Saturday, February 21, 2015
Matthew 27:46 " ... My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
JESUS' LOST PRAYER
During His earthly life, prayer was very important to Jesus. As Jesus drew closer to the cross, and to the climax of His earthly suffering, He continued to pray.
At the Last Supper Jesus prayed for His disciples, that they would be kept from temptation in the hours to come; that their faith in Him would remain, and the devil would not triumph over them. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed with such deep tension in His soul over the coming battle, that blood forced its way into His sweat and fell in great drops on the dirt. Prayer was Jesus' instinctive reaction to everything. When the soldiers finally drove the nails home through His hands and feet, Jesus prayed for the soldiers saying, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
But the Bible reveals that there was a time when Jesus' prayer fell on deaf ears. As Jesus hung on the cross of Calvary, the Father withdrew from the Son. And that precious line of communication that had existed from eternity was severed. As Jesus hung crucified in the supernatural darkness of the first Good Friday, at around three o'clock, He cried out in a loud voice, saying, " ... My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
As followers of Christ, we often close our prayers with the phrase, "in Jesus' name." We pray this not because we're praying FOR Jesus, but because we are enabled to pray BECAUSE of Jesus. We know that the Holy God doesn't hear the prayers of faithless sinners. But through simple trust in Christ, sinners like you and me are declared cleansed and forgiven. Through faith in Jesus we are given the gift of open, unhindered communication with God.
Because Jesus was cut off, we are invited in.
