A Model Balance

A Model Balance

While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God. Hebrews 5:7

IN THE BEGINNING, Jesus (the Word) was with God, and he was God. This is the staggering theological statement John makes at the beginning of his Gospel, and the writer of Hebrews echoes it in the opening of his letter, calling Jesus the agent of creation, the radiance of God’s glory, the exact expression of God’s character, and the sustainer of everything (Hebrews 1:2-3). Yet this same writer emphasized Jesus’ humanness several pages later, describing how the Son learned obedience through suffering (5:8). He also tells us that Jesus prayed with loud crying and tears—and was heard because of his reverence for the Father, with whom he was “one” (John 10:30; 17:11). In other words, God’s own Son prayed with godly fear.

We might think Jesus’ conversations with the Father would be more familiar or confident than this, but reverence does not contradict familiarity and confidence. As a human being, he blazed this trail for us; he entered into the throne room of God as a human with all the pains and turmoil that a human being would. He prayed from the heart because God is full of emotion, as Scripture thoroughly attests, and the Son, the exact representation of God, expressed emotion back to him. This balance of reverence and familiarity, emotion and maturity, and humanity and divinity becomes a model for us. If this is how Jesus prayed, and we are called to pray in his name and from his identity, then our prayers ought to look a lot like this.

Somehow, many Christians have the idea that we must choose between boldness and reverence before God. Not so with Jesus. Many also have the idea that faith and emotion are incompatible. Not so in Jesus. He is the image of God, and we are being conformed to the image of Jesus—in keeping with our original design. This is what prayer can look like. And in the Son of God, it was powerfully, eternally effective.

In that name, a man may draw near to God with boldness.