The Place of Crushing

I wish I'd written this, but Michael Card blessed me with this devotional on the Garden of Gethsemane. Perhaps it will speak to you, too.

Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. "Abba, Father," he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." Mark 14:35-36

Gethsemane literally means "place of crushing," a place where olives were crushed for their oil. That name took an infinitely deeper meaning when Jesus knelt down there to pray that night in the garden.

A man knelt there, a man of unspeakable courage and obedience. Jesus looked the Father in the face with mature, though anguished honesty and said, "If there is any way for this cup to pass, let it be so!: Yet a child also knelt down there to pray,. "Abba, anything is possible for you!" Jesus' words sound like a child's cry to his father for help, not a theological statement about an all-powerful Universal Being.

Jesus cried out, "Abba." Never let anyone clothe that word in theological sophistication. It is not a sophisticated word. It is baby talk! Papa, Daddy, Abba - they are all the same thing: the first stutterings of an infant, not to be categorized in some theological structure, but to be cried out from the heart of a child, a heart of faith.

PRAY: Bring the deepest cries of your heart to your Abba, your heavenly Father. Do not be ashamed of your feelings before him.