Prayer of Consecration
And he was parted from them about a stone’s cast; and he kneeled down and prayed, saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine be done. (Luke 22:41, 42, RV).
As stated in the last post, many Christians pray their redemptive rights prayers on the basis of “if it be Thy will,” which they get from this verse. A close examination of the circumstances of Jesus’s prayer here establishes that His prayer is based on a consecrative dedication to God’s purpose in His individual life. It does not involve the redemptive rights that we have as New Testament believers.
As shown in John 1, the preincarnate Christ became a man in order to redeem mankind from sin and death. When Jesus walked the earth, He walked a life of faith(fulness) to the Father’s redemptive plan. That walk involved fulfilling the Law and then becoming a curse on the cross for mankind. (See Galatians 3:11-14). As Jesus was fully human, He possessed complete volition of whether He would fulfill God’s purposes or not. While He knew that He had to die to redeem mankind, it was in the Garden of Gethsemane that he became fully soul conscious of the terror that it entailed. The emotional impact was so great on Him that He sweated blood. It is here where Jesus consecrated Himself in prayer to the Father to fulfill the Plan of Redemption. Jesus asked if there was any other way to do it. As there was not, He volitionally committed Himself to do the will of the Father instead of deciding to walk away from it. That is why He prayed “if it be Thy will.”
As New Testament believers, we should likewise consecrate ourselves to the Lord who is the Head of the Church. Recently, I met with a college friend of mine who is pastoring a church. He is a very bright guy having graduated from college with honors and going on to earn an MBA. If he wanted to do so, he could go to work for a Fortune 500 hundred company and have a nice, comfortable career and retirement. Instead, he has consecrated his life to the Lord and found that the Lord called him to pastor a church. Like Jesus’s Garden prayers, my friend’s prayers involved a consecrative dedication to the Lord’s purpose in his own individual life. The Lord hasn’t called anyone but my friend to pastor that church. My friend’s consecration did not involve his redemptive rights as a New Testament believer, but rather the Lord’s selective purpose for him in the Body of Christ. It is for the Lord’s selective purposes for us in the Body that we may pray “if it be Thy will.”