Jesus Prays

          Well we have read the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-15 (NIV)

9 "This, then, is how you should pray:
"'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,

10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

11 Give us today our daily bread.

12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.

13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.'

14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

          Now in today’s reading of John 17 we get to see a practical application of Jesus praying to the Father.  Not to say that this wonderful passage from Matthew is not good as a model for prayer, but we get to see Jesus here applying this model He has given His disciples. 

          Jesus prays for Himself to be glorified, so that He may glorify the Father.  Not for Himself, but for the Father and the people the Father has given Him in this world.  He prays for the disciples so that when He is gone that they will be protected from the sins of this world and continue doing the Lords work here in this world.  And He prays for all the believers in this world that they may become one united in Christ and assembled in heaven.

          One of the most interesting statements I found in all of these passages was this:

John 17:13  "I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.

          Now to truly appreciate this statement you have to understand where Jesus came from in the first place.  He stepped down from His glorified position in heaven where He sat with the Father to come among all us in the world.  I am not even going to try and make a comparison of this, but this had to be a great sacrifice and Jesus was in a place right before His death that had to be the low point of His life, rock bottom.  So now this is where He prays this specific passage that the full measure of His joy in them?  Low point of your life and you want the full measure of your joy in them?  Jesus knows what is coming and that soon His time is coming that He will once again be with His Father in heaven.  How many of us can say that we pray at the low points in our lives so that the full measure of our joy can be seen?  This is a foreign concept to us.  We are usually praying Lord get me out of here, make this go away. 

          Of course Jesus does come to say that He wishes this cup of His death may pass away if there is any other way, but goes onto to say that the Father’s will be done and not His own, so that they all will be glorified.  Perhaps we need to look at it through God’s eyes best we can the next time we are hitting rock bottom and pray to see the full measure of joy in the bigger picture.  Pray that we can see God’s glory in all of this.  Pray that we are able to put our selfish desires aside for a moment and look to God’s will in all of this.