Jesus’ clear preference was to avoid the cross and all it represented. The human part of Him wanted to live. But greater than His desire to live was His desire to do His Father’s will, His desire to be obedient.

And so, He struggled in prayer. In his Gospel account, Luke says the struggle was so great that drops of blood fell like sweat from Jesus’ forehead.

And yet, what we see in verse 41 is Jesus taking the time from His own anguish to encourage the disciples.

He’d found them sleeping when they should have been praying for Him. But, instead of condemning them for failing to come alongside Him when He most needed it, HE came alongside THEM and encouraged THEM.

“Keep watching,” He said. Stay alert, and be praying that you don’t enter into temptation.

So what was the temptation He was worried about for them? It was the same temptation HE faced. The temptation to preserve themselves.

Jesus knew that when He had been raised from the dead and taken back into heaven, His disciples would face great persecution in His name. He knew that most of them would eventually be killed for spreading the gospel.

And He knew that, by the power of the Holy Spirit within them, their spirits would be willing to face even death in defense of the gospel, But their flesh would — just as His was at this time — desire to protect itself.

He knew they would want to do the right thing, but that they would need supernatural help to do it, regardless of how strong they had thought they were.

Even in the face of what lay before Him, Jesus showed the greatness of His love and compassion by thinking of His disciples and the trials they would soon face.

And so, having encouraged them and instructed them to stay alert and pray, He went again to pray on His own. Look at verse 42.

Matthew 26:42–44 NASB95

42 He went away again a second time and prayed, saying, “My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done.” 43 Again He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. 44 And He left them again, and went away and prayed a third time, saying the same thing once more.

The fact that in verses 42 and 44 we hear Jesus repeating the same prayer He had prayed before, asking God for the same thing, is a great lesson in persistence in prayer.

One commentator said that “persistence expresses the intensity with which we feel the need to have our petition met, and it shows our faith in God’s ability to meet our need.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Mt 26:42.]

But note that, just as Jesus was persistent in His request to God, He was also persistent in His determination that His Father’s will was His greatest desire.

There’s a great lesson here regarding our own prayers. When we don’t know God’s will, we can and should request our own preference. But we should submit ourselves and our preferences to the will of God, whatever that may be.

And if we, like Jesus, want God’s will above everything else, then even when He denies our preference, His answer to our prayers is a positive one, because we receive what is in HIS perfect will.

And we can be confident that what He wills is what is best, because, as Paul wrote, “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”

Jesus had faith in His Father that God would use whatever happened in the next several hours to bring good, both to Him and to all who would follow Jesus in faith.

He was confident that God is good and that He does good things and that He would use even the greatest act of evil in history to bring the greatest goodness to the world.

And so, He submitted Himself to His Father’s will. And in that way, He “learned obedience.”

Jesus didn’t need to learn obedience the way that I had to learn it. He was already obedient. But in submitting to God’s will there in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus “became even more proficient in His obedience to the Father as a human being.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Mt 26:42.]

If you are a follower of Christ, I know God’s general will for you. He desires that you follow Jesus’ commandments to love God and to love people.

But what is His specific will for you today? I don’t know that. I don’t know what He’s called you to do that you’ve been struggling against. I don’t know what He’s convicted you of that He wants you to STOP doing.

What I DO know is that whatever it is that you’re holding onto — or whatever it is that you’re fighting against — when you finally submit to HIS will, you’ll find one day that He will bring something good from it that you couldn’t have imagined.

And you’ll find that persistent prayer will help keep you IN His will, able to do whatever it is He calls you to do.

But if you haven’t turned to Jesus in faith that He alone can give you the kind of relationship with God that Jesus was so grieved over losing for three hours at the cross, then I can tell you today that God’s will for you is that you would come to a saving knowledge of Jesus.

His will for you is that you admit your sins and your complete inability to atone for them. His will for you is that you accept the free gift of salvation that Jesus offered at the cross.

His will for you is that you accept the sacrifice Jesus suffered at the cross for your sins and mine as full and complete payment for what we all owe for our rebellion against God.

His will for you is for a relationship of trust and dependance upon Him through Jesus. His will for you is that you will set aside your OWN will — your dependance upon yourself for salvation — and trust in Jesus.

Will you submit to God’s will for your life today?