When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples,
he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow.
Luke 22:45
“Exhausted from sorrow,” the disciples slept through a time when Jesus needed them the most. He had warned them, saying “Pray that you will not fall into temptation” (Luke 22:40), then withdrew from them to pray by himself. Jesus did not ask the disciples to pray for him because of the looming destruction of his body or because he needed strength to endure. His request was for them to pray that they would not fall into temptation.
The Gospels of Matthew and Mark reveal that Jesus went away and returned three times to find the men sleeping. In response he said, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). The Bible passage stating that the disciples were “exhausted from sorrow” and Jesus’ comment that their spirit was willing but their bodies weak give the impression that the disciples may have been grappling with anticipatory grief regarding his pending death. But what form of temptation did he want them to resist through prayer? He feared they would fall into unbelief, where hopelessness is found and vision is lost.
In the fall of 1998, I had the pleasure of meeting and developing a friendship with Joni Eareckson-Tada. At that time, Joni had been in a wheelchair for over thirty one years. She became a quadriplegic in 1967 from a diving accident. I was a prison Chaplain, and Joni and her staff worked with our people to form a program to restore wheelchairs for those who were physically disabled.
During a conversation over lunch Joni and I discussed her diving accident and she shared with me that initially she felt hopeless. Filled with anger towards God, she was consumed by a ‘why me’ attitude. But this led her nowhere. Confined to her bed, she became suicidal and ineffective for Christ. She lost her vision and bathed in unbelief as she couldn’t grasp how God could ever use her or her life for His purposes. Eventually she submitted to God’s plan for her life by believing in faith what Gods Word says about her in His Word, and in the years since, He has used her disability for His glory, helping literally thousands of people. Joni has been more successful in Christ without the use of her legs than most that have total use of their body. When it comes to unbelief, Smith Wigglesworth says it best:
God wants to sweep all unbelief from your heart. He wants you to dare to believe His Word. It is the Word of the Spirit. If you allow anything to come between you and the Word, it will poison your whole system, and you will have no hope. One bit of unbelief against the Word is poison. It is like the Devil putting a spear into you. The Word of Life is the breath of heaven, the life-giving power by which your very self is changed. By it, you begin to bear the image of the heavenly one.
Once again, if we do not have hope it’s because we have no vision. Without vision, men perish. Our vision must be God’s vision. His vision for us is described in His Word, so we must learn His Word, stand on it, and apply it to our lives.
‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!” (Hebrews 11:1). Things hoped for and not seen are visions for the future. The invisible is more real and tangible than the visible. Faith is the foundation of all things in Christ, including transformation. We should not let life’s circumstances shipwreck our faith. We can trust, we can believe and we can walk in faith. We should ask the Lord right now to increase our faith, remembering that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:17).
As I close, look at where in your heart you carry unbelief about who God is and what He’s promised for us in His Word. Follow this with confession in prayer and asking God to heal your unbelief. In Mark 9, a father who lacked faith that Jesus could heal his son asked Jesus to help him overcome his unbelief (v. 24), and Jesus told him, “Everything is possible for him who believes.”
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