With Christ in the School of Prayer (28) ... Christ the Sacrifice

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 28, Christ the Sacrifice

This chapter speaks of one of the most fundamental and powerful aspects of our walk in the Spirit. Unfortunately it is also the principle probably most left out of our walk with God in our lives. It proves the genuineness of our devotion and having a true experience of having a vision from the Spirit of what we are really living for.

It is from the entire surrender of His will in Gethsemane that the High Priest on the throne has the power to ask what He will, has the right to make His people share in that power too, and ask what they will.

For all who would learn to pray in the school of Jesus, this Gethsemane lesson is one of the most sacred and precious.  To a superficial scholar it may appear to take away the courage to pray in faith.

Let us draw nigh in reverent and adoring wonder, to gaze on this great sight—God’s Son thus offering up prayer and supplications with strong crying and tears, and not obtaining what He asks.  He Himself is our Teacher, and will open up to us the mystery of His holy sacrifice, as revealed in this wondrous prayer.

Here He prays for something in regard to which the Father’s will is not yet clear to Him.  As far as He knows, it is the Father’s will that He should drink the cup.

The prayer that the cup should pass away could not be answered; the prayer of submission that God’s will be done was heard, and gloriously answered in His victory first over the fear, and then over the power of death. It is in this denial of His will, this complete surrender of His will to the will of the Father, that Christ’s obedience reached its highest perfection.  It is from the sacrifice of the will in Gethsemane that the sacrifice of the life on Calvary derives its value.

Let me look at them again, the deep mysteries that Gethsemane offers to my view.  There is the first:  the Father offers His Well-beloved the cup, the cup of wrath. The second:  the Son, always so obedient, shrinks back, and implores that He may not have to drink it.  The third:  the Father does not grant the Son His request, but still gives the cup.  And then the last:  the Son yields His will, is content that His will be not done, and goes out to Calvary to drink the cup.

That Spirit teaches me to yield my will entirely to the will of the Father, to give it up even unto the death, in Christ to be dead to it.  Whatever is my own mind and thought and will, even though it be not directly sinful, He teaches me to fear and flee. He opens my ear to wait in great gentleness and teachableness of soul for what the Father has day by day to speak and to teach.

With my whole will I learn to live for the interests of God and His kingdom, to exercise the power of that will—crucified but risen again—in nature and in prayer, on earth and in heaven, with men and with God.

Being of one mind and spirit with Him in His giving up everything to God’s will, living like Him in obedience and surrender to the Father; this is abiding in Him; this is the secret of power in prayer.

More on Christ the Sacrifice
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XXVIII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.