We have arrived at Jesus’ night of travailing prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Rather than just teaching through these verses I hope that we can come together and discuss them. This prayer of Jesus, repeated word for word three times according to Mark is our clearest glimpse of Jesus’ humanity in the entire Bible. He wrestles with God’s will, with His sorrow and even with the weariness and lack of understanding of His three closest friends during His most painful moments. In all of this Jesus declares that there is nothing His Father can’t do, He shares His true heart and He asks His Father to take the task of becoming our Redeemer from Him. I’m not sure we realize this when we read through it quickly, Jesus asked, not to be dramatic, not for some effect but because it was His heart’s desire, it was His emotional response to the weight and stress He was under, to not have to bear our sin, die our death and defeat our enemy. Eternity hinged on one single word “nevertheless”. My prayer has been that tonight we can have honest discussion and maybe even prevailing prayer and come to our own “nevertheless”, our own moment in which the truth of who God is is allowed to overcome anything else that we feel. In Gethsemane, what we will see is that Jesus’ feelings didn’t change, His sorrow didn’t lift but His heart became settled because He was, through prayer, once again assured of the goodness of His Father and the everlasting nature of His love.