He Prayed All Night
“One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor (Luke 6:12-16, NIV).
Are you too busy to pray?
We know now that the crowds were pressing in on Him. Hundreds, if not thousands, showed up at His doorstep where He spent the night. He needed a place to pray with no interruptions. He had business to transact and needed to hear from His Father about one of the most important decisions He would make during His earthly time, the choosing of the twelve disciples. So, He heads to the mountains to spend a night in prayer. A whole night!
It is incredible what we sometimes have to go through to just carve out thirty minutes of prayer, well, make that fifteen. In our way of thinking an hour spent in prayer would be a huge deal. We would qualify as spiritual giants! Then there is our Lord, He spent whole nights in prayer, yet while He was human, just like us in every way. How amazing and yet perplexing.
We have all these other pressures, commitments, requirements every day, and then there is the infamous “to do list.” They seem never ending. Managing our time is a momentous task. Today whole industries are built around assisting people in planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time that is spent on activities during the day.
Productivity and outcomes, that’s what we are after, that’s what we are all about. Right?
There are two great differences in the way we see life and the way the Lord sees life.
1. Time
Time means everything to us. We squeeze it. We maximize it. We cherish it. We try to figure how not to waste it, how to capitalize on it, and how to multiply it. But, time means nothing to the Lord. He has all the time in the world. He is in no hurry. What he wants to accomplish in our lives can take four days for forty years. He isn’t concerned with the length of time it takes to accomplish His purposes. Here these words with your spiritual ears, “You can’t hurry the Spirit.” If your goal is unbroken fellowship with the Lord in every minute of the day and if you want to secure Christ’s presence to overcome every temptation that comes your way, then you must determine that spending time in the secret place every day is one of the great resolves of your life.
Put on you spiritual eyes and read this carefully, there is something of much greater importance than all of our requests to the Lord for our personal needs and the needs of others for whom we intercede. There is a prerequisite to all of this; it is to have a deep, living relationship with the Father. He created us for this. He created us to commune with Him, delight in Him, and fulfill His will for our lives.
The great encumbrance to our relationship with the Lord is that we are preoccupied with other things. Instead of making everything secondary to the decision to spend time with the Lord every day, we hurriedly shove in a few minutes here and there with Him. We try to focus on the Lord for a few minutes while we scurry from one project to the other, from one appointment to the other, from one person to the next.
2. Results
The short of it is, we want results. Productivity. We are getting paid to produce something. We have to see something tangible for our efforts. We transfer this fleshly propensity for the need to see results, to our spiritual life in the Lord. We often don’t see measurable results from our prayers with the Lord so we get discouraged and prayer wanes. The Lord simply does not measure our lives by our productivity. The Lord looks at all of our accomplishments, our degrees, our vitae, our “projects completed list” and He is not impressed. He doesn’t manage by outcomes or goals achieved. The Lord is out for depth in our relationship with Him. Intimacy. He doesn’t measure our lives by what is seen. He does His most significant work in the unseen. Our Lord wants His life deeply imbedded into the fabric of our soul. He wants our spirit exchanged for His, our character for His. “But the LORD said to Samuel, ’Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart’” (I Sam. 16:7, NIV).
Time and results, we need spiritual ears and spiritual eyes to hear and see what the Spirit is up to in our lives.
I called up a long time mentor recently to visit with him. When I asked him about a date the following week for us to get together for lunch. He responded that he wouldn’t know for sure about his availability until the day before. That’s all he said. It was a while later until I remembered he rarely sets appointments in advance. His reason, he always wants to be available to people, to those he shepherds and those with immediate needs. One thing about this man that is so unique is his ability to focus on one person at a time. He is never hurried. He is available.
When I was a new Christian I had the blessing to be discipled by a series of men, most of who had a Navigators background. The Navigators is a ministry that advances the gospel throughout the world by discipleship—a call to discover life to the fullest in Christ. In its call to discipleship, the Navigators place great importance on being faithful, available, and teachable. Availability is a huge issue in today’s hectic, fast-paced culture. Just try to get a few Christians together to pray on a regular basis and you will experience what great difficulty we have in “putting first things first.” Our busyness crowds out the most important things in life.
Are you available to others? Are you available to your fellowship or church? Are you available to the Lord?
We are in such a hurry. We have so many places to go and things to do. Can you make time to stop for the next person who comes across your path?
Hidden from men, in full view of God
He needed to avoid public display. He had no one to impress; there were no illusions of grandeur on His part.
I have spent a great deal of time in my life with young people. In the most recent years I always take occasion to query teens and others about their prayer life. One of the questions I repeatedly ask people is, “What keeps you from praying?” Oddly enough, one of the many responses people give is that they are not good about praying aloud so they are embarrassed to pray. That response raises an interesting question, “Should we be good or proficient about praying in the presence of others?” Jesus warns us to be very careful about the reason we pray. He warns us not be like the hypocrites who love to pray, but do so in order to be seen praying by others. “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get” (Matt. 6:5, NLT).
We know that our Lord was accustomed to strong crying and tears. His prayers were meant for only the Father to hear. He needed to pour out His entire soul–groanings and rejoicing. He held nothing back. He needed to have a place where he could have complete communion with His Father to make the decision at hand. He needed a place where there would be no bystanders looking on. To avoid being seen by men while He prayed, he sought the mountain. Even in this time of great travail before the Father, He was modeling what He would teach the disciples later, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matt. 6:6, NIV).
