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Commentary on "The Promise of Prayer"
Day 3: Monday, March 5, 2012 - "Jesus, the Praying Messiah"
Overview
For today’s study, the author offers a list of texts showing Jesus praying under various conditions. The point the author pulls from the list is that, “If Jesus needed to pray in order to deal with the things He faced, how much more do we?” The author teaches that Jesus gave us an example of how to live a life centered on prayer and that we must pray in order to maintain a relationship with God.
Observations
A Biblical view of Jesus Christ is that He is God incarnate.
“For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).
“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature and He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).
Jesus Christ was, is, and always will be God. God is Holy and cannot sin, He cannot fail, and He is in need of nothing.
Adventists profess to have the same view of the Trinity that orthodox Christianity holds. This lesson, however, would strongly suggest otherwise. If in fact Seventh-day Adventists hold that Jesus Christ is eternal God-- YAHWEH, then it would seem to follow that they would have to disagree with the conclusion of the author in today’s study when she writes, “If Jesus needed to pray in order to deal with the things He faced, how much more do we?”
It is true that Jesus prayed constantly, and it is true that we are to as well. However, to make a claim that Jesus needed prayer in order to “deal” with His life degrades Him from being the fullness of God and places Him right where Ellen G. White does in her Great Controversy paradigm. Her Jesus was a man who set aside the power of his deity and was capable of failing. He was a man dependent on strong spiritual discipline that helped him perfectly keep the 10 commandments, showing us (and watching worlds) that it is in fact possible to keep God’s law—if we pray and submit enough! According to this world view, prayer becomes like a transaction at the bank. “I will pray often and hard enough and God will give me what I need to be righteous.”
Prayer is not a transaction of power or a means of maintaining our right standing before God. The only “transaction” that takes place between God and the believer is the one where Jesus became sin so that we may become His righteousness. God gave us His righteousness in Jesus Christ through our believing in Him and repenting of our nature. He seals us with the Holy Spirit who is the third person of the God head, not a power source that we receive in measure if we pray hard enough. The Holy Spirit teaches us to pray and intercedes for us when we do not know how to pray or what to pray for.
Prayer begins as a means for man to repent and confess that Jesus is God. After one is born again, prayer becomes a matter of communicating with our Father and obeying His command for His children to pray for His will on Earth as He shows us through His word. It is true that a part of our prayer life is to confess of our sin as He reveals it to us, and it is to bring our request before our father, but this is not the end of it! Scripture is clear that we are a royal priesthood and we are commanded to pray for the body, the persecuted, for persecutors, for our leaders, our teachers, the harvesters, those in prison, for missionaries, the spreading of the gospel and much more. We learn what God’s will is through abiding in His word and it is in this time spent that we come to know and love the Fathers’ heart more and more each time we respond to His call for us as His forever children.
Summary Points
- Jesus is eternally God and is in need of nothing.
- We do not maintain our relationship status to God through prayer. The Holy Spirit maintains our relationship to God as our sealed guarantee of our adoption.
- God’s word tells us what to pray for.
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised March 3, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Camp Verde, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
The Sabbath School Bible Study Guide and the corresponding E.G. White Notes are published by Pacific Press Publishing Association, which is owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist church. The current quarter's editions are pictured above.
Official Adventist Resources
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