The Prayer Life of Jesus – Before Bethlehem
The Prayer Life of Jesus – Before Bethlehem.
Tremendous power is released through the passionate, heartfelt prayer of a righteous man!” (James 5:16).
The Lord Jesus always was and still continues to be the ultimate prayer warrior. He prayed to the Father even before He was born (Hebrews 10:5-7), and He kept praying until the moment of His ascension (Luke 24:50-53). But He didn’t stop praying when His work on earth was done, for He continues to intercede for us at the right hand of the Father as we read this! (Hebrews 7:25). His ministry was largely a prayer ministry in the sense of prayer being the foundation for everything He did. He prayed for saints and sinners, privately and publicly, with His face to the ground and His head up facing the heavens. He prayed in grief and He prayed in gratitude, while exhausted and while full of energy. Jesus prayed with His dying breath and He prayed after He rose from the dead. He prayed before major decisions and during dramatic miracles. He prayed spontaneously and He prayed in words prepared thousands of years before Him. He prayed short, one-sentence prayers (John 12:28), and He prayed in at least one long prayer that seemed to encompass just about everything (John 17). Jesus developed a lifestyle of prayer that was common to observant Jews, but nonetheless uncommon in its intimacy with the Father.
Jewish Lifestyle. Being born and raised in an observant and orthodox Jewish household, Jesus was immersed from Day One on earth in prayer, in the centrality of prayer to one’s life and faith. Observant Jews practiced formal prayers frequently during the day, and spontaneous prayers throughout each day. They would pray the Sh’ma twice a day, the primary statement of faith for all biblical Jews, starting with its first line, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might…” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Then there’s the Amidah, a series of 18 sacred benedictions that each Jewish father would recite at home twice a day, or perhaps each rabbi in the local synagogue. The Psalms were memorized and on the lips of all believing Jews, as were other classic prayers from the Hebrew Bible, most notably Aaron’s Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.” But by no means were the Jews content with all those formal prayers each day. The rabbis taught each Jew to offer up sincere blessings for just about everything in the course of each day, as many as a hundred blessings, giving God praise and thanks for every common blessing enjoyed. There were blessings for practically every conceivable grace and event, from successfully going to the bathroom, to waking up each morning, to the blessing of being able to retire at the end of the day. These formal prayers and the more informal blessings developed a habit of prayer in each earnest Jewish believer, and made sure that God was seen as the main reference point all day for everyone in the faith. The Jewish prayers were constant reminders of God’s grace and goodness, and made sure that each Jewish home and synagogue were cultures of prayer. Jesus was shaped and directed and nurtured in this Jewish prayer life, and since He was a faithful Jew, prayer was certainly second nature to Him throughout His time on earth.
Inner Dialogue. Few mysteries in the faith are less likely to be understood than the union between the Father and the Son. Their level of intimate, eternal communion is well beyond our grasp. “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” (John 17:21). The prayer life of Jesus has everything to do with their intimacy. Somehow, the Father and the Son were inside each other in Spirit. So when Jesus prayed to the Father, He was spiritually looking inward to the Father’s presence. Jesus was speaking to the Father in a secret place within Himself where the Father dwelled. The prayer life of Christ was an inner dialogue between Father and Son, a private conversation of two divine Beings who love each other. Jesus said that He would not even take a step without the direction from the Father, He wouldn’t say a word without the Father’s approval. Jesus placed Himself completely at His Father’s disposal, such was the level of trust between the Father and the Son. Certainly, Jesus was the perfect example of one who “prayed without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:16-17). Jesus’ prayer was conscious and deliberate, and it was also subconscious and intuitive. Jesus walked prayerfully every second of every day, out of devotion to the Father.
“This is why, when coming into this world, Jesus said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings, You have not desired, but instead You have made a body ready to offer; In burnt offerings and sin offerings You have found no pleasure.’ Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come to do your will, O God; to fulfill what is written about me in the volume of the Book.” (Hebrews 10:5-7).
The First Recorded Prayer of Christ. Could this actually be what it looks like, the first recorded interaction between the Father and the Son, the first prayer of Jesus to God the Father? Yes, it is. In His loyalty to the Torah, Jesus quotes here a messianic psalm of David, Psalm 40:6-8. The Hebrew version of this psalm literally reads, “My ears you have dug out.” Some translations take that to read, “You have pierced my ears.” And the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible interpreted that to mean, “You have prepared a body,” since the Greek understood the ear to be a symbol for the whole body.
The Perfect Servant. This poignant statement from the heart of Jesus reveals His pure servant’s mindset as He approaches His incarnation. Jesus is sharing with the Father that He is perfectly willing to come to earth to offer His body as a sacrifice, a spotless sin offering for the sins of the world. In this passage, Jesus is submitting in obedience to the Father to complete the mission set before Him on earth. Yes, dear Father, Jesus is saying, I will do your will, even to the point of sacrificing myself. Both the Father and the Son were well aware, of course, that only Jesus could provide the only completely acceptable offering that will redeem mankind. Only the Son of God could take away the first system of sacrifice to make room for the better system. Jesus knew what he was getting into by taking on human flesh, willing to replace the incomplete system based on the blood of animals with His own blood, the blood of a completely righteous human being.
Excavate My Ears. The passage in the psalms (40:6) that Jesus quoted in the Hebrews 10 passage above focused on the ear for good reason. The Hebrew Bible understood the ear to represent one’s entire body. Why? One of the most famous words in Scripture, “Hear” from the Shema in Deut. 6, is a word that to the Jewish mind meant hear and do, listen and obey, receive and respond. To hear was to do what was heard. To hear the word of the Lord meant to do his will. One didn’t truly hear something unless one acted on what was heard. A listener didn’t hear a thing if it went in one ear and out the other. To have open ears meant one was receptive, attentive, obedient to what was heard from God. In the Jewish mind, the ear was holy. So to have one’s ears “dug out” meant that God was at work helping the listener to remove obstacles, to excavate unwanted matter, that kept one from hearing the truth and then acting on it. The ear was an important symbol for the whole body in Scripture: In Deuteronomy 15:17, when a servant wanted to swear life allegiance to the master, he would pierce his right ear and commit to being a love-slave. In Exodus 29:20, when a priest wanted to sanctify a sacrifice, he would place a drop of the sacrificial blood on his right ear. So it is no surprise that Jesus closed His prayer to the Father with, “I have come to do your will, O God.” Jesus had ears to hear, and so He had a body to sacrifice.
Before Bethlehem. While we focus on the numerous triumphant words that surrounded Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, let us not forget that Jesus also had something profound to say at the same time. He spoke words of submission and obedience to God the Father before becoming flesh. The depth of Christ’s love for us is beyond comprehension.