Our decision making model
How do we approach the Lord when we have a great decision to make? Do we pray for many hours? Do we fast? Do we seek counsel? With the challenge of this particular decision, choosing the twelve, the particular time selected by Christ to pray is meant to be a lesson to all of us. He had a decision to make that would resound throughout history of mankind. The decision that lurked the next day required perfect communication and unity with His Father. Can you see the great oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this decision? Can we grasp the depth of unity the Lord is asking us to enter with our fellow believers? So He prayed the whole night. He has set us an example that we should follow. In great emergencies in our life, when we have duties with boundless consequence, or we are about to meet severe encounters, we should seek the divine blessing and direction by setting apart an unusual portion of time for prayer. If we are praying or fasting unto the Lord, others won’t see it as zeal or fanaticism. Our Savior did it. We should follow in His steps.
Men of the world, in business, will sometimes spend hours upon hours in strategic planning, goal setting, developing marketing plans, even if it takes all night sessions. Why should it seem strange that Christians spend an equal portion of time in the far more important business with eternal significance? We need our minds renewed. We need to see the great necessity for prayer.
Jesus the man
There is a fathomless mystery here. Jesus was a man, but He was completely God. We can ask, “Why Jesus should pray?” As a man, He was subject to the same needs as us; He needed divine support, strength, and blessing. It is difficult for us to get our arms around the fact Jesus had physical and human needs. The mystery here is that there was no more contradiction in His praying than there was in His drinking or eating. Both are consistent with who He was while here on earth.
What do we really need? What should we be praying about? We pray for a lot of things. Mostly we pray for things we need (or think we need). We pray for the forgiveness of our sins; Jesus had no sin. He was tempted, but He did not fall into temptation. There was no backsliding on His part. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12, NIV) is an appropriate prayer for us, but He didn’t need it for Himself. Paul describes this inner struggle that each of us face: “O wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7:24, NIV). But Jesus didn’t experience this. He had guarded His heart from sin and the enemy, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30, NIV). The enemy had no way to find entrance into Christ’s heart.
The mystery: He was divine, yet was tempted just like us. He was perfect, yet he was a man. He needed to pray all night on occasions, particularly on this occasion; His humanity compelled Him to pray.
His wisdom
Luke frequently shows Jesus praying before some significant event. But can you imagine Jesus fully human, mentally and emotionally. See Jesus as a young boy; He had to grow in wisdom (Luke 2:52). What must it have been like for Joseph and Mary to raise Jesus the Messiah? Did He make bad decisions? Did He have to learn new things just like any other young boy? In the Infancy of Thomas, a pseudepigraphical gospel about the childhood of Jesus that is believed to date to the 2nd century, the child Jesus does numerous whimsical and malicious miracles. A pseudepigrapha writing usually refers to a collection of Jewish religious works written circa 300 BC to 300 AD. Though not accurate, this gospel account was written because there are so many unanswered questions about His childhood and people wanted to know what His childhood was like.
The Bible is silent about Jesus’s early years, except for the encounter in Luke of Jesus in the synagogue at age twelve (Luke 2:39-52). We are given a snapshot of Jesus’s development before this synagogue experience. “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him” (Luke 2:40, NIV). In this account, the boy Jesus asks astute questions that indicate He has a profound understanding at this tender age. And at the end of the passage we get a glimpse of the years of Jesus between twelve and thirty. “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (2:52, NIV).
See the three areas of His development:
• Wisdom, godly understanding
• Stature, maturing as a young man
• Favor, from man and God
He called upon God the Father to be in complete communion with Him in choosing the twelve. He used the spiritual understanding He acquired and He called on the Father and the Holy Spirit for more understanding. He wanted to be in total unity with Father and Holy Spirit in the choosing of the disciples. The example is clear for us, if we have spiritual eyes to see: Christ wants us to grow in spiritual understanding, in the knowledge and application of His word, but we must submit all that we are to His spirit. We must commune with Him every day to know His will for our lives in all situations. It is in the secret place with God where we learn from Him. By the Lord’s matchless grace that is given to us, we can live every day and make every decision in concert with His will for our lives. We can fellowship with Christ so intimately in the secret place that we can understand His will for lives and be empowered by His spirit to walk it out.
There are practices of prayer mentioned over and over in the Psalms:
• “But whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night” (Psalm 1:2, NIV).
• “I will praise the LORD, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me” (Psalm 16:7, NIV).
• “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night” (Psalm 63:6.).
Jesus knew firsthand of the counsel and wisdom of the Father to be gained in the night hours. He sought the Father and found the wisdom He needed.
Jesus followed all of these practices of the Jewish culture on prayer and more. This is what He grew up on. He grew in His communication with the Father through prayer. He received the Father’s words through prayer. He knew when to heal through prayer. He chose the twelve through a night of prayer. Think of the scene: After praying all night, Jesus calls His disciples together and then invites the twelve, one by one into a deeper place of intimacy with Him. Like the good shepherd who knows each of his sheep individually, Jesus now knows each and every one of his disciples intimately. And He desires to be known and loved by each of us in this same way.
Your invitation to be known is found in prayer; answer the invitation.