The devil knows what is afoot. He can name the Lord. The devil knows what the game is, even if he is trying hide it from us. So it is in these days in which God's laws are flaunted in the name of love; a love bent from the purposes for which it was given by God. There can be no right love, outside of the commands of the God who is Himself love. And yet our enemy is trying to blind us to this with worldly demands for fairness. Our own natural blindness finds us calling God's law unloving and calling moral discipline names I dare not repeat. Satan would prefer us to be instructed by teenagers and morally formed by those who have not yet matured in their judgment. Recently, in the Wall Street Journal comedian Jerry Seinfeld was quoted as saying about his own adolescent daughter, They just want to use these words. "That's racist." "That's sexist." "That's prejudiced." They don't even know what they're talking about" (WSJ). Such "wise, adult" children should turn again and become God's children, subject to a loving Father's disciple.

The older I get the more childlike I want to become, if that child-likeness is God's child-likeness. "Yes, dear Father, I am Your child and would do as you have commanded. I know that I will falter, but I will never glory in my fault, but confess it, sorrow over it, and seek Your mercy. Dear Father, forgive me. Turn me away from my sin. Restore me that I may not die." You see, the sin in the world leads me to pray about my own sin. If you don't need to pray, place your hand upon your heart and check to see if it is still beating. If it is, you are still in the world and there is plenty of trouble, sorrow, sin, and suffering in it. Why pray? Because I see so much needless suffering around me, much of it caused by me.

Jesus certainly prays at pivotal moments in His ministry. In Mark 1 He is making the first public appearances of His ministry. On the night of His betrayal He prays continually: at the Supper; for Himself, His disciples, and us in the Upper Room; and in the Garden of Gethsemane. He is ready to be offered in the eternal plan to die; a plan devised by Him from the foundation of the world. And yet now He is confronted by the enormity of His suffering (and not just its physical cost): the weight of human depravity which He is owning now to remove it from you, He is facing the implacable and stubborn unbelief of the humans who howl for Him to die, and for whom, despite their rage against Him, He has come to die. In the darkness, He kneels bloodying them. In the darkness, He cries out to His Father. In the darkness, great drops of bloody sweat ooze from His pores. Why pray? Oh, because we are in such deep trouble!