The Prayer Life of Jesus – Glorify!

The Prayer Life of Jesus – Glorify!

“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.

“’Father, glorify your name!’ At this a voice came out of heaven, “I have glorified it before, and I will glorify it again!” (John 12:28).

In other words, in John 12:28 Jesus abruptly called out to God, “’Father, bring glory to your Name!’” And the Father responded quickly with His own voice from heaven, saying, “I have already brought glory to my Name, and I will do so again.” What we have here is an intimate glimpse of what was probably going on continuously, a profound inner dialogue between Father and Son.

Glory: the weighty splendor of God’s personal presence in the world. The bottom line is that the weight of God’s presence outweighs the world; His presence is more substantive and heavier than the universe. To give God glory is to…

GLORIFY: to acknowledge and applaud the awesome reality of God’s presence in the world; to make His presence heavier and more obvious; to magnify Him by enlarging His name and reputation in the world; to live in a way that strengthens God’s credibility; to honor God in a way that reveals the truth and makes Him less hidden; to live in a way that preserves God’s glorious name and Personhood; to follow God in a way that helps others to recognize God as the ultimate Person of Substance; to publicize and promote His glorious name by demonstrating His character; to be a guardian of God’s goodness and spiritual power in the world.

The mystery of glory reaches its muted crescendo in the Person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was glory in a minor key. Here was the eternal Son of God, who emptied Himself of His glory in heaven to become a man, identifying with the unglorious, a tarnished image of Himself. For the most part, He put His weighty splendor aside for a season while in the flesh on earth.

Anguish Before the Passion. Just before His extemporaneous prayer to the Father, we notice in verse 27 that He is dreading the moment that is coming soon… His suffering and death. Jesus is said to have been “troubled,” which is the Greek term “tarasso.” That word is the one used for stirring the waters in John 5:4, and means that Jesus was stirred up inside, agitated, in turmoil, and very unsettled in His normally calm spirit.

Glory All around! Despite His very human feeling at the moment, Jesus wanted nonetheless nothing more than for His Father to be glorified through the coming Passion. It was for this purpose that He was sent to earth, and He was not about to refuse His mission. Not much later at the Last Supper, when the word “tarasso” was once again used, Jesus elaborates a bit on the glory of the Passion when he told His disciples, “Now the Son of Man’s glory is revealed, and God’s glory will be revealed because of Him. If the Son brings glory to God, then God Himself will bring glory to the Son. Since God receives glory because of the Son, God will give His own glory to the Son, and He will do so very soon.” (John 11:31-32). But what is so glorious about being unfairly tortured and executed in the most painful way possible? What kind of glory is that? Perhaps we can tiptoe into a mystery and say here that through His death and resurrection, Jesus will be exalted and revealed for who He truly is, the Redeemer of the world. And God will be glorified by this because Jesus will have fulfilled God’s plan for the redemption of the world. God will be glorified when the world recognizes God’s mercy and forgiveness through Jesus’ death. God will receive glory when Christ completes His mission from the Father, conquers death, is glorified in heaven, and releases His Holy Spirit to bring life to the world. So in God’s scheme of salvation, the Cross is the means by which He will be given glory. In the sublime mystery of the relationship between Father and Son, the Father is glorified when we give glory to the Son, and the Son is glorified when we give glory to the Father. In some profound mystery beyond us, they each represent each other and thus share each other’s glory.

“Bat-qol”: A rabbinic term for God’s voice meaning “daughter of the voice,” or small voice or echo. We hear the Father’s voice spoken to Jesus three times: during Christ’s baptism, at his Transfiguration, and here in John just before the Passion. This may have been what the Father was referring to when He told Jesus that He “had already brought glory to His Name.” The voice of God from heaven during those three times in Jesus’ life reminds us of Elijah’s singular moment in the cave in which he heard a “still, small voice.” This voice in the cave has been translated as a gentle whisper, a light murmuring sound, the sound of a gentle breeze, and “the sound of a slender silence.” (Rabbi Sacks). But God’s voice is definitely a mystery, of course, and was also compared in Scripture to loud thunder, an angel, harps, and trumpets. In this passage in John, it was hardly a still small voice, because the people around Jesus who heard the voice were confused about what they heard, whether a loud clap of thunder or the speaking of an angel. God’s voice to His followers remains a mystery… sometimes clear, sometimes unclear, sometimes unmistakable, and sometimes soft and gentle. We all pray that we can discern God’s voice when He speaks to us, for those who know Jesus know His voice. “I am the good Shepherd. My sheep listen to my voice. I call my own sheep by name and lead them out to pasture. I go ahead of my sheep, and my sheep follow me because they recognize the sound of my voice.” (adapted from John 10:1-5).