Watch and Pray

1-11-10 Matt. 26:41 - "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Here is the picture: Jesus is in the garden with three of His closest disciples and friends. While there, He asks them to do something simple…watch with Him. He goes off and enters into powerful, deep, agonizing prayer with His Father. And His friends? They fall asleep. After praying awhile, He comes back and finds them asleep, wakes them up and says these words. “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He then goes back into the garden and enters into more powerful prayer and His disciples continue to sleep. The point? This is the human condition. Our flesh is weak. We can’t seem to do the right thing. Even though we want to. Even though in our spirits we have the desire to resist wrong and to make wise and right decisions, we can’t. We fall asleep.

The solution: “Watch and pray…” The word for “watch” means to pay attention, to be alert, to be cautious, to be active. Our spirits want to win this battle against temptation and sin and the only way we can do this is to pay attention to what is going on around us and in us. We have to actively guard our hearts. We have to actively guard our lives. We have to actively guard our families. We have to know that Satan wants to take us down and the most effective way that He does this is by our own complacency. Our own apathy. Our own sleep. Jesus warned against this. Actively watch and pay attention.

We don’t hear much about the need to watch. I am afraid that in our failure to watch we let our guards down and junk comes in that we, in retrospect, would never want. Junk we see on TV, or in movies, or playing video games, or people that we befriend, or a thought that we entertain, or an attitude that we develop, or a habit that seemed to be innocent when we started it. It is all so sly, so cunning, so deceptive. Then, before you know it we are sucked in. Why? Because we did not watch. We were not careful. We didn’t listen to wise counsel.

And pray. We have to pray. We have to make this a life discipline. This has to be an integral part of our lives, all of the time. If we fail to pray we fail to be sensitive to what God wants and the result is an inability to resist temptation.

Prayer is our line of defense. Prayer is our connection with the Father. Prayer is our lifeline to strength. We can’t do this on our own. We need God to intervene. We need God’s power.

Watch and pray. Two good words to apply.