Profiles of Courage: The Courage of Surrender

Sermon Summary: Sitting in church one day, I wondered how I could improve retaining and acting upon the sermons our minster preaches. I decided that I could summarize them here which would help me remember them and create a log of them. Hopefully, I will be able to do this weekly (baring traveling, sickness, or bad weather) so that I can do a better job at intentionally living.



Since I'm behind on sermon summaries, I'm going to get right to the point and try not to elaborate!

This week's sermon was based on Luke 22:39-46. 


Have you seen the 3d sidewalk chalk artist's work? The artist is Julian Beever, and the Huffington Post has many pictures of his work. His work is based on perspective. Meaning, if you're standing in just the right place, you can see his masterpiece as a 3D world. If, however, you're not standing in that place, your eyes can't figure out the image. 


Our pastor made the argument that Jesus' devote praying throughout His adult life was to help Him regain His perspective. As He walked on earth and dealt with the trials set before Him, He needed the conversation with God and the Holy Spirit to keep His perspective about what His role on earth was. 


Luke 22:39-46 addresses His disciples' lack of prayer. This is the only time of prayer that all four Gospels record, but Luke's record is different from the other gospels'. Luke's account wants you to see that the act of Jesus praying is a normal thing for Him in a normal place for Him. It's not extraordinary or different than any time before. 


We, however, often pray in times of need, distress, newness, or lack of direction. We often pray after 80% of the decision making is done to ask for God to bless our decision making instead of seeking God's wisdom at the beginning. This is not the prayer life of Jesus.


When we loose perspective in our own lives, we often struggle to see it that way. However, when we look at other people's lives, it's easier to see that they've lost perspective. For example, when a friend buys a house that needs lots of work, it's easy for you to see that there's going to be a ton of time and money invested in the house to make it livable. However, your friend that bought it has fallen in love with the house and only sees that it needs 'some' work. Emotion changed that friend's perspective. The perspective became distorted. 


Through prayer we can regain our faith perspective. This holy week, through prayer, we can see the cross as an instrument of torture and death. We can remember that Jesus told us we would all have our own crosses to carry. Often times, the crosses are not things that we anticipated to be crosses: a grown child in jail, a mother with dementia, a flailing marriage. 


Jesus prayed so that he could re-align his perspective to carry His cross. We must pray to do the same.  We must pray to surrender ourselves to God's will. We must pray so that God isn't part of our lives but the center of our lives. We must pray to surrender ourselves